How Globalization and the Neoliberal Turn Are Shaping Gender Relations in Hanoi

Striving to be Men in the Family: Masculinity and Capitalist Transformation in Vietnam

“…A case in point can be found in Rofel’s (1999) study which shows women who grew up during China’s period of marketization starting to retreat from the workforce into the home. Often, this de-emphasis on women’s labor force participation is accompanied by the masculinization of the market and society, which weds men’s identities to their ability to labor (Gal and Kligman 2000; Murru 2018; Thai 2006; Watson 1993). However, the predominant attention given to marketization’s effects on women can obscure how economic transformation also shapes masculinity as a process, an ideal, and a lived experience for men.…”

“…The Vietnamese state, a reluctant agent for economic transformation (Gainsborough 2003), saw the home as a safeguard against market corruption. Consequently, the Social Evils Campaign of 1996 and the “Cultural Family” began casting women’s duties in the home as integral to the preservation of familial harmony, thus tying women’s identities to their families and the domestic arena (L. Hoang 2020; Murru 2018). As such, the good socialist woman that existed before 1986 was gradually replaced by a “return in some quarters to an idealized Vietnamese woman as delicate, beautiful, and submissive” (Werner and Bélanger 2018: 21).…”

“…With the separation of women’s values from their productive labor and breadwinning histories during Doi Moi , there was a simultaneous linking of breadwinning to masculinity. This occurred as Vietnamese men’s values became associated with their paid work (Murru 2018: 97). The pressure on men to be breadwinners shows how this notion, less prominent and less gendered during high communism, is being subsumed under the jurisdiction of the masculine.…”