The ‘Hardship’ of Ordinary Crises: Gendered Precariousness and Horizons of Coping in Vietnam’s Industrial Zones.

Summary, in English

This article focuses on the ways in which women employed in Vietnam’s heavy industry, mitigate and cope with crises at the workplace and in social life. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, which I have conducted in the Industrial Zones of northern Vietnam in the international corporations called Xylan and Yate, I examine how women who are working on the floor manage crises entanglements as an underlying condition of daily life. Vietnamese society is rapidly transforming from a labor-intensive farming society into an industrial globalized nation and provides the context in which I study crisis as social dynamics spurred by events that disrupt the normal order of things, but which also might transmute into crises processes that generate persisting ‘hardship’ (vất vả) and ‘problems’ (vấn đề) of the ordinary.

• Author: Helle Rydström
• Department/s: Department of Gender Studies
• Publishing year: 2022
• Language: English
• Pages: 540-558
• Publication/Series: Global Discourse: A Developmental Journal of Research in Politics and International Relations
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 3-4
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/204378921X16329024386613
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: Bristol University Press
• Topic: Gender Studies
• Keywords: Gender; Global Capitalism; Precariousness; Crisis; Industry; Vietnam
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 2043-7897