The benevolent cage: Moral governance, gendered disablement, and the shadow welfare state in contemporary Thailand

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.