‘I want to take risks, like my mother’: Memory, affect, and Vietnamese masculinities – the legacy of gendered variations in socio-economic mobility during Ðổi mới

Abstract

Young Vietnamese men who witnessed their mother's changing economic and labour market situations through the early years of Ðổi mới (the policy of economic liberalization in Vietnam after 1986) have developed conceptions of masculinity that are ambivalent to notions of male power and authority within what is often termed the ‘traditional’ neo-Confucian family. On the basis of the life narratives of a small group of men in their early twenties, the author suggests that the value young men place on their mother's work and familial influence during Ðổi mới contrasts with the findings of much gender scholarship on women's social and economic (im) mobility in the 1990s in Vietnam and on young men's own masculinist narratives. Most gender-sensitive research in this area has suggested that Vietnamese women remained curtailed in the early 1990s by a resurgence of male-oriented kinship systems and patriarchal structures at household level. However, the author discusses the young men as being equivocal. While invoking broad Confucian tropes, these men remember their mothers as economically dynamic relative to their fathers. This led to the informants citing their mother's histories of economic risk-taking as exemplifying free-market capability. Further, the finding suggests that Vietnamese women's social and economic mobility in the 1990s strongly affected young men's contemporary ideas and practices related to masculinity.

Keywords:

• Ðổi mới (Doi Moi)
• masculinities
• memory
• social mobility
• Vietnam

Notes

1 All translations from Vietnamese to English have been made by the author. The Vietnamese language features several vowels that are not used in English and uses diacritical marks to denote the tonal inflection of a syllable or word. I have chosen to retain these where I feel there could be some slippage of meaning between Vietnamese and English, and/or possible confusion for the reader. This allows readers to check the original Vietnamese words. However, for the names of my informants, Vietnamese sources, and Vietnamese words that commonly appear in English texts (such as place names), I disregard the diacritics and the monosyllabic word construction. For example, I write Vietnam instead of Viêt Nam, and Hanoi instead of Hà Nôi. For Vietnamese names, I adopt the common practice of placing given names after the surname and middle name.

2 Pseudonyms have been used for all informants.