Essential Trade: Vietnamese Women in a Changing Marketplace

The architecture of cigarette circulation: marketing work on Indonesia's retail infrastructure

“…During an earlier fieldwork project in a more rural setting (Welker ), I was left to mind my friend's kiosk on several occasions, affording me a modicum of experience selling cigarettes and recording credit transactions. Gendered associations between women and trade in the marketplace (Brenner ; Leshkowich ) are strengthened by a venture's physical location in or adjacent to the home, literally domesticating and rendering socially appropriate and unthreatening income‐generating activity that can be combined with domestic cleaning, cooking, and child supervision. Women involved in commerce are often significant or principal household providers (Alexander : 5).…”

Troubling Love: Gender, Class, and Sideshadowing the “Happy Family” in Vietnam

“…Scholars in recent decades have continued to question the dichotomy often drawn between “modern” and “traditional,” “developed” and “underdeveloped,” “secular” and “pious.” Mahmood (), Deeb (), and Fader (), for example, show how nonliberal Muslim and Orthodox Jewish women engage in practices of piety and “modesty” that are to be understood not as signifiers of women's oppression and cultural “backwardness,” but as modes of mobilizing cultural constructions of “tradition” to confront changing social conditions and cultivate “modern,” virtuous selves within their communities. Leshkowich () shows how women in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, similarly subscribe to, and mobilize to their advantage, essentialist discourses of gender and piety formerly denigrated by the Communist state as “backward superstitions.” Women draw on these “traditional” tropes to provide for their families and thereby embody market socialist modes of “modern,” virtuous sociality. Decades of colonial rule, anticolonial and anti‐imperial struggle, socialist revolution, and now efforts at market liberalization have brought with them various projects of “modernization” and “development” in Vietnam that can appear both continuous with, and yet dissimilar to, one another in their attempts to claim legitimacy at home and on the world stage (see e.g., Phinney ; contributors to Nguyen‐Marshall, Drummond, and Bélanger ).…”

“…Mahmood (2005), Deeb (2006), and Fader (2009), for example, show how nonliberal Muslim and Orthodox Jewish women engage in practices of piety and "modesty" that are to be understood not as signifiers of women's oppression and cultural "backwardness," but as modes of mobilizing cultural constructions of "tradition" to confront changing social conditions and cultivate "modern," virtuous selves within their communities. Leshkowich (2014) shows how women in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, similarly subscribe to, and mobilize to their advantage, essentialist discourses of gender and piety formerly denigrated by the Communist state as "backward superstitions." Women draw on these "traditional" tropes to provide for their families and thereby embody market socialist modes of "modern," virtuous sociality.…”

The anxiety of romantic love in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

“…Despite its extensive effects, đổi mới is an unevenly distributed process (Schwenkel & Leshkowich ), and people's access to neoliberal technologies of the self varies according to age, gender, and class (Leshkowich ). Indeed, the extent to which Vietnam can be characterized as ‘neoliberal’ is debatable as đổi mới has not superseded socialist and Confucian social forms but revived or intensified them (Schwenkel & Leshkowich ).…”

“…Rather, becoming middle class involves the process of associating oneself with ‘modern’ lifestyles. While Vietnam's middle class has previously been examined through the lens of consumerism (Dutton ; Truitt ), education (Earl 2014 b ), and gender (Leshkowich ), this article examines the cultivation of emotional states as a middle‐class practice and aspiration.…”