Rethinking Single Motherhood in Thai-Esan Culture: A Hybrid Conceptual and Contextually Grounded Analysis
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Abstract
Single motherhood in Thailand is often approached through deficit-oriented narratives that emphasize individual failure, family breakdown, or social risk. Such framings obscure the structural, cultural, and relational conditions that shape the lived realities of single mothers, particularly in regional contexts. This article offers a conceptual rethinking of single motherhood in Thai-Esan society through a hybrid framework that integrates feminist family studies, cultural sociology, and context-grounded synthesis of regional literature. Rather than treating single motherhood as a uniform or pathological condition, the analysis demonstrates how its meanings and consequences are mediated by kinship density, gendered moral expectations, migration regimes, and community surveillance characteristic of Thai-Esan communities. Drawing on secondary ethnographic and regional
studies, the article highlights how extended family arrangements, remittance flows, and local moral economies simultaneously mitigate material hardship and reproduce social stigma. The study contributes theoretically by reframing single motherhood as a structurally embedded social position rather than an individual deviation, and by showing how regional context conditions both vulnerability and resilience. Policy and research implications highlight the need for context-sensitive social support and underscore the importance of future empirical studies on underexplored family forms, including single fatherhood and intergenerational caregiving roles, across various Thai regions.
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