CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Nguyen, Nha Thi Thanh |
|---|---|
| Title | Subjects-in-becoming: Theorizing sexual subjectivities of young, unmarried women from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam |
| Summary | This thesis explores sexual subjectivities of young, unmarried, middle-class women (aged 23-30) from Hồ Chí Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam. Young Vietnamese women’s experiences of sexuality have become increasingly complex in post-Đổi Mới Vietnam (after 1986). They have had to learn to negotiate a complex set of sociocultural values such as neo-Confucian ethics, the postsocialist government’s nationalist agenda and, more recently, neoliberal values and consumer culture. While globalization and economic development has turned HCMC into a cosmopolitan space that promises alternative lifestyles, urban middle-class women’s sexuality continues to be governed by a range of traditional discourses and their associated expectations. In this thesis, I argue that sexual subjectivities should be understood as processes of becoming in ways that are attentive to a politics of location (Rich 1986). Further developing Bao’s (2018) understanding of subject positions, I coin the concept sexual subject(s)-in-becoming to account for the ways in which young women continuously negotiate competing discourses on sex, sexuality, and gender in their everyday lives. Drawing on postcolonial feminist writings, queer theory, and a feminist narrative approach, this study sheds light on the complexity, fluidity, and situatedness of women’s (hetero)sexuality in the postcolonial, postsocialist, and neoliberal nation-state of Vietnam. I explore young women’s sexual subjectivities through their own narratives of sexual experiences, the context in which the stories are situated, and the interconnections between subjective experiences and the broader historical, sociocultural, and political landscape of Vietnam. To do so, I employ a feminist narrative approach, for which narrative interviews with nine young women were conducted online from Vienna, Austria. While this study focuses on young, unmarried, middle-class women from urban HCMC, I argue that the concept sexual subject(s)-in-becoming is productive for an understanding of sexual subjectivities beyond the immediate context of Vietnam, contributing to the literature on sex, sexuality, and gender in Asia. In attending to the situatedness of the subject, the thesis seeks to advance studies that take Asia as a point of reference and thus contribute to the development of “Asia as method” that Chen (2010) advocates, as well as responds to Connell’s (2014) call for more theorization from the Global South. Methodologically, this study contributes to the development of a feminist narrative approach to researching sexuality in Asian contexts. Various tactics of care and strategies of listening in conducting research on sensitive and difficult topics are discussed, which can be further employed in future studies on sex, sexuality, and gender in Vietnam in particular, and other Asian contexts more broadly. |
| Supervisor | Loney, Hannah |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/nguyen_nha.pdf |
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