Search

Recent political, legal and social shifts in relation to the rights and recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people in Vietnam have facilitated increasing openness about the non-heteronormative preferences of young adults. However, established societal and familial norms related to the importance of heteronormative marriage and family values continue to impact significantly on the ways in which these young adults are able to live their lives. In this chapter, we examine young Vietnamese LGBTQ adults’ experiences of face-to-face encounters and their navigation of social interactions. The chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork which involved semi-structured group and individual interviews with young women aged 20 to 29 who identified as lesbian, bisexual and/or queer, as well as employees at nongovernmental organizations dealing with LGBTQ issues and politics. The chapter sheds light on the ways in which young LGBTQ adults engage in impression management in order to “keep face” and not “lose face,” reducing their own vulnerability while also protecting their parents and upholding the collective face of the family.

This article takes the notion of crisis as a helpful analytical entry point to unfold the tem- poralities and modalities of the machinery of violence as manifested in men's abuse of their female partners in Vietnam. Based on ethnographic research I conducted over the years, the article argues that some types of crises might be episodic, and thus a bracketing of daily life, while others, such as intimate partner violence, might settle as a crisis of chronicity; as a condition of prolonged difficulties and pain that surreptitiously becomes a new 'normal'. The machinery of violence, the article shows, refers to processes of symbolic and material transformations of a targeted woman, shaped in accordance with a perpetrator's essentialist imaginations about her embodied properties (e.g., gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, and bodyableness). Such violence is invigorated by a patrilineal organization of society and a systemic permissiveness to male-to-female abuse. A battered woman is confined to an interregnum; a space in which the laws of protection do not apply and male violence is perpetrated with impunity. Yet, men's violence against their female partners also is combatted and resisted in Vietnamese society.

Although Vietnamese society is currently undergoing significant changes with regards to the rights and perceptions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) people, dominant socio-cultural norms related to gender, sexuality, and the importance of the patrilineal family regime continue to cast a shadow over the lives of GLBTQ in contemporary Vietnam. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the urban centers of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, as well as legal documents and secondary sources, this article illustrates how dominant heteronormative socio-cultural norms have contributed to the political, legal, and social exclusion of same-sex sexualities through a process of outlawing, whereby GLBTQ have been systematically excluded from the rights of law. Drawing on qualitative interviews with gay men and lesbian women between the ages of 20 and 50, the article also highlights how this relation of domination has allowed for instances of GLBTQ resistance, through subversive opposition, strategies of avoidance, and the seeking out of new opportunities in urban spaces outside the dominant sociality. The article thus provides a qualitatively nuanced account of family politics and GLBTQ resistance in urban Vietnam at a significant socio-political historical juncture.