Introduction

Migrant beer sellers are counted among the thousands of young women in Southeast Asia who are encouraged to move to urban centres for work or education and who are potentially excited by the possibilities of adopting an imagined ‘modern’ urban lifestyle. Notably, working as a beer seller is considered more lucrative and less demanding than factory labour (Phouxay and Tollesfsen 2011) and is often sufficiently flexible to combine with post-secondary studies even as workers contend with the stigmatization associated with an occupation that is formally or informally categorized as (indirect) sex work.

In this chapter, I draw upon a participatory mixed-methods study, Intersections of Gender, Work, and Health: Migrant Beer Sellers in Southeast Asia, conducted with migrant beer sellers in Bangkok (Thailand), Phnom Penh (Cambodia), and Vientiane (Laos). The project included a scan of our state of knowledge of beer selling in the three focal cities and primary data collection that featured focus groups and in-depth interviews with 90 beer sellers, surveys from a total of 946 workers from different venue types in each city, and 70 hours of observation. Drawing from these data and focusing on the body, I highlight how complex and shifting global, regional, and local interactions contour the lives of migrant beer sellers.

Context

Despite their historical, social, and political particularities, the countries of Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos have all been impacted by and are implicated in contemporary neoliberal globalization that propelled the expansion of export-oriented manufacturing in the region beginning with Thailand in the 1970s (Esara 2004) and eventually spreading to Laos in the mid-1980s (Khamphouvong and Santasombat 2014).