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AbstractOnly rarely is Vietnam's global heavy industry studied from an anthropological perspective in either its gender or its class dimensions. This article contributes new insights into the ways in which the interagential dynamics of gender and technology from shopfloor to engineer offices coproduce social orders in contesting and perpetuating essentializing notions of femininity and masculinity. Blue‐collar and white‐collar women working in heavy industrial workplaces represent a minority in 'a man's world', ambiguously both disidentifying and identifying with notions of a typical 'female character' vis‐à‐vis 'male character'. Women working in heavy industry, the article shows, generate 'disruption' by reconfiguring conventions regarding gendered occupation, redefining gendered engagement with technology, and recalibrating images of femininity and masculinity. Doing so means carving out new opportunities and/or provoking crisis in a patrilineal universe. The article analyses the intricate ways in which women's engagement with technology is empowering while simultaneously reinforcing gender‐ and class‐specific inequalities in socialist Vietnam's global market economy.

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 mitigate crisis challenges and build social resilience depend on 'horizons of coping', which inform the scales and impacts of crises entanglements. Thus, crisis studies direct our attention towards human precariousness and societal inequalities, as well as the ways in which crises entanglements are counteracted, closed, navigated or endured in specific ethnographic contexts.

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 perpetrator'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 confined to an interregnum; a space in which the laws of protection do not apply and male violence is perpetrated with impunity. Yet, men's violence against their female partners also is combatted and resisted in Vietnamese society.

By drawing on testimonies gathered in rural Vietnam, this article focuses on the violence to which local inhabitants were subjected when Vietnam was under French rule (1883–1954). On a self-imposed 'civilizing mission', the control of local bodies was critical for the colonial powers and they became the subject of brutal abuse. Violence was exercised with impunity in the occupied areas and rendered 'logic' in accordance with western imaginations about racial superiority. While such ideas informed colonial terror in general, the differentiated registers of terror implemented in regard to women and men disclose how sovereign attempts of reducing local inhabitants to bare life were designed, in addition to race, along the lines of gender and sexuality. Vietnamese testimonies from the French colonial period reveal experiences of a reality of horror which in the article is considered through the prism of four different body typologies; typologies which elucidate the symbolic, physical, and imaginary metamorphoses through which women and men in differentiated ways were being increasingly dehumanized in the encounter with the colonial power.

Although Vietnamese society is currently undergoing significant changes with regards to the rights and perceptions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) people, dominant socio-cultural norms related to gender, sexuality, and the importance of the patrilineal family regime continue to cast a shadow over the lives of GLBTQ in contemporary Vietnam. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the urban centers of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, as well as legal documents and secondary sources, this article illustrates how dominant heteronormative socio-cultural norms have contributed to the political, legal, and social exclusion of same-sex sexualities through a process of outlawing, whereby GLBTQ have been systematically excluded from the rights of law. Drawing on qualitative interviews with gay men and lesbian women between the ages of 20 and 50, the article also highlights how this relation of domination has allowed for instances of GLBTQ resistance, through subversive opposition, strategies of avoidance, and the seeking out of new opportunities in urban spaces outside the dominant sociality. The article thus provides a qualitatively nuanced account of family politics and GLBTQ resistance in urban Vietnam at a significant socio-political historical juncture.

By drawing on ethnographic data collected in two different settings in northern Vietnam, this article considers the ways in which heterosexual masculinity is configured by younger men. The intersection between heterosexuality and masculinity, the article argues, epitomizes a site of contestations between moral ideals, expectations about gendered support, and sexual pleasures disguised as protests. In introducing into a Southeast Asian context, the Latin American term machismo, understood as an expression of male-centered privileges and the ways in which they foster men's chauvinism against women (or other men), the article explores how local assumptions about the natural quintessential drive of male sexuality as well as a wife's obligations to comply with his sexual needs together provide men with morally legitimized explanations for the buying of various kinds of female sexual services.

This special issue explores the intertwining reconfigurations of labour and welfare in the Global South by bringing together eight empirical studies of different national and transnational contexts and three commentaries. It asks how Global South people and states alike have come to prioritize market logics as guiding principles for welfare systems, moving away from collective risk-pooling towards individual responsibility, and how this reorientation is connected to the restructuring of labour. In this introduction to the special issue, we discuss the genealogies of the social question and review the growing academic discussion on the changing landscape of welfare in the Global South. We then underscore how the contemporary social question is predominantly framed in the terms of people's capacity for market participation in the specific empirical contexts discussed by our authors. The framing of the social question as such, and the accompanying solutions to it, we argue, disregards politics, political economy and social justice at the cost of the more urgent social question that confronts the increasingly asymmetrical power relations between labour and capital.

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 Interdisciplinary Crisis Studies as a field of scholarly enquiry, which allows for new perspectives on data collection and analysis. Using the cases of, first, crisis and security and, second, crisis and climate, conflict and migration, we illustrate how studying and intervening in crises requires non-linear approaches which connect across disciplines to develop more comprehensive, interdisciplinary understandings of societal problems and better solutions. In concluding the paper, we assert that key features of Interdisciplinary Crisis Studies must include (1) temporality, spatiality and scale; (2) multi-layeredness, processuality and contradictions; and (3) gender, intersectionality and social inequalities.