Gender equality, neoliberalism, and the law: a critical discourse analysis of Vietnam’s 2006 gender equality law

This paper critically examines Vietnam’s 2006 Gender Equality Law (VGEL) through the lens of Foucauldian discourse analysis and reveals its neoliberal foundations and its failure to address structural gender inequalities. By emphasising formal equality, VGEL advances a neoliberal ideal of the ‘self-empowering woman’, a figure that reflects broader ideological shifts which de-centre collective struggle and obscure the need for systemic reform. Drawing on Carol Smart’s feminist legal critique, the analysis argues that the law ultimately reinforces patriarchal structures and bureaucratises gender equality through a formalist legal discourse that evades structural critique. Crucially, in the Vietnamese context, where no established tradition of feminist legal critique exists, this paper positions discourse analysis as a vital methodological intervention to confront historical and theoretical absences. It argues that in the absence of a critical feminist tradition in Vietnam, Foucauldian discourse analysis offers a necessary methodological intervention, both to expose the gendered and phallocentric logics embedded in legal discourse and to lay the groundwork for a historically conscious, structurally engaged feminist legal practice attuned to Vietnam’s socio-political realities.