Logo image
“Don’t Do Your Gender on Me!” Gender Mainstreaming and the Politics of Training in Vietnam
Book chapter

“Don’t Do Your Gender on Me!” Gender Mainstreaming and the Politics of Training in Vietnam

Kristy Kelly
Gender and Practice: Insights from the Field, pp 71-87
30 Sep 2019

Abstract

Sociology
This chapter examines the role of gender training in the context of gender mainstreaming in Vietnam to illuminate how gender shapes and is shaped through development practice. Through thick description of a week-long gender training designed to mainstream gender into a rural development project, the author examines the role gender and development practitioners play as teacher–trainers in moving gender-mainstreaming policies beyond national development planning and rhetoric to affect local and cultural change. As they teach their students how to “think gender” they transform abstract gender equality policy commitments to fit the needs of different local constituents, who are themselves embedded in a complexity of gender, class, ethnic, age, and urban–rural power relations. In the process, training becomes a key political space, place and process where development subjects are produced, and gender expertise is negotiated. It is where teacher–trainers and their students actively negotiate the meaning of gender, equality, and development. It is a place where power and knowledge are constructed (and contested), and where trainers and trainees make visible their own political commitments and intentions as “insiders” and “outsiders” to the development process. As a result, training serves as an important site of engagement and contestation over the cultural and political meaning of gender mainstreaming, gender equality, and development in Vietnam, and as such has become an important space for feminist activism.

Metrics

21 Record Views
3 citations in Scopus

Details

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This publication has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#5 Gender Equality
#10 Reduced Inequalities

InCites Highlights

Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:

Web of Science research areas
Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary
Women's Studies
Logo image