Tiền bạc, ăn chơi, và phiêu lưu: Chuyển biến nam tính trong một cộng đồng kinh doanh phế liệu ở đồng bằng sông Hồng

Tóm tắt

This article examines the ideas and practices of masculinity by male migrant waste traders in a Red River delta district through the ways in which they conduct their trading activities and live their lives. Although they consciously construct differences between them and their fathers, between their trading operations and those of the women traders, their ideas and practices change over time as they transition from youth to becoming husbands and fathers. While they distance from their fathers’ ways of being a man during their youth, being influenced by encounters with the urban male culture and encouraged by haphazard opportunities in the urban waste trade, normative ideas about appropriate manhood over time increase their relevance for them. Yet their previous experiences continue to shape how they view themselves as men. This not only indicates the shifty and relational nature, but also an increasing hybridity of masculinity, and the ways in which gender identity shapes and is shaped by men’s participation in the market for their livelihoods.