Alongside economic change, market socialism in Vietnam entails biopolitical campaigns to combat poverty as a “social problem.” Social workers in Hồ Chí Minh City function as agents of therapeutic governance to transform the lives of poor urban clients by employing empathetic interpersonal interaction grounded in scientific models of human behavior. Analysis of social workers’ affective expertise illuminates two gendered and classed consequences of their technoscientific interventions. First, social work is feminized, yet social workers often cannot achieve middle-class feminine ideals. Second, the casework approach risks naturalizing class inequality by atomizing structural problems as stemming from individual characteristics that require reform.
Affective Expertise: The Gendered Emotional Labor of Social Work and the Naturalization of Class Difference in Hồ Chí Minh City
Ann Marie Leshkowich is Professor of Anthropology, College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, Massachusetts, United States). Her research focuses on gender, economic transformation, neoliberalism, middle-classness, fashion, social work, and adoption in Vietnam. She is the author of Essential Trade: Vietnamese Women in a Changing Marketplace (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014), for which she was awarded the 2016 Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, and co-editor with Kirsten W. Endres of Traders in Motion: Identities and Contestations in the Vietnamese Marketplace (Cornell University Press, 2018). Versions of this article were presented at ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute; University of California, Riverside; Bennington College; and annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association. The author is grateful for comments provided by members of the audiences on those occasions, as well as by Kimberly Arkin, Misty Bastian, David Biggs, Johanna Davidson, Claire Edington, Ellen Foley, Carla Freeman, Ella Ben Hagai, Carla Jones, Martha Louise Lincoln, Minh T. N. Nguyen, Christina Schwenkel, Merav Shohet, Allen Tran, Tiantian Zheng, and two peer reviewers. Research was funded by grants from College of the Holy Cross.
Ann Marie Leshkowich; Affective Expertise: The Gendered Emotional Labor of Social Work and the Naturalization of Class Difference in Hồ Chí Minh City. Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1 May 2023; 18 (1-2): 173–202. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/vs.2023.18.1-2.173
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