Relationally Sustained Self-Sufficiency: Transnational Aging Among Retired Western Men in Chiang Mai’s Sex-Entertainment Economy

Abstract

This article examines how retired Western men in Chiang Mai, Thailand, organize everyday life through continued participation in Loi Kroh Road’s sex-entertainment field. Using transnational aging and informality as its conceptual frame, it develops the concept of relationally sustained self-sufficiency to describe how independently organized retirement can depend partly on locally embedded relationships. Based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork, the article shows how sex-entertainment venues form part of an informal economy through which support is assembled in later life. While pensions, healthcare entitlements, and legal status may remain anchored across borders, everyday life in Thailand requires locally available knowledge, companionship, practical assistance, and care. These forms of support emerge through repeated commercially mediated relationships between men and women and are partly reciprocal, combining financial contributions with attention, help, and social connection. However, reciprocity remains unequal and conditional, shaped by gendered expectations, economic asymmetries, and the absence of formal obligation. The article argues that retirement migration can relocate later life without automatically relocating the relational infrastructures that sustain it, showing how self-sufficiency may be socially produced and prolonged through informal relationships whose continuity cannot be guaranteed.