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Focusing on welfare challenges and crises encountered by women in contemporary Vietnam, this article examines the gendering of morality and the ways in which a feminized ethics of care is entangled with women’s practice of the social capacity tình cảm(sentiments/feelings/emotions). Drawing on data from the Industrial Zones of northern Vietnam, the article highlights how low-income workers are rendered precarious in the Vietnamese semi-privatized welfare sector. The article shows how an inadequate public welfare system not only relies on, but even capitalizes on, a feminized ethics of care provided by women for kin and relatives in need of everyday support. Thus, shaped as an essentializing morality-defined female capacity, tình cảm is imposing pressure upon girls and women while also facilitating the building of social resilience with which they can mitigate and cope with care expectations, challenges, and crises.

AbstractAlthough Vietnamese society is currently undergoing significant changes with regards to the rights and perceptions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) people, dominant socio-cultural norms related to gender, sexuality, and the importance of the patrilineal family regime continue to cast a shadow over the lives of GLBTQ in contemporary Vietnam. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the urban centers of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, as well as legal documents and secondary sources, this article illustrates how dominant heteronormative socio-cultural norms have contributed to the political, legal, and social exclusion of same-sex sexualities through a process of outlawing, whereby GLBTQ have been systematically excluded from the rights of law. Drawing on qualitative interviews with gay men and lesbian women between the ages of 20 and 50, the article also highlights how this relation of domination has allowed for instances of GLBTQ resistance, through subversive opposition, strategies of avoidance, and the seeking out of new opportunities in urban spaces outside the dominant sociality. The article thus provides a qualitatively nuanced account of family politics and GLBTQ resistance in urban Vietnam at a significant socio-political historical juncture.

This article examines the ‘inclusive education’ strategy in Vietnam and the extent to which it facilitates learning in students with disabilities. After the introduction of the doi moi(renewal) policy in 1986, Vietnamese society went through a period of rapid transformation, including the educational sector. Debates on teaching means, curricula, learning, and the inclusion of children with disabilities in public school classes increasingly became a focus of concern. Supported by international aid organizations, the Vietnamese government initiated the implementation of an ‘inclusive education’ program which aims at mainstreaming the public school system in order to include all students regardless of disabilities. Even though the partners involved in the introduction of the ‘Inclusive Education’ program into Vietnam usually refer to it as a success, my data indicate that the program tends to amplify already identified problems in the public educational system mainly caused by overloaded and abstract curricula and a pervasive rote-learning tradition. The article shows how girls — disabled girls, in particular — are susceptible to pedagogical setbacks in the public school system.