Harriet M Phinney

Single Mothers and the State's Embrace

Reproductive Agency in Vietnam

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

"In the mid-1980s, after the Indochina Wars, a shortage of men meant that many single women in northern Vietnam found themselves without suitable marital prospects. Increasingly, they began to pursue single motherhood by "asking for a child" (xin con), seeking men who would agree to impregnate them. Xin con was a radical departure from traditional Vietnamese kinship values and practices, which were based in Confucian patriarchal and patrilineal ideology. A principal question generated by this phenomenon was whether xin con was solely a response to the postwar demographic imbalance or whether it presaged a more permanent shift in reproductive strategy. Drawing attention away from men's patrilineal reproductive interests, the practice foregrounds women's maternal desires and subjectivities. This longitudinal ethnography, the first in-depth study of xin con, follows post-war single mothers through the next generation, exploring their reproductive agency, the government's legitimation of xin con as a socially intelligible reproductive option, and the new social position of these women"--

Produktdetails

• Verlag: University of Washington Press
• Seitenzahl: 236
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Februar 2022
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 226mm x 152mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 386g
• ISBN-13: 9780295749433
• ISBN-10: 0295749431
• Artikelnr.: 61343215

Autorenporträt

Harriet M. Phinney is associate professor of anthropology at Seattle University and coauthor of The Secret: Love, Marriage, and HIV.