Gender and Water in Northeast Thailand: Inequalities and Women\u27s Realities

The water world is socially constructed, reflecting continuous global gender inequalities and discrimination by those who hold dominant perspectives on water. While there is a strong global acknowledgement of the roles of women in water management by the United Nations International Water for Life Decade 2005-2015, discourses on gender mainstreaming in water management are still marginalised and under-theorised. The Millennium Development Goal-7 on environmental sustainability, addressing the need of more than one billion people for a significant improvement to accessing safe drinking water and basic sanitation, stagnated without a strong political will to include gender ideology in mainstream water perspectives. This qualitative study was conducted in a sub-urban community of Northeast Thailand in 2011, exploring the gendered roles, responsibilities, and inequalities of access to and control over village water resources. Results of this study illuminate the importance of taking into account the complexity of power and negotiation in local water structures within women’s social realities

Measuring the impact of health problems among adults with limited mobility in Thailand: further validation of the Perceived Impact of Problem Profile

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Perceptions of menopause in northeast Thailand: Contested meaning and practice

This paper draws on data collected from village-based ethnographic research conducted in northeast Thailand in 1990-1991 and highlights the polarities and contradictions of perceptions of menopause that exist between village women and health personnel with whom these women interact. For village women until recently, the menopause has been regarded as a simple and natural biological event; for health professionals, it is consistently represented as a 'medical problem' indicating treatment. The paper highlights women's construction of menopause, and their recognition and management of its physical symptoms. It draws attention too to differences among women and to the dynamic nature of their understandings and consequent health-seeking behaviour. The paper also describes the way in which health providers, through their own training and reading of professional and popular journals, increasingly represent the menopause as a pathological process and treatable condition. Through the exploration of conflicting perceptions of the menopause among contemporary Thai women, the paper draws attention to the heterogeneity and fluidity in understandings of biological processes that are related to and reflect the wider social and economic changes to which they are subject

Perceptions of menopause in northeast Thailand: Contested meaning and practice

This paper draws on data collected from village-based ethnographic research conducted in northeast Thailand in 1990-1991 and highlights the polarities and contradictions of perceptions of menopause that exist between village women and health personnel with whom these women interact. For village women until recently, the menopause has been regarded as a simple and natural biological event; for health professionals, it is consistently represented as a 'medical problem' indicating treatment. The paper highlights women's construction of menopause, and their recognition and management of its physical symptoms. It draws attention too to differences among women and to the dynamic nature of their understandings and consequent health-seeking behaviour. The paper also describes the way in which health providers, through their own training and reading of professional and popular journals, increasingly represent the menopause as a pathological process and treatable condition. Through the exploration of conflicting perceptions of the menopause among contemporary Thai women, the paper draws attention to the heterogeneity and fluidity in understandings of biological processes that are related to and reflect the wider social and economic changes to which they are subject.Thailand menopause social construction medicalization