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 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 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 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 210 Handbook on gender in Asia 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 precar- ious 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 Binh, 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, 212 Handbook on gender in Asia 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 uncom- mon. 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 gen- erations 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 com- mented 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 214 Handbook on gender in Asia 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 accom- modation 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 impos- sible 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, discur- sive 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 vulnera- bilities, 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, respect- ful 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. 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). 2. 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. 3. 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). 4. 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 Handbook on gender in Asia

5. 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. 6. 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. 7. 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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