How Facebook Has Enhanced Thailand’s Ethnic Women Entrepreneurs’ Community-Based Homestay Tourism Development
Keywords:
social media, homestay, tourism, Thailand, community-based tourism, women entrepreneursAbstract
This study inquired into a community of ethnic Lahu women in northern Thailand who utilize social media in community-based homestay tourism businesses to transform their socioeconomic statuses and negotiate traditional gender power relations. As a social construction, they have traditionally been limited to the domestic sphere, requiring them to do housework entirely, while men engage in the public sphere to generate family income. This scenario has maintained male superiority in ways that perpetuate gender inequality and the sociopolitical dichotomy of the public and private spheres. Due to technological modernity and economic development, social media has become a public sphere that these women are empoweringly using to cultivate economic and social capital. For example, as a marketing strategy, they use Facebook to promote their homestay tourism businesses locally and internationally. This space is also being used to negotiate gender power relations within their families and communities. Another notable element of this modern phenomenon is that these marginalized ethnic people, men and women alike, now transformatively realize the modern-day value of their ethnic identities. They are using social media and homestay tourism as soft-power tools for countering a national sociopolitical discourse that inaccurately portrays them as rural, uncivilized “forest destroyers.” This study underlines that the process of social empowerment includes gaining a sense of independence while taking individual and collective actions to transform discourses, institutions, and social norms to reflect a holistic understanding of traditional and modern social phenomena.
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