The politics of representations : Thai migrant women's negotiation of identity.

The notion that popular culture, such as television programmes, opens a space for women resistance to the dominant cultural discourse is remarkably held by feminist and cultural theorists. However, few considerations have been given to the specific group of women audiences who are in the margin of society in terms of class, ethnicity and gender. This thesis explores the kinds of subversive meanings Thai migrant women of the urban poor construct and deconstruct from the dominant representations in television programmes; and how the women empower their negotiation discourse in order to define their preferred identities that connect to their ethnic culture and their everyday lives in urban slum culture. Thirty-four women living in Klongtoey slum, the biggest slum in Bangkok, Thailand, who migrated from the Northeast, the poorest region of the country, are the main population of study in this thesis. It investigates this through both textual and reception analyses with the theoretical framework of dominant representations and identity emphasising class, ethnicity, and gender. To understand the negotiation and construction of identity, the method of ethnographic audience analysis is used in order to see this through the women's own experiences. This study also aims to assert the distinctive concept of ethnography within the Thai media academy which draws heavily on content analysis or quantitative audience analysis, while it remains ignorant of the 'real' audiences of marginalized groups. Chapters One, Two and Three seek to locate the Klongtoey women's identities and their dominant representations in the various approaches to the study of the politics of representation. Chapter Four provides the research methods and examines how the transformation between rural and urban culture has affected the women's identities. Chapter Five discusses the patterns of media consumption and the construction of meanings within the women's contexts. Chapters Six and Seven analyse in more detail the ways the representations of class, ethnicity and gender are decoded and negotiated by the Klongtoey women and how this negotiation process reflects the women's formation of identities. Chapter Eight conceptualises the negotiation strategies that the women employ in the construction of their preferred identities and concludes with a discussion of how this study contributes to theorising on the politics of representation.