Navigating identity, ethnicity and politics: a case study of gender variance in the Central Highlands of Vietnam

ABSTRACT

Based on ethnographic data collected among the Bahnar ethnic group in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, I discuss the lived experiences of masculine performing people (assigned female at birth) whose gender characteristics blur the boundaries between lesbian and transgender. In reviewing non-normative gender practices in supernatural rituals in Southeast Asia and in Vietnam I explore the links between these practices and present-day terminology and discourses relating to the complexities of gender and sexual diversity in the secular realm. I also discuss the disclosure experiences of these people, their vulnerability to social discrimination and draw attention to the nuances of contingent masculinities against the backdrop of the complex inter-ethnic relations in the Central Highlands.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender nonconformity
• masculinity
• ethnicity
• politics
• Bahnar
• Vietnam

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Wibke Straube, Kirsten Endres and the anonymous reviewers of NORMA for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Huong Thu Nguyen is a Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology of Vietnam National University, Hanoi and currently affiliated with the Department of Gender Studies of Lund University as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Her research interests center on the intersection of sexual violence, gender diversity, ethnicity, and politics in Vietnam and the Philippines. Her recent work has appeared in Culture, Health and Sexuality, Journal of Asian History, Sojourn and Journal of Vietnamese Studies.

Notes

1. Research participants presented in this article have been assigned pseudonyms for purposes of confidentiality.

2. I wonder whether the non-conforming gender practices of these masculine performing people members have anything to do with the traditional social structure of the Bahnar bearing the characteristics of a bilateral [song hệ] society – which regards rather highly the role of women in the family and in the community at large. This is an intriguing question that deserves further investigation.

3. From information received from interviews conducted locally, the degree of ‘problematic’ was based on the number of individuals previously known to be involved in incidents occurring in 2001 and 2004.

4. By December 2015 there are 310,014 Roman Catholics in Kon Tum diocese, of which ethnic minorities accounted for 68% (Roman Catholic Diocese of Kon Tum, 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the project ‘Women’s Leadership: Empowerment of Women in the period of International Integration’ of United Nations Development Programme and Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Vietnam in 2012. The additional literature review for the second submission of this article was developed from the two-year project ‘Transgender Funeral Performers in the Ho Chi Minh City’, funded by the Vietnam National University of Hanoi (2017–2018).