Abstract
Drawing on more than 15 years of ongoing ethnographic research in Ho Chi Minh City, this chapter explores the dilemmas of freedom, constraint, anxiety, and morality experienced by middle-class women with respect to finances, family, fashion, and fitness. Although many women welcome the chance for self-determination afforded by new forms of production and consumption, and this might signal a retreat of the state from involvement in private life, this chapter demonstrates that market-oriented economic policies have enabled the Vietnamese government and communist party to interpellate women as consumer-citizens in new commercial arenas.
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- 1.
- 2.
For an insightful overview of Marxist and Weberian approaches to middle classness, see Liechty (2003).
- 3.
Shorthand for the official terminology, “market economics with a socialist orientation” (kinh tế thị trường định hướng xã hội chủ nghĩa).
- 4.
In her study of private housing communities in China, Li Zhang (2008) makes a similar point about the tendency to hide how wealth is produced while displaying it through conspicuous consumption.
- 5.
Often attributed to Foucault, this precise phrase does not appear in English translations of his work, but it has become common shorthand for his sense of government as “the attempt to shape human conduct by calculated means” (Li, 2007, p. 5).
- 6.
Rivkin-Fish offers a fascinating discussion of a similar “logic of mapping moral caliber onto class distinction” and its expression through consumption in postsocialist Russia (Rivkin-Fish, 2009, p. 80).
- 7.
The Happy Family campaign is a continuation of longstanding socialist movements to promote national development through the transformation of attitudes and behaviors in the most basic units of society. The first iteration of these campaigns, begun in the 1940s by Hồ Chí Minh, focused on creating a New Way of Life based on the New Socialist Person who would be directly loyal to the party and collective, as opposed to the family (Drummond, 2004, pp. 162–163). Later versions shifted to promoting the Happy or Cultured Family, with emphasis by the 1980s turning toward issues of family planning. By the 1990s, the moral, cultural, and social dilemmas raised by the turn toward market socialism prompted decreased emphasis on family planning, political, or economic goals in favor of visions of the family as a harmonious affective unit. It is this ideal of the family as cozy nest that Women’s Union programming promotes.
- 8.
Nguyễn-võ Thu-Hương (2008) notes the irony that, while middle-class women’s sexuality is disciplined through the application of scientific expertise, the sexuality of working-class prostitutes is punished through incarceration.
- 9.
All names in the case studies are pseudonyms.
- 10.
Although Hiền did not explicitly use the word “tình cảm” or sentiment, her vision of feminine concern for the wellbeing of others is precisely what this popular term captures. Rydstrøm (2003) argues that tình cảm is the primary virtue that girls are socialized to embody.
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Leshkowich, A.M. (2012). Finances, Family, Fashion, Fitness, and … Freedom? The Changing Lives of Urban Middle-Class Vietnamese Women. In: Nguyen-Marshall, V., Drummond, L., Bélanger, D. (eds) The Reinvention of Distinction. ARI - Springer Asia Series, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2306-1_6
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