Identity Work and Entrepreneurial Marketing Among Women Entrepreneurs in Vietnam: A Postcolonial Feminist Perspective

Abstract

This paper examines how entrepreneurial marketing shapes and is shaped by the identity work of women entrepreneurs in postcolonial Vietnam. Drawing on a postcolonial feminist framework and 23 in-depth interviews conducted on Unicorn Island in the Mekong Delta, this study explores how women navigate gendered expectations, moral obligations and spiritual beliefs in the construction of entrepreneurial identities. The findings demonstrate that marketing operates not merely as a functional business activity but as a gendered and culturally embedded practice through which identity is performed, negotiated and legitimized. Through informal strategies such as storytelling, the mobilization of spiritual symbolism, and embodied performances, women market their enterprises in ways that foreground relationality, morality and community belonging. These practices enable women to establish entrepreneurial credibility while simultaneously resisting dominant, individualized and masculinized models of entrepreneurial success. By centering the lived experiences of women in the Global South, this study contributes to postcolonial feminist debates by conceptualizing entrepreneurial marketing as a key site of gendered identity construction within culturally and spiritually situated contexts.