Organizer: Nhung Tuyet Tran, University of Toronto

Chair and Discussant: Frank Proschan, Smithsonian Institute

Viet Nam has been described as the crossroads of Asia and no symbol has been appropriated to represent its culture more often that that of "Woman." This panel explores how Vietnamese legal and medical regimes regulate reproduction through the control of women’s bodies. The first two papers examine how Vietnamese society from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries sought to regulate women’s bodies and sexuality through legal and medical mechanisms. Tran’s paper takes a twist on the sexual order by examining the problem of the "chaste" female to the political order while Thompson’s paper tackles directly the extent to which Vietnamese conceptions of the body and reproduction were influenced by Chinese medicine. The last two papers explore from an anthropological perspective how the Vietnamese government defines and regulate women’s reproductive options in the era of market capitalism. Phinney’s paper evaluates the 1986 Marriage and Family law from both the top-down and bottom-up perspectives, exploring how the state and local organizations frame the discourses to suit their goals of defining maternal obligations and rights. Pashigian’s paper takes the panel into the reproductive advances of the globalized world, arguing that the Vietnamese government’s attempts to regulate the new reproductive technologies reflect its desire to assert control over the definition of "Vietnameseness." Together, the papers demonstrate that women’s bodies serve as sites upon which legal and medical regimes negotiate the boundaries of reproduction to define feminine and cultural authenticity. While the papers emerge from Vietnamese case studies, they raise issues relevant to study of gender and sexuality in other parts of Asia.

Nhung Tuyet Tran, University of Toronto

Scholars of Southeast Asia are familiar with the observation that women enjoyed relatively autonomous religious and sexual lives in the early modern period. While this observation is often made to tie Viet Nam to the Southeast Asian region, little work examines the intersection between the two in Vietnamese society. This paper seeks to explore the relationship between religion, sexuality, and politics by examining constructions of proper and improper chastity in seventeenth and eighteenth century Vietnam. After providing an overview of the sexual order, the paper suggests that state authorities linked women’s sexuality to the stability of the political order, and set the limits of "chastity" to exclude spiritual motivations. The efforts of the Trinh and Nguyen states to control and punish female Buddhist and Catholic communities professing vows of chastity highlight the extent to which local society and state directives required women of child-bearing age to be (re)productive members of society.

C. Michele Thompson, Southern Connecticut State University

The nature versus nurture debate regarding human traits, physical and mental, is not new. Societies worldwide have discussed physical inheritance and social influence for millennia. The Nguyen Dynasty (1802-1945) provides an interesting case study regarding this debate. The Nguyen was the most sinified of all Vietnamese dynasties in political structure and social norms. Since it is generally accepted that Vietnamese Traditional Medicine acquired most if not all of its medical theories from Chinese Traditional Medicine then if this is so Vietnamese concepts regarding what is physically inherited from a person's parents should conform to the Chinese theories on this subject. This paper will give an overview of traditional Vietnamese concepts regarding reproduction and physical inheritance and what were considered to be natural laws governing conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. The paper will then move to an examination of the Vietnamese response to the Chinese theory of tai du or fetal poison which was thought to predispose a child to certain medical problems. This 'class' of afflictions was thought to be congenitally transmitted. Ideas of what is congenital or what is hereditary are tied to concepts regarding the physical relationship between mother and fetus, father and fetus, mother-father and fetus and between the fetus and all those who are seen as its kin. This essay will thus focus a medical lens on the on-going debate over the depth and breadth of Chinese influence on Vietnamese culture and society.

Harriet M. Phinney, University of Washington

Since its founding, the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam has sought to specify and control the boundaries of interpersonal familial relations. With the promulgation of the 1959 Law on Marriage and the Family, as well as its successors the 1986 and 2000 laws, the state appropriated the authority to define what a family is and how it shall operate. This paper will examine the 1986 Law on Marriage and the Family, the first law to legally state the importance of Vietnamese women’s role as mothers. First, I will examine the impetus for the changes in the1986 law and discuss the law itself. I will focus on the way specific articles in the law, together, are broadly interpreted to recognize the legitimate right of older single women to bear children out of wedlock and on the interrelated significance of articles detailing parents obligation to their children, regardless of the circumstances of the child’s birth. Second, I will examine the manner in which the Women’s Union and social scientists framed their discourse around the law in order to broaden social support for single mothers. This discourse relies on essentialist notions of the woman’s body, beliefs regarding the instinctual nature of a woman’s maternal desire. Third, I will discuss the implications of the 1986 Law on Marriage and the Family, its revolutionary and perhaps unintended consequences in a new era of governmentality, the Doi Moi era.

Melissa J. Pashigian, Bryn Mawr College

Since the advent of doi moi, the Vietnamese state has struggled to balance the emergence of market capitalism with social stability and the preservation of culture.  Efforts to balance the acquisition and use of technology-intensive medical practices and procedures not previously available in Vietnam and accompanying shifts in cultural practice are no different.  This paper explores the ways in which the introduction of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in Vietnam has forced rethinking of reproduction and relatedness codified in the 2003 and 2005 laws regulating use of new reproductive technologies and banning gestational surrogacy. The paper argues that the regulation and scrutiny of the new technologies and their uses reveal the centrality of a uterine identity (that is maternal identity and mother-child relatedness produced through gestation) to Vietnamese culture, long purported to privilege the genetic reproduction of the patriline.  The multiplicity of responses to IVF, from the personal to the bureaucratic, reveals the importance of privileging gestation. After providing an overview of the laws and the rapid emergence of new reproductive technologies in Vietnam, the paper then explains the importance of uterine identity that is exposed in discourses about surrogacy, reproduction with donor gametes and adoption.  Finally, the paper suggests that while women’s bodies and their stratification continue to be used as sites of legislated social control, they remain critical not only to national projects of codified reproduction, but also to Vietnam’s participation in a global market of biomedical practices.