Doing Gender, Doing Race: Intersectional Negotiations of Femininity in Vietnamese American Families

This article examines how second-generation Vietnamese American women negotiate gender within the diasporic home. Drawing on 28 in-depth interviews and guided by a Doing Gender through Intersectionality framework, the study analyzes how speech, silence, labor, and embodied comportment function as sites where gender is enacted, policed, and resisted under intersecting forces of race, migration, and family hierarchy. Thematic analysis identifies three patterns: (1) the persistence of patriarchal labor expectations that position daughters as both wage earners and caretakers; (2) the regulation of femininity through Vietnamese cultural binaries of hiền (gentle, deferential) and dử (aggressive, unruly), intersecting with U.S. racialized standards of femininity; and (3) strategies of resistance through quiet defiance, silences, and embodied acts that preserve ties while challenging norms. We introduce transraced immigrant striving to describe the double bind in which daughters must excel professionally while remaining modest, obedient, and culturally authentic.