Hectic slowness: digital temporalities of precarious care from a Global South perspective

ABSTRACT

This article explores the temporal entanglements of care and precarity in Vietnam by unpacking the condition of “hectic slowness” experienced by mothers who sell food on Facebook against the widespread fear of dietary intoxication. Unlike the common association of “slowness” with an absence of activity, these trader-caregivers’ experience of “slowness” is defined by an overwhelming pressure of childcaring chores, casualized jobs, and intensified insecurities. At the center of this frantic inescapability is the caregiving “heart” [tâm] in the digital race, when a mother carries multiplied burdens while trying to move forward at the screen scrolling speed. Young mothers’ hectic slowness, however, is wired into an alternative temporality of the grandmothers, who effectively offer their care but remain largely out-of-sync with both the digital race and the stigma of “backwardness.” The continuities and mutations of precarized care across generations prove the need to learn from the long history of care agencies and vulnerabilities on the ground of the Global South.

KEYWORDS:

• Gendered precarity
• digital speed
• Vietnamese motherhood
• Global South digital media
• digital ethics of care
• Facebook

Acknowledgments

Thanks to colleagues at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (University of Pennsylvania), especially Marwan Kraidy, Clovis Bergère, Samira Rajabi, Rayya El Zein, Yakein Abdelmagid, Stanislav Budnitsky, Heather Jaber, and Marina Krikorian, for their intellectual generosity and emotional support. Thanks to Erik Harms, Ken MacLean, Adrian Athique, and Graeme Turner for their valuable feedback on an earlier draft of this paper. The two anonymous reviewers’ comments and suggestions have been particularly enabling, for which I would like to express my sincere gratitude.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Names have been changed in the article.

2. All translations are mine.

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by the Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED) under [grant number 508.04-2018.02].

Notes on contributors

Giang Nguyen-Thu

Giang Nguyen-Thu is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities of the University of Queensland, Australia. She is also an on-leave lecturer at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (Vietnam National University, Hanoi). She is the author of Television in Post-Reform Vietnam: Nation, Media, Market (Routledge 2019). E-mail: [email protected].