Dear all,
We are looking for additional panelists for our AAA panel proposal on 'Gender and Economic Activities in China and Vietnam' below. Since the deadline (April15) is approaching, please send an abstract until March 22th if you are interested in joining us - sorry for the short notice. We will inform you shortly afterwards of the selection. The American Anthropological Association meeting this year will take place on November 18-22 in Denver (see http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm). Please note that panelists have to be a registered member of the AAA or have a membership exemption and pay the conference fee.
Sincerely,
Minh Nguyen
Research Fellow
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
Halle/ Saale, Germany
AAA Panel proposal:
Gender and Economic Activities in Marketized Socialist China and Vietnam
Organizers:
Minh Nguyen and IChieh Fang, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany
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As in other political systems, gender was one of the key organizing principles for the economies of Vietnam and China during state socialism. Above all, it was instrumentalized to shape processes of production, consumption and exchange in particular ways. Women were mobilized into the labor force by the state, which dictated the organization of economic life through production units and a central planning system that regulated most aspects of economic life – thereby becoming more dependent on the paternalist state than on individual men. Attempting to eliminate gender differences, the socialist state officially promoted gender equality and instituted public social services to ensure women’s full participation in the socialist productive system, which was predominantly focused on manufacturing and heavy industries. Particular notions of masculinity and femininity were fostered for the sake of productivity and political mobilization, on a large part privileging the public and productive roles of both men and women over their domestic roles.
Following their reforms in the late 1970s and mid-1980s, sweeping changes have taken place in the two former centrally planned economies, which are increasingly marketized while remaining under the political command of the party state. The downsizing of state industries, the dissolution of collective agricultural production, and the disintegration of socialist welfare have been accompanied by an increase in private ownership, the expansion of the service sector, the mobilization of migrant labor in new types of global industries, and the rise of entrepreneurialism. The household economy, which was marginal during state socialism, has regained its central importance in the livelihoods of many. This seems to occur at the same time with a privatized turn to the home as the main locus of consumption and gender identity construction.
This panel examines how gender is reconfiguring and is being reconfigured by these post-reform economic transformations in China and Vietnam, two neighboring countries with interesting contrasts and similarities in development trajectories. We are especially concerned with the ways in which gender is implicating on key economic elements of labor, value, money and property from an ethnographic perspective. Panelists shall contribute ethnographies of economic activities by men and women in different sectors, analyzing how they are differentially positioned in the organization of these activities, which economic outcomes they achieve, and what such gendered positioning matters for their social status and identity. These analyses shall be actively linked to the shifting construction of femininity and masculinity by the state under market socialism, which, in contrast to the central planning period, increasingly emphasizes gender difference as an instrument of governance.
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