Growing up in Vietnam at the beginning of the 21st century, I was familiar with the nation’s animosity towards its LGBTQ population. Several reasons lay behind this hostility: the country’s battle against the HIV-AIDS epidemic was ongoing, and homosexuality, alongside drug addiction and prostitution, was considered a ‘social evil’ that not only threatened Vietnamese moral values but also obstructed the ongoing fight against AIDS.
The Three-Teachings philosophy (Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism) that shapes Vietnamese culture also extended this stigmatisation: its emphasis on gender roles, sexual dimorphism and lineal reproduction constructed non-normative sexual and gender identities as a ‘selfish lifestyle’, a ‘White man’s disease’, a failure to fulfil one’s filial duty, and ultimately, a betrayal of the family institution. As a result, the Vietnamese LGBTQ community faced much stigma and discrimination during this time. With the laws set against same-sex marriage and gender transitioning, and public media constructing LGBTQ as a transmissible ‘disease’, there was virtually no safe space for queer expressions and identities in Vietnam, whether in urban or rural contexts.
But things change, and such changes happen rather rapidly. While many Vietnamese LGBTQ people still live on the fringes of society, the country has become significantly more accepting of LGBTQ identities and relationships, especially in urban areas. Vietnam held its first Pride event in 2012, followed by a number of legal alterations that decriminalise same-sex unions and legitimise sex-reassignment surgery. Behind this transformation, one sees a community of dedicated activists who work to improve conditions for LGBTQ people via a multi-institutional approach to social change. In an authoritarian regime such as Vietnam, change does not come about through actions that overtly challenge the state’s authority, such as protests or public demonstrations. Instead, Vietnamese LGBTQ activists accomplish change through soft, organised and consistent persuasion techniques: they provide training workshops to raise public awareness of LGBTQ rights, bring positive LGBTQ presentations to the media and lobby for changes to the law. Thus, their approach adds another dimension to the ‘activist’ label, one that is still commonly and mistakenly understood simply as ‘protestor’ in the social movement scholarship.
Addressing this limitation, my recent article in the journal Emotions and Society expands the definition of activism, highlighting actions that contribute to social change outside the frames of protests and demonstrations. Turning the inquisitive gaze onto Vietnamese LGBTQ activists, I explore the various roles these activists adopt to carry the movement and the significance of emotions in the fulfilment of such roles. In order to elevate the moral standing of LGBTQ in Vietnamese public perception and to motivate closeted queers to come out, these activists rely on the discourse of essentialism and exhibit a hopeful self-image, highlighting that LGBTQ are worthy citizens who deserve societal acceptance, and by extension, equal rights. This strategy to perform ‘emotion work’ in public settings, however, can become a burden in their private lives. Here we find a contrasting image: a happy ‘front stage’ where activists exhibit joy and hope, and a lonely ‘back stage’ where they struggle with the demands of activism, a lack of family support and anti-LGBTQ harassment. Recognising the weight of their back stage experiences is the prerequisite to understanding specific activities in their activist training, which as I demonstrate, can be regarded as a form of collective emotion work that activists perform to address burnout and sustain commitment to the cause. Through interviews and participant observation at activist training and meetings, I show that a must-have component in Vietnamese LGBTQ activist training is activities that require participants to express vulnerability to their activist colleagues. Such activities not only provide a safe space for activists to vent but also work as a mechanism transforming privately felt pain and suffering into collective commitment and hope.
Through this research, I highlight the central role of emotions in the making or breaking of a social movement. Here the focus moves beyond the emotional energy generated in crowd settings such as Pride parades, and settles on the underlying emotions of everyday activism. On the one hand, the study illuminates the critical impact of emotion work techniques on social change: Vietnamese LGBTQ activists elicit positive emotions to elevate the social standing of the LGBTQ community and motivate bystanders to join their cause. On the other hand, this precise necessity to portray positivity and hope can contribute to activists’ back stage suffering, as they find themselves unable to live up to the expectations of being an ‘ideal’ activist. By illuminating this contrast, the study reminds us that emotion constitutes a crucial aspect of the activist’s career as well as of other professions that require individuals to comply with specific sets of emotional behaviour. Recognising these emotional challenges and carving out space to address them not only improves one’s wellbeing but also sustains one’s commitment, whether to a movement or a profession. In the context of Vietnam, social change for LGBTQ lives could not have taken place without activists’ strategic use of emotion work: as a form of persuasion as they approach the laws, as a form of motivation as they approach the public, and as a form of healing as they nurture their own activist community.
Yên Mai is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Uppsala University, Sweden.
‘What happens on the backstage? Emotion work and LGBTQ activism in a collectivist culture’ by Yên Mai is published in Emotions and Society.
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Image credit: YEN DUONG