Preamble

- Entrepreneurs
- Gender and Subjectivity: What does it mean to be an entrepreneur? What processes of becoming are involved, and why are they important?
- Leshkowich, Essential Trade: Vietnamese Women in a Changing Marketplace, How does one select the puzzles that a book tries to solve?
- Key themes: essentialism, gender subjectivities, and sociofiscal relationships

 

I. Essentialism in a Time of Change

A. Ngoc describes her husband: "He doesn't sell as well as me. Naturally, it's because he's a man."
B. Khanh: "confined in this cage" and "under house arrest."
C. Different regimes

1. Civil war: 1954-1975
2. Postwar economic restructuring, socialist cooperativization: 1975-1986
3. 1986-present: Doi moi (Renovation)

D. Prosperity, but anxiety
E. Timeless truths about women: patient, sweet, skillful
F. Essentialism: ascribing the features of someone or something to its supposedly natural, underlying, and enduring qualities - its essence
G. These qualities are in fact acquired under particular social, political, and economic conditions
H. Essentialism often works to naturalize material inequalities (Ong on spirit possession and young women)

1. Judith Butler: heteronormativity, performance, and gender trouble
2. Gayatri Spivak: strategic essentialism can be OK

I. Leshkowich: Need to apply Paul Farmer's hermeneutic of generosity: insights about the processes through which people become the diverse, contradictory, and significant beings that they are

1. Essentialism doesn't have to be strategic or false consciousness
2. What role does essentialism play in shaping subjectivities?

J. Methods

1. Interviews with 272 traders who owned a total of 345 cloth and clothing stalls
2. Extensive participant observation with 40 stallholders
3. 20 life history interviews
4. Person-centered approach

 

II. Gender and Entrepreneurship in the Marketplace

A. Ha's story
B. Socialism feminized entrepreneurship
C. Bargaining: "Singing out to catch the fish"

1. Speech
2. Pronouns
3. "Talking nonsense"
4. Men and prestige --> studied ineptitude

 

III. Sociofiscal Relationships and Moral Subjectivities

A. Personalistic networks (quan he) seen as functional and essentialist
B. Nga's bankruptcy

1. Bank loans versus "hot loans"
2. Hui: revolving credit associations

C. Tinh cam: caring, sympathetic, and supportive relationships

1. Ngoc's rejection of commissions
2. Insiders and outsiders
3. Quan he as similar to guanxi in China, BUT...

D. Connection between gender and relational subjectivities: morality matters, for business and self

 

IV. Beyond Resistance or Mystification

A. The limits of strategic essentialism: lying or mystification?
B. Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: agency lies not in rejecting norms, but in "the variety of ways in which norms are lived and inhabited, aspired to, reached for, and consummated" (Mahmood 2005, 23).
C. Narrative and performative production of legible subjects

1. Individuals knowable to themselves and to others
2. Create and challenge socialist and market socialist political economy
3. Essentialism can be both personally meaningful and strategically advantageous

 

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For more information, contact:  aleshkow@holycross.edu