‘Not fully out, not fully hidden’: emotional labor and affective strategies of queer teachers in Vietnamese schools

Information from the abstract

This paper examines how queer teachers in Vietnam negotiate emotional labor and professional legitimacy within school environments shaped by heteronormativity, Confucian-inflected moral expectations, and everyday silence around gender and sexuality. Drawing on narrative inquiry and affect theory, the study analyzes interviews with six queer educators. Rather than framing professional identity through binaries of being ‘out’ or ‘closeted,’ the findings show that participants managed visibility, safety, and authority through affective calibration. Queer presence emerged through strategies such as strategic ambiguity, coded humor, selective silence, and relational attunement, allowing teachers to remain professionally legible while minimizing moral and reputational risk. Emotional labor was enacted through everyday acts of care and subtle pedagogical interventions that enabled harm to be interrupted without declarative disclosure. By foregrounding affective surveillance as a recurring condition of participants’ school lives, the study reframes opacity as an ethical and pedagogical strategy in morally regulated educational contexts.

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Related topics: Gender Roles and Identity Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies · Emotional Labor in Professions