Feminized Ethics of Care and Everyday Crises: Gendered Morality, Family, and Labor in Industrializing Vietnam

Industrialization and globalization processes in Vietnam have resulted in increased marketization of care, which is imbued with ideological goals that capitalize upon and invigorate gendered morality. Morality thus provides a helpful analytical entry for my exploration of the ways in which feminized ethics of care is informed by moral codes and values for appreciated and condemned behavior in women and men. Feminized ethics of care informed by gendered morality become a crises mitigation and coping strategy for women in the socialist market economy. When a crisis of care entangles itself with socio-economic antecedents such as limited economic resources, a conglomerate of crises is constructed, which perpetually is inflicting difficulties while at the same time surreptitiously transmuting into a condition of the ordinary.