This paper introduces a men’s studies approach to Vietnamese gender studies. It explains the value of incorporating studies of men’s lives and experiences into gender and women’s studies. It argues that the study of gendered conflict and power is necessary to understanding Vietnamese gender relations. This understanding must be contextualized within the social processes of negotiation, cooperation, and reconciliation that are so essential to the cultural fabric of Vietnamese social life. This approach, which integrates women and men’s studies, can have effective theoretical and practical consequences for changing men’s relationships to men and women in both private and public spheres. It integrates men as partners in a movement for social change that seeks expanded roles for women in all sectors of the society, expanded roles for men in family life, and includes men as critical participants in solving current gender and social problems.
Vietnam is now deep into the first phase of “renovation” in which it is moving to a market economy under socialist principles. Gender equality as a concept and a reality has had some attention by the State, through laws and by the work of the Women’s Union, which is tied to State and Party apparatus. An additional source of change has been economic forces, even more than women’s political or social movements.
