The benevolent cage: Moral governance, gendered disablement, and the shadow welfare state in contemporary Thailand
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This study investigates how disability is relationally produced and negotiated within Thai family dynamics. While scholarship often treats the family as a benign support unit, this article conceptualises it as a site of governance that can produce psycho-emotional disablism. Integrating critical family theory with the social relational model of disability, the analysis draws on interviews with 32 blind street musicians (19 men, 13 women). A moralised framework of karmic consequence, compassionate pity, and elder-junior hierarchy authorises a benevolent cage of confinement. Gender stratifies these dynamics, imposing compounded obligation on women while rendering men's standing precarious through erasure from kinship structures. Welfare absence compels families to function as a shadow welfare state, wherein a debt of gratitude becomes a transactional mechanism making belonging conditional upon economic contribution. Non-transactional arrangements indicate that economic conditionality is a structural adaptation rather than a cultural inevitability. The findings conceptualise familial disablement as policy-mediated and call for rights-based defamilialisation.
Source: Critical Social Policy
Authors: Quanchai Kerddaen, Ilan Katz, Karen R. Fisher
Institutions: Ubon Ratchathani University, UNSW Sydney
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,650
OpenAlex ID: W7223171998