Exploring and explaining the vulnerability and resilience of migrant women in Viet Nam

This thesis maps, conceptualises and explains multidimensional vulnerability of rural female migrants who migrate to urban area in Vietnam. It does this through a qualitative life story method which captures the histories, stories and experience of vulnerability of 15 informal sector migrant women workers in Ho Chi Minh City. I develop a multi-dimensional conceptualisation which focuses on social, economic and physical vulnerability to map their complex intersecting vulnerabilities. To explain their vulnerability I develop a theoretical framework which combines the theory of gender and power with insights from feminist political-economists and embed this within the concrete manifestation of hegemonic masculinity in contemporary Vietnam which is Confucianism. However, I do not limit my conceptualisation and analysis to only the vulnerabilities that these women experience but also the ways in which they develop strategies of survival and resilience, that can arguably be framed as seeds of resistance/active agency. I demonstrate the depth and intersecting nature of the three strands of vulnerability through a sharing of their stories and conceptualisation of what these demonstrate. Social vulnerability is a potential key which leads to economic and physical vulnerability and this vulnerability stems from their hometowns. Due to cultural gendered norms and their intersection with state policy and political economy, the female migrants often face inequities in power and autonomy and are valued as the ‘lowest of the low’ in the social hierarchy. As a result, they are subject to complex forms of violence which intersect with the consequences of economic reform which has strengthened the informal economy and the demand for feminised, unregulated and low paid labour. Perhaps the most pernicious form of this vulnerability is when the women come to internalise and naturalise their precarity and the sufferings they experience due to fate and their gender and class status. However, I also demonstrate, through an initial engagement with their practices of survival and strategies of resilience and agency how these women do not passively accept these circumstances. I conceptualise their agency through the ideas of public and hidden transcripts and feminised forms of solidarity and sociability. The participants tend to use their hidden transcripts for their social and economic vulnerability however, they resort more to the public transcript for their physical vulnerability and in each form different degrees of feminised solidarity and support.