Money, Risk Taking, and Playing: Shifting Masculinity in a Waste-Trading Community in the Red River Delta

Abstract

This chapter examines the practices of masculinity by male migrant waste traders from a Red River delta district as underscored by the shifting ways in which they conduct their migrant trading activities and live their lives between youth and adulthood. It demonstrates that their practices push the boundaries of normative manhood, and over time help to redefine it, at the same time that they reproduce its symbolic parameters. As such, gender ideas and practices interact with each other to concurrently produce changes to and sustain social structures. The chapter indicates the relational and hybrid nature of masculinity, as well as the ways in which gender identity shapes and is shaped by the men’s participation in the marketplace.