Helle Rydstrom
Lund University, Gender Studies, Faculty Member
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Recent political, legal, and social changes have served to highlight shifting understandings of sexualities in contemporary Vietnamese society. Such changes have included pride demonstrations; the establishment of organisations working... more
Recent political, legal, and social changes have served to highlight shifting understandings of sexualities in contemporary Vietnamese society. Such changes have included pride demonstrations; the establishment of organisations working with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) rights; new legislation; and increased openness to non-heteronormative sexualities. Despite these changes, however, dominant heteronormative sociocultural norms related to the importance of the family, the patrilineage, and the innate characteristics of males and females, continue to exert significant pressure on the daily lives of LGBTQ people. In this chapter, we explore this familial politics of pressure and consider the ways through which LGBTQ people have sought to resist the dominant heteronormative context. The chapter is based on secondary sources, legal documents, and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the urban centers of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, which involved participant observations in various settings, and informal and semi-structured interviews with employees at organizations dealing with LGBTQ issues, leaders of same-sex clubs, and LGBTQ people between the ages of 20 and 50. Our findings illustrate that rather than sacrificing their own happiness in order to fit into the dominant heteronormative framework, some LGBTQ people have instead resisted that restrictive framework in myriad ways, including through the co-option of the very framework within which their resistance takes place.
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Although an increasing number of studies on children in non-Western and Western contexts have been conducted during the last twenty years, the field of anthropology and children still remains at an ...
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In the world we live in today, the presence and claims of crisis abound – from climate change, financial and political crisis to depression, livelihoods and personal security crisis. There is a challenge to studying crisis due to the ways... more
In the world we live in today, the presence and claims of crisis abound – from climate change, financial and political crisis to depression, livelihoods and personal security crisis. There is a challenge to studying crisis due to the ways in which crisis as a notion, condition and experience refers to and operates at various societal levels. Further, different kinds of crisis can overlap and intersect with each other, and act as precursors or consequences of other crises, in what can be thought of as inter-crisis relations or chains of crises. This article makes an enquiry into how to develop more adequate analytical tools for understanding crisis as a multidimensional phenomenon. We ask how crisis can be conceptualised and what the analytical potentials of a distinct crisis perspective might be? In this article we suggest a multi- and interdisciplinary approach to bridge between traditionally separated realms. Our ambition is to present a case for the development of Interdisciplina...
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This article explores crisis as social dynamics spurred by events that not only disrupt the normal order of things, but also transmute into crisis processes that generate persisting hardship and problems of the ordinary. Drawing on... more
This article explores crisis as social dynamics spurred by events that not only disrupt the normal order of things, but also transmute into crisis processes that generate persisting hardship and problems of the ordinary. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the industrial zones of Northern Vietnam, the article highlights the ways in which women workers manage crisis as an underlying condition of daily life. Capturing the heterogeneity and volatility of crisis means to unravel the modalities, intensities and temporalities by which a specific crisis is composed, and to identify how it interlocks with socio-economic crisis antecedents, such as gender and class. While crisis takes different shapes and undergoes various phases, a crisis tends to entangle itself with already-existing crises, fuelling or even exacerbating those, while fostering crises entanglements that impose difficulties and harm upon lifeworlds. The differentiated ways in which particular social groups can mit...
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This article takes the notion of crisis as a helpful analytical entry point to unfold the tem- poralities and modalities of the machinery of violence as manifested in men’s abuse of their female partners in Vietnam. Based on ethnographic... more
This article takes the notion of crisis as a helpful analytical entry point to unfold the tem- poralities and modalities of the machinery of violence as manifested in men’s abuse of their female partners in Vietnam. Based on ethnographic research I conducted over the years, the article argues that some types of crises might be episodic, and thus a bracketing of daily life, while others, such as intimate partner violence, might settle as a crisis of chronicity; as a condition of prolonged difficulties and pain that surreptitiously becomes a new ‘normal’. The machinery of violence, the article shows, refers to processes of symbolic and material transformations of a targeted woman, shaped in accordance with a perpetra- tor’s essentialist imaginations about her embodied properties (e.g., gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, and bodyableness). Such violence is invigorated by a patrilineal organization of society and a systemic permissiveness to male-to-female abuse. A battered woman is con...
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Research Interests: History, Gender Studies, Anthropology, Violence, Gender, and 5 moreMasculinity, Vietnam, Crisis, Anthropocene, and Ethnos
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Forskningsprojekt: Hvordan laerer vietnamesiske born deres kultur at kende? Og hvori bestar forskellene pa det, som piger skal laere i forhold til drenge for at vaere kulturelt set kompetente vietnamesere? Dette er hovedsporgsmalene i et... more
Forskningsprojekt: Hvordan laerer vietnamesiske born deres kultur at kende? Og hvori bestar forskellene pa det, som piger skal laere i forhold til drenge for at vaere kulturelt set kompetente vietnamesere? Dette er hovedsporgsmalene i et planlagt forskningsprojekt, som indebaerer et ars feltarbejde i Vietnam.