12. Vulnerability and resilience on the streets:
interrogating intersectionality among
Southeast Asia’s street vendors
Sarah Turner, Ammar Adenwala and Celia Zuberec
INTRODUCTION
Street vending is a key form of urban informality that provides livelihood opportunities for millions of urban residents in the Global South, as well as for lesser
numbers in the Global North (Recio and Gomez, 2013; Yotsumoto, 2013; Truong,
2018). Scholars working with street vendors in Global South locales have emphasized the livelihood insecurity and poor working conditions that many vendors face.
Additionally, scholars frequently highlight the exclusion of street vendors from specific urban spaces, as states position vendors as “out of place”, hence marginalizing
them even further (Yatmo, 2008). Local authorities often consider street vendors as
incompatible with neoliberal visions of modernized and orderly urban environments,
blaming vendors for producing unsanitary conditions and traffic congestion (Cross,
2000; Bhowmik, 2005). While city authorities strive for “new spatialities and temporalities” (Sassen, 2000: 215), vendors, especially those trading itinerantly, are repeatedly considered to be a form of slow mobility, an illegitimate form in need of being
restricted or eliminated so that modern, legitimate mobilities, especially motorbikes
and cars, can be encouraged and move quickly and freely. As a consequence, street
vendors frequently face harassment from police and municipal workers who may
forbid them from vending in a particular location, fine them or confiscate their goods.
Nonetheless, in recent years, scholars have complicated the dominant narrative
of street vending as primarily an informal livelihood pursued by marginalized
populations for subsistence earnings. This contemporary research has highlighted
that cities in the Global South can be home to an important diversity of street
vendors. Focusing on Southeast Asia locales, authors have noted the complexity and
variety of individuals involved. To take a few examples, Malasan (2019) found in
Bandung, Indonesia, that while street vending includes members of the urban poor,
it also involves middle-class individuals such as office employees who sell street
food outside their formal working hours to earn extra income. In Bangkok, there is
a significant contingent of middle-class entrepreneurs working as street vendors who
often have college degrees or had professional careers before the Asian Financial
Crisis of 1997 (Maneepong and Walsh, 2013; Yasmeen and Nirathron, 2014). More
specifically, Batréau and Bonnett (2016) argue that the tacit acceptance of informal
economic activity by the district administration on Bangkok’s Soi (lane) Rangnam
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has allowed vendors to turn profits equal to middle-class wages, despite their work
remaining officially illegal.
Moreover, motivations vary for pursuing street vending livelihoods, beyond
the well-rehearsed trope of being the only option for the urban poor. Some individuals opt for street vending due to the independence and flexible working hours
self-employment provides, as Truong (2018) found when interviewing vendors in
Hanoi who were formerly employed in the formal sector. One such benefit is the
ability to return to one’s farmland for peak agricultural periods (see also Luong Van
Hy, 2018). For women vendors, child-care and other non-paid work can also be
a important motivations to maintain this flexibility, allowing women to supplement
their household income (Maneepong and Walsh, 2013), or to take on the role of
primary breadwinner for their household (Trupp and Sunanta, 2017). Vendors can
also push back against local authorities in imaginative, resourceful and oft-subtle
ways to maintain their right to vend on the city’s streets, highlighting significant
agency in the face of state restrictions.
To try to tease apart this diversity and complexity, we focus on the differential
access street vendors have to urban public spaces in Southeast Asia. We examine how
other urban actors (officials, planners, non-vending residents) support, ignore, constrain or marginalize different groups of vendors, especially along the intersectional
axes of gender, migrant “other” and ethnicity (Crenshaw, 1989). Intersectionality has
been defined as “the interaction between gender, race, and other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power” (Davis, 2008: 68).
While cognizant of the debates surrounding which categories and how many should
be incorporated into intersectional analyses (Davis, 2008: 68), we initially focus
on the categories that appear most often in literature regarding the region’s street
vendors. We also pin-point other categories that we find to be relatively ignored in
the literature to date and which we suggest deserve closer attention in the future.
While drawing on this approach, we note the range of strategies that vendors put
in place to maintain their access to city streets. In the Southeast Asian context, one
specific concern that appears under-explored in street vendor research is the differing
nature and degree of harassment that vendors must cope with. Hence, we complete
this chapter with a brief case study of street vending in Vietnam’s capital city Hanoi,
in which we focus on the forms of harassment vendors – especially migrant women
– face, and their coping mechanisms.
GENDERED “NORMS”
Analysing the gendered logics embedded in street vending practices has shown
that street vending in Southeast Asia is regarded as a distinctly feminine practice
(Leshkowich, 2005; Lloyd-Evans, 2008; Mills, 2016).1 Access to street vending
work, as well as the acceptability of certain trading practices and strategies, are
shaped by socio-cultural discourses surrounding gender norms. For instance, in the
Interrogating intersectionality among Southeast Asia’s street vendors 207
Philippines, Milgram (2014: 154) argues that women rural-to-urban migrants capitalize on their historical roles as “household finance manager” and “public market
trader” to engage in innovative forms of street trading. Milgram (2015) also notes
that Muslim women vendors in Baguio, the Philippines, prefer selling DVDs and
CDs to food, so that they can dress in a manner their families deem acceptable (hence
complicating notions of shared experiences with non-Muslim women vendors in the
city). Meanwhile, Leshkowich (2005, 2014) notes that informal street vending and
marketplace trade is Vietnam is strongly associated with femininity, exemplified
by the practice of referring to traders as “các chị em tiểu thương”, a combination of
the Sino-Vietnamese words for “petty trader” (tiểu thương) and a kinship term for
“sister” (các chị em). She argues: “The femininity of street trade eases the process
of characterizing it as a form of disorder and hence an unseemly and undesirable
pursuit” (Leshkowich, 2005: 188).
Simultaneously, the women traders whom Leshkowich (2014) interviewed in Ho
Chi Minh City’s Bến Thành Market believed stereotypically feminine traits, such as
“patience” and “sweet-talking”, allowed women to trade more effectively than men,
both while making sales and to mitigate reprimands from authorities. Studies of street
vending in Hanoi likewise indicate that women vendors are able to mobilize specific
gendered narratives to elicit more lenient punishments when caught by local authorities (Turner and Schoenberger, 2012; Eidse et al., 2016). On the border of Cambodia
and Thailand, women involved in fish trading from Cambodia explained that they
were better suited for trading as they had less “ego” than men (Kusakabe, 2009). This
allowed women traders to negotiate lesser customs payments with Thai officials at
the border by pleading or causing a commotion, behaviours that the traders believed
would not be tolerated from men (Kusakabe, 2009).2
The social and cultural association of “feminine” with street vending can result
in social stigma for men attempting street vending livelihoods. In Luong Van Hy’s
(2018: 98–99) gender analysis of street vendors from Tịnh Bình province, Vietnam,
the author argues that vendors place themselves in “the vulnerable position of
a supplicant” when “soliciting and pleading” a sale. Among the lowland majority
Kinh ethnic group, the author adds that occupying this inferior position is a greater
challenge for men regarding their sense of masculinity and honour, than for women
traders regarding their sense of self-respect. Men found street vending more difficult
as a result, with their sales pitches less persistent (2018: 98–99). Zuberec (2019)
found similar results in Hanoi where Kinh men and women involved in itinerant
street vending noted that men are usually unwilling to perform such physically
exhausting work, with street vending considered nhêćh nhać (pitiful and dirty). In
Thailand, men from the ethnic minority Akha community faced shame for producing and selling souvenirs, which is typically regarded as “feminine” work (Trupp
and Sunanta, 2017). Like in other case studies, the authors note that women Akha
vendors found an advantage in leveraging “feminine” strategies, such as conversing
with patrons in specific ways (Trupp and Sunanta, 2017). It thus becomes clear that
gendered logics shape the tactics and strategies employed by vendors in the region.
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THE MIGRANT OTHER
Scholars have noted a strong representation of rural-to-urban migrants among
the populations of street vendors within Southeast Asia’s metropoles (Turner and
Schoenberger, 2012; Batréau and Bonnett, 2016; Truong, 2018; Sekhani et al.,
2019).3 The growth of urban economies across the region has been paired with
declining employment opportunities in rural areas due to agrarian transitions
involving increasing mechanization and, in some locales, the loss of small-holdings
to corporate plantations (Turner and Caouette, 2009). This combination has led to
many rural-dwellers migrating to cities in order to seek work (Bhowmik, 2005;
Truong, 2018). On the outskirts of large cities, the appropriation of agricultural land
also frequently leaves peri-urban dwellers with inadequate resources to maintain
livelihoods solely based on farming (Labbé, 2014). In turn, rural-to-urban migrants
often arrive in cities with limited formally recognized skills and education, and hence
face restricted access to formal employment opportunities. Such combinations have
increased urban informality, including a growth in street vending (Milgram, 2009;
Brata, 2010). Across Southeast Asia it is often more commonly women who migrate
to find work as street vendors in urban locales than men. While some migrant men do
vend, due to the “feminine” stigma attached to this employment option, men are more
likely to migrate to find work on construction sites, or as porters, security guards or
informal transport drivers, such as motorbike taxi drivers (Turner and Ngo, 2019.
This intersection of gender and migrant status can place women street vendors in difficult situations with regards to negotiating local authorities and also other residents,
as highlighted below in our case study.
The 1997 Asian financial crisis played a noteworthy role in dramatically increasing the number of urban street vendors, and the 2008 economic slowdown likewise
contributed (Milgram, 2009). Bhowmik (2005) reported on how the 1997 crisis
was a key factor reinforcing the street vendor populations of cities in Malaysia, the
Philippines and in Singapore. In Cambodia and Vietnam, the situation was somewhat
different. Kusakabe (2012) notes that the exodus from Cambodia’s rural areas after
the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979 resulted in a surge of migration
to Phnom Penh where street vending was one of the first employment opportunities for new migrants. In Vietnam, after a series of market liberalization reforms
from the mid-1980s relaxed restrictions on small-scale commercial activity, many
rural-dwellers migrated to urban areas to engage in street trading, mostly to large
urban centres, such as Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, a trend that has continued in
recent years (Jensen and Peppard, 2003; Turner and Schoenberger, 2012; Eidse et al.,
2016; Luong Van Hy, 2018). In Thailand, the uneven distribution of financial capital
between urban areas such as Bangkok and rural areas, has resulted in sustained migration to Bangkok in search of informal employment, including vending (Yasmeen and
Nirathron 2014; see also Maneepong and Walsh, 2013; Trupp, 2015). Batréau and
Bonnett (2016) also note the presence of international migrants from Cambodia, Laos
and Myanmar among Bangkok’s street vendors, raising awareness that migration
patterns for street vendors are not necessarily constrained by state borders. Research
Interrogating intersectionality among Southeast Asia’s street vendors 209
has also noted that migration for vending is not necessarily a permanent move; for
peri-urban dwellers especially, vending in the city can involve a daily, weekly, or
monthly commute, often dictated by the rhythms of farm work, if agricultural land is
still accessible to the broader household (Jensen and Peppard, 2003).
Upon arrival in the region’s cities, migrant status frequently influences the nature
of vending opportunities individuals can access. Indeed, while migrants may be
from different socio-economic backgrounds, there is a tendency for urban residents
and officials to classify all migrant informal workers as “the other” and oft-times as
inferior to long-term urban residents, be this due to accent, a lack of formal skills
or just limited knowledge of how to navigate the city’s streets and bureaucracy.
This “othering” underlines a fairly frequent dichotomy between vendors who have
“fixed stalls”, often on pavements or in other public spaces, compared to those who
sell itinerantly. Preferable vending opportunities, including prime selling locations
and access to permanent structures, are often dictated by local resident status or by
length of time a migrant has been in the city. For instance, Kusakabe (2012) notes
that vendors operating fixed stalls in Phnom Penh arrived in the city from 1980 to
1982, while those who trade itinerantly tended to arrive in the 1990s, after more permanent opportunities for vending had been monopolized by earlier migrants. These
differences mean that migrant women street vendors often have very different lived
experiences than long-term urban resident women vendors, disrupting normative
assumptions regarding all “women vendors”.
THE COMPLEXITIES OF ETHNICITY
Less documented than gender and migrant status, has been the influence of ethnicity
on vending. Yet, a small body of scholarly work examines how ethnic minority
populations in Southeast Asia face specific challenges to accessing such work.
Turner and Oswin (2015) investigate the practices of women street vendors from
Hmong, Yao and Giáy ethnic minority communities trading in Sa Pa, a tourist town
in the northern uplands of Vietnam. Their study reveals that, in comparison to Kinh
(Vietnamese ethnic majority) vendors, ethnic minorities face greater challenges due
to broad discrimination and bias against minorities, which become obvious during
their interactions with town officials (who tend to be Kinh). Moreover, a lack of
Vietnamese language skills often restricts minority vendors from negotiating with
officials, while they are disproportionately impacted by police action, as they are
unable to access information regarding future street-clearing raids and ongoing
changes in regulations.
Similar trends emerge in Trupp (2015) and Trupp and Sunanta’s (2017) work
with Akha street vendors, who migrate from rural Thai upland communities to
urban centres in order to make a living peddling souvenirs. Aesthetic identifiers as
members of a highland minority group leave Akha vendors vulnerable to discrimination by local authorities who, like in Vietnam, often negatively stereotype ethnic
minority communities. However, these studies also demonstrate that Akha street
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vendors, as for Hmong, Yao and Giáy in Sa Pa, are able to access a niche market with
tourists by leveraging their unique cultural artefacts, an economic advantage gleaned
from the “exoticization” of ethnic minority cultures. At other times, vendors rely on
the fluidity of ethnic identity to gain social advantages while bartering, as Kusakabe
(2009) observed among women fish vendors at Rong Kluer market, on the border
of Thailand and Cambodia. Here, Cambodian vendors emphasized their similarities
with fellow Cambodians or downplayed their differences with their Thai counterparts
to negotiate better prices for goods. Notably, this behaviour was not prevalent among
men selling at the same market, highlighting how gender and ethnic identity can
intersect to shape vending practices, and also how ethnic identity is a contestable
construct (Geertz, 1973).
NEGOTIATIONS AND CONTESTATIONS
Gender, migrant status, ethnicity and other possible markers such as age, education
and religion, intersect in numerous ways when vendors find themselves having to
negotiate not only with customers, but also with exclusionary state practices and
policies.4 Despite the broad diversity of political systems that Southeast Asian
countries represent, policies regarding street vending are tending to be become
increasingly restrictive as both states and individual city administrations compete to
attract financial capital and investments. Removing street vendors is often considered
a fairly easy way for officials to improve or “advance” a city’s image as progressive,
modern and “world class”. This process of “worlding” often results in dispossession
and exclusion, as specific images of urban citizenship are encouraged (Roy, 2011).
For example, in Baguio City, the Philippines, authorities target and remove street
vending activities in busy commercial spaces along Session Road, the thriving
commercial artery, while maintaining the right to trade for more “orderly” formal
enterprises (Milgram, 2009, 2011; Yeoh, 2011). Authorities in Jakarta, Indonesia,
have attempted to register vendors and limit street vending to select locales; however,
Yatmo (2008) notes that only a fraction of vendors actually sell from these locations,
leaving over 80 per cent of vendors trading in spaces deemed illegal and subject to
forced removal by police. In Bangkok, scholars note that street vendors are either
part of the pre-1997 Asian financial crisis “old generation” of traders, who are more
often mobile, sell food items or cheap goods, and gain subsistence earnings, or part
of a post-1997 “new generation” who sell more luxurious items at higher prices
and often trade from fixed stalls (Yasmeen and Nirathron, 2014). Maneepong and
Walsh (2013) note that the “old generation” of vendors face notably more precarious working conditions. While both dedicated and temporary vending areas have
been allocated for street vendors in Bangkok (Nirathron, 2006), “older generation”
vendors often occupy illegal trading locations and are subject to far greater harassment from local authorities (Maneepong and Walsh, 2013). Even when these vendors
opt to register their trading locations, they are frequently intimated into paying bribes
by corrupt local officials. In Hanoi, vending was banned in favoured public spaces
Interrogating intersectionality among Southeast Asia’s street vendors 211
and streets across the city in 2008 and currently the city’s (mostly migrant women)
itinerant vendors risk substantial fines from local authorities who consider their
mobile trade a “backwards” practice (Nguyễn Thị Thanh Bình, 2018).
During negotiations and contestations with officials over their right to vend, and
also during many interactions with city residents, vendors often find themselves
subject to harassment, bullying and physical violence. This is especially the case
where vendors’ legal position remains under debate (Milgram, 2011). Nonetheless,
the focus on violent encounters faced by street vendors in Southeast Asia remains
limited in the academic literature. Exceptionally, Boonjubun (2017) details how
street vendors in Bangkok’s Tha Chang neighbourhood negotiated conflicts with
municipal actors, and also among themselves, to avoid potentially violent encounters. Here, vendors contended with threats of extortion from local gangsters, eviction
from municipal authorities and competition from fellow vendors.
Moving briefly beyond the Southeast Asian realm, in neighbouring China,
a number of case studies – particularly in Guangzhou – have detailed violent encounters between street vendors and municipal authorities responsible for managing urban
spaces. In Guangzhou, officers have attracted notoriety for their violent enforcement
methods, with many documented incidents of assaults on street vendors (Xue and
Huang, 2015), particularly involving lower-level officers (Xu and Jiang, 2019). In
return, scholars have also noted the violent tactics that street vendors employ to resist
attempts to confiscate their goods or in retaliation for prior mistreatment. Vendors in
Guangzhou have fought back using makeshift weapons in confrontations leading to
vendors being imprisoned, injured and even killed (Huang et al., 2014). Similarly, in
Harbin and Shanghai, Hanser (2016) notes that tensions between street vendors and
municipal authorities have erupted into mass protests and, at times, destructive riots.
In India, scholars have pointed to the multiple avenues of violence threatening street
vendors. In Mumbai, vendors face violent demolitions from municipal authorities
and police (Anjaria, 2006), as well as physical violence from proprietors who rent
stalls to vendors new to the city (Salès, 2018). Meanwhile, Mahadevia et al. (2016)
find vendors in Guhwati, Northeastern India, are regularly extorted by local gangs
and police.
While such pervasive violence is not frequently reported upon with regards to
street vending activities in Southeast Asia, vendors in the region still frequently
face repressive conditions including localized or individual acts of violence and
harassment. In response, street vendors employ creative strategies to continue to
access their livelihoods and contest hegemonic visions of urban space use and urban
citizenship. In Manila, street vendors have mobilized strategies, such as public
rallies, backdoor negotiations and bribery, to negotiate the efforts of local authorities
to exclude them from prime commercial spaces around a key transit hub, Monument
station (Recio and Gomez, 2013). Elsewhere in the Philippines, Cebu City’s street
vendor association mounted a political campaign in favour of electing a mayor who
was positive about vendors’ rights (Yasmeen, 2016). Focusing on practices at the
individual level, scholars in Hanoi have analysed how street vendors rely on social
network ties and a range of everyday politics, including covert resistance measures,
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to negotiate access to urban spaces (Turner and Schoenberger, 2012; Eidse et al.,
2016). There are important differences in the tactics vendors draw upon, often setting
long-term Hanoi residents trading from fixed stalls in opposition against migrant
itinerant traders, detailed below.
Analyses regarding the gendered nature of these interactions remain fairly uncommon. Yet, in the Vietnamese context, as introduced earlier, Leshkowich (2005) has
argued that the implicit associations between femininity, disorder, petty trade and
premodernity have informed the government’s negative discourses on street trading.
In turn, women street vendors, who symbolize this “disorder”, are excluded from
urban spaces and persecuted by local authorities. Moreover, women street vendors
are also targets for gender-based violence. Trupp and Sunanta (2017) note that
women Akha vendors experience conflicts with and at times sexual harassment from
customers. However these women are reluctant to report their experiences to local
authorities, who often discredit the accounts of ethnic minority individuals whom
they deem as “backwards”.5 Due to the limited academic attention to date regarding
the gendered harassment that street vendors negotiate in Southeast Asian cities, we
next introduce a brief case study of vending in Hanoi based on fieldwork we have
completed there, focusing in on these specific concerns.
STREET VENDING AND HARASSMENT IN HANOI,
VIETNAM
The year 2008 was a notable one for the changing landscape of Hanoi, the capital of
the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, with important ramifications for street vendors
in the city. That year, with minimal public consultation, Vietnamese state officials
expanded the official area of the city from 920 to 3,345 square kilometres (Prime
Minister of Vietnam, 2008). This swelling in land area and population is part of
an ongoing state initiative to modernize Hanoi’s economy, with hopes that the
Vietnamese capital will soon rival Ho Chi Minh City and become more populous
than Singapore or Kuala Lumpur (The Straits Times, 2008).
This “worlding” vision and the actions of officials in the years preceding the
city’s overnight expansion have resulted in the rapid transformation of Hanoi and
its periphery, with peri-urban areas increasingly targeted for real estate development
(Labbé, 2014). The resultant decline in surrounding farmland has been an important
cause for increasing numbers of rural and peri-urban residents to seek informal work
in the city. Also in 2008, officials banned street vending from 62 streets and 48 public
spaces in Hanoi’s urban core (People’s Committee of Hanoi, 2008).
Fixed-stall vendors in Hanoi, who comprise the minority of the overall vending
population, are usually long-term women residents, sometimes with multiple generations of their family born in the city. Many fixed-stall vendors were formally
employed in the state sector prior to market liberalization reforms in the mid-1980s,
and supplement their small pensions with stall earnings, while also seeing vending
as a way to remain active in retirement. In contrast, the overwhelming majority
Interrogating intersectionality among Southeast Asia’s street vendors 213
of street vendors in Hanoi work itinerantly with bicycles, trolleys, carrying poles
or baskets (Turner and Schoenberger, 2012; Eidse et al., 2016). These individuals
are predominantly women rural-to-urban migrants from Hanoi’s peri-urban areas
and are frequently scorned by fixed-stall vendors, who consider these migrants as
“outsiders” and “uneducated” (Jensen and Peppard, 2003; Turner and Schoenberger,
2012). In turn, itinerant vendors resent the favourable treatment fixed traders receive
from local officials and their access to preferred trading opportunities. While many
itinerant vendors have been in Hanoi for close to 15 years, our interviews reveal they
continue to face exclusion by authorities and “native residents”.
It is the Công an or public security officials who are primarily responsible for
enforcing the city’s street vending ban. Long-term resident vendors with fixed stalls
play upon their local knowledge and resident status to assert their rights to the city’s
pavements with these officials, who police the streets at the smallest spatial unit of
urban administration, the ward (phường). These vendors, predominantly women,
have described specific performativities that they partake in, that emphasize their
feminine “lowly position”. This includes “playing up” their widowed status, their
poverty or that they are the elderly mother of a deceased soldier, hence appealing
to officials to take pity on them. In turn, ward officials often adapt state policy
to accommodate the local conditions of their jurisdiction, and fixed-stall vendors
frequently negotiate a monthly “fee” to avoid further demands (Koh, 2006). The situation is markedly different for migrant street vendors, again predominantly women,
for whom avoidance tactics are far more important, and having to pay hefty bribes
when caught is common. These tactics include evading scheduled patrols by knowing
the routes of officials, trading when officials take their lunch breaks, and calling each
other by cell phone to warn of approaching police raids (Turner and Schoenberger,
2012). This lack of shared experience is made visible by taking an intersectional
approach, highlighting the importance of deconstructing not only the category “street
vendors”, but also “women street vendors”.
During the summers of 2017 and 2018, the first and third authors completed 52
in-depth interviews with street vendors, including specific questions on harassment.6
Eight of the vendors were men, three being stationary vendors and five itinerant, while
12 women were selling from fixed stalls and 32 were trading itinerantly. Focusing on
the responses of women interviewees, we found that fixed-stall sellers were seldom
very concerned about sexual or other forms of harassment while trading. They commented that they know their neighbourhood well, often trade alongside neighbours
and friends who keep an eye out for each other and each other’s goods, and – in
some but not all cases – noted that they only trade during daylight hours. Due to their
financial arrangements with ward officials, harassment from officials or the police
was also limited. For women itinerant traders – who were all migrants – the situation
was noticeably different, with traders explaining the tactics they had implemented to
avoid harassment. Younger vendors talked of dressing “in clothing for older people”
so as not to draw attention to themselves, working only during daytime hours, and
avoiding areas with fewer people or staying in eye-sight of other itinerant vendors
whom they knew. Others explained that they feared being sexually harassed when
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moving through narrow alleyways that were less populated or when they went into
new areas they were unfamiliar with. They were also concerned that they might get
“caught out” after dark with their heavy goods and be subjected to sexual harassment.
Being afraid to return home after dark because of the isolated route to their accommodation was also a concern for some young vendors. One vendor explained that
she had been drugged and robbed while vending, and many others were also worried
about this possibility. As such, these concerns factored into embodied performances
regarding what women migrant vendors wore, and how, where, and when, they sold
their goods.
Itinerant vendors added that going to the authorities in such situations was impossible due to their livelihood and migrant status, explaining that officials would just
want to extract additional bribes from them. In contrast, migrant men involved in
street vending noted no concerns regarding sexual harassment or sexual violence
but added that they were as fearful of harassment from officials for bribes as women
vendors were. Many migrant vendors whom we interviewed – both men and women
– noted that they felt angry or sad when residents or authorities mistreated them, but
believed they had few grounds to stand up for themselves because of their migrant
status. Nonetheless, our participants also noted that younger men had an advantage
because they were better able to resist Hanoi residents trying to steal from them,
while women had “no way to fight against these bullies” (interview data, 2018). This
brief case study thus highlights that the experiences of street vendors with regards to
harassment and violence in Hanoi are not only gendered, but also closely linked to
migrant status, and to some degree age.7
CONCLUSION
In this chapter we have highlighted the need for a greater understanding of the
critical interplay of social structures and processes when it comes to street vending
in Southeast Asia. As officials in the region’s cities strive to make their metropolis
“world class” and rapidly enact an assemblage of urbanization and modernization
policies, street vending is increasingly deemed out of place, backwards, and in need
of strict reforms or termination. Yet, street vending continues to be an important
livelihood opportunity for thousands of men and women throughout the region, either
through necessity or by choice. In contested public spaces, vendors have quite different livelihood experiences, struggles and quotidian interactions due to their gender,
ethnicity and migrant status, among other factors. This “multiplicity of identities”
and the ways such categories intersect at particular sites create important similarities
and differences in vendor experiences and struggles (Crenshaw, 1991: 1298; Davis,
2008).
Based on our review and findings here, we suggest that there is a need for more
focused research regarding both personal and political harassment and violence of
street vendors, across a diversity of vending locales. In the Southeast Asian realm at
least, there is little literature detailing such concerns, yet we found migrant women
Interrogating intersectionality among Southeast Asia’s street vendors 215
vendors in Hanoi, Vietnam, quick to mention their avoidance and coping strategies in
this regard. As Mills (2016: 286) aptly states: “Gender systems are, in effect, discursive formations that shape and are shaped by matrices of power; as such they are also
continually articulated and negotiated through intersubjective performances, which,
in turn, produce, reproduce, and at times contest these same patterns of domination.”
In sum, if future research can continue to raise awareness of intersectional vulnerabilities, as well as vendor agency and tactical coping mechanisms within the realm of
broader socio-cultural and political dynamics, it is hoped that scholars and activists
will be able to help structure new imaginings of street vendor livelihoods and landscapes. In turn, this could lead to political and social change to find tangible, respectful ways by which these individuals can be recognized as having a “right to the city”,
while continuing to provide for their household’s welfare. Better still, city authorities
could acknowledge that street vendors themselves have important knowledge and
expertise regarding how they might be legitimately integrated into city “upgrade”
processes. Nonetheless, this proposition would considerably challenge the status quo
regarding urban governmentality in a number of Southeast Asian countries, requiring
a shift in discourse from street vendors as backwards and a “thing of the past”, to
highlighting their ingenuity and resourcefulness in times of transformation.
NOTES
1.
2.
3.
4.
We read no literature on street vending in Southeast Asia that talked of categories other
than the gender binary of men and women. Street vending research in the region thus
appears to assume vending landscapes are heteronormative (see Muñoz, 2015, for work
regarding queer street vendors in Los Angeles).
While outside the Southeast Asian realm, it is also interesting to note that in Moroccan
bazaars, Kapchan (2001) highlights how bartering rhetoric differs between men and
women vendors. While women draw on popular discourses, such as appealing to clients’
religious and mystical beliefs, men draw upon more formal markers of legitimacy, such as
diplomas and lingual dexterity between French, English, and Arabic. In Bolivia, Sikkink
(2001) observes that women traders mobilize fluid class and ethnic identities in their
interactions with customers, projecting an “exotic Indianness” to bolster the apparent
efficacy of the herbal remedies they sell.
While some scholars suggest that the ‘minimum standard’ or three main axes of intersectionality are gender, race, and class (Leiprecht and Lutz, 2006; in Davis, 2008: 81),
the literature on street vending in Southeast Asia tends to highlight migrant status more
regularly than class, hence our focus here (although see Leshkowich, 2005).
We should note that we found no work on (dis)ability and street vendors in Southeast
Asia. Elsewhere, in Mozambique, Agadjanian (2002: 336) briefly mentions that men
street vending are “those to whom the mainstream labor market is particularly unfriendly
and whose manhood is not to be compromised by doing a ‘woman’s job’ – especially
the young, the old, the physically disabled, and the socially marginalized”. In Columbia,
Martínez et al. (2017: 36) explained that street vendors were “more likely than the general
population to be disabled or from an indigenous background”. Cuvi’s (2019) research on
the policymaking process in downtown São Paulo towards disabled and elderly street
vendors was the most focused on (dis)ability that we could find regarding the Global
South.
216
5.
6.
7.
Handbook on gender in Asia
Beyond the Southeast Asian context, Companion (2014) calls attention to the sexual
harassment faced by women street vendors in Northern Mozambique. Companion
determines that these street vendors’ vulnerability to violence is concurrently shaped by
factors that include migrant status, the length of time passed in a particular location and
the need to scavenge for resources. In the highly gendered spaces of street food vending in
Durban, South Africa, Wardrop (2006: 680) notes that “fear is specifically engendered”
with female vendors working outside organized caravans vulnerable to physical assault
by municipal officials and criminals.
This fieldwork builds on previous work by the first author since 1999 regarding informal
livelihoods in Hanoi, although in prior interviews vendors were not specifically asked
about harassment beyond what they experienced from local officials.
All the vendors with whom we spoke were Kinh (ethnic majority) and hence did not
face the ethnic discrimination of minority vendors with whom we have talked to in the
Vietnam uplands (Turner and Oswin, 2015).
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