Interrogating Intersectionality Among Southeast Asia's Street Vendors

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 oppor- tunities 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 empha- sized 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 tempo- ralities” (Sassen, 2000: 215), vendors, especially those trading itinerantly, are repeat- edly 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 205 206 Handbook on gender in Asia 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, con- strain 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 differ- ence in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ide- ologies 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 capi- talize 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. 208 Handbook on gender in Asia THE MIGRANT OTHER Scholars have noted a strong representation of rural-to-urban

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