Negotiating the Ideal Woman: Hybrid Femininities and the Functional Persistence of Gender Norms in Contemporary Vietnam

This study examines how the ideal woman is discursively constructed and negotiated in contemporary Vietnamese online media amid globalisation and rapid social transformation. Using framing analysis, it examines recurring metaphors, catchphrases, depictions, exemplars, slogans and visual representations across a corpus of Vietnamese online texts concerning accomplished women, femininity, marriage and identity. The findings delineate three competing interpretive frames: (1) modernized traditional femininity, which reinterprets Confucian gender ideals through contemporary narratives of female empowerment; (2) relational negotiation, which situates women’s achievements by their impacts on heterosexual relations, emotional balance, and familial responsibilities; and (3) critical challenges to gender inequality, which questions restrictive gender norms, idealized femininity, and unequal relational expectations. Collectively, these frames demonstrate that contemporary media frequently portray women’s empowerment alongside persistent expectations of caregiving, emotional labor, and relational responsibilities. Building on these findings, functional persistence and relational negotiation are proposed as complementary analytical concepts for explaining how contemporary empowerment narratives accommodate and transform, rather than simply displace, traditional gender norms. The study contributes to sociological scholarship on gender discourse, media framing, and globalisation by demonstrating how competing representations of the ideal woman collectively shape a hybrid configuration of femininities in contemporary Vietnam.