Archives par mot-clé : gender studies

Lectures / Readings, Signalements

Nhung Tuyet Tran : Familial Properties: Gender, State, and Society in Early Modern Vietnam, 1463–1778 [parution]

[ndlr] Nouvelle parution. Présentation de l’éditeur.

Familial Properties: Gender, State, and Society in Early Modern Vietnam, 1463–1778

Nhung Tuyet Tran

Familial Properties is the first full-length history of Vietnamese gender relations in the precolonial period. Author Nhung Tuyet Tran shows how, despite the bias in law and practice of a patrilineal society based on primogeniture, some women were able to manipulate the system to their own advantage. Women succeeded in taking pragmatic advantage of socioeconomic turmoil during a time of war and chaos to acquire wealth and, to some extent, control what happened to their property.

Drawing from legal, literary, and religious sources written in the demotic script, classical Chinese, and European languages, Tran argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, state and local communities produced laws and morality codes limiting women’s participation in social life. Then in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, economic and political turmoil led the three competing states—the Mac, Trinh, and Nguyen—to increase their military service demands, producing labor shortages in the fields and markets of the countryside. Women filled the vacuum left by their brothers, husbands, and fathers, and as they worked the lands and tended the markets, they accumulated monetary capital. To protect that capital, they circumvented local practice and state law guaranteeing patrilineal inheritance rights by soliciting the cooperation of male leaders. In exchange for monetary and landed donations to the local community, these women were elected to become spiritual patrons of the community whose souls would be forever preserved by collective offering.

By tracing how the women, local leaders, and court elites negotiated gender models to demarcate their authority, Tran demonstrates that despite the Confucian ethos of the times, survival strategies were able to subvert gender norms and create new cultural models. Gender, thus, as a signifier of power relations, was central to the relationship between state and local communities in early modern Vietnam. Rich and detailed in its use of documentary evidence from a range of archives, this work will be of great interest to scholars of Southeast Asian history and the comparative study of gender.

Source : University of Hawai’i Press

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Catherine Earl : Vietnam’s New Middle Classes – Gender, Career, City

Earl_VietnamsNewMiddleClasses[ndlr] Nouvelle publication sur les classes moyennes vietnamiennes.

This volume explores the social consequences of macro-economic reform introduced in Vietnam more than a quarter of a century ago through a focus on young women graduates who hope to find success in Ho Chi Minh City’s growing graduate labour market. They are part of Vietnam’s new middle class, an educated and affluent segment of society growing with the rapid urbanization of Vietnam’s major cities.

Drawing on a rich person-centred ethnography supplemented with middle-class Vietnamese women’s published autobiographies, it reveals how opportunities for professional work, further education, and leisure lifestyling attract young migrants, particularly female graduates, to Vietnam’s mega-urban Southeast region. Centred on Ho Chi Minh City, it argues that Vietnam’s Southeast enables young women, so long as they remain single, to realize aspirations for betterment that affect not only their own lives, but those of their families and communities who remain in rural Vietnam. It highlights the socio-cultural and material benefits realized through remittances received from urban daughters to emphasize the salience of kinship during periods of social transformation.

The volume concludes with a wide-ranging look at the emergence of middle classes in Pacific Asia in order to locate the Vietnamese new middle class within a globalizing context.

Contents

Acknowledgements vii

1. Middle classes in post-reform Ho Chi Minh City 1
2. Urban middle classes in postcolonial Saigon 49
3. Living in twenty-first century Ho Chi Minh City 87
4. Lifestyles of professional work 109
5. New middle-class leisure culture 135
6. Social mobility in a multi-dimensional family 172
7. Delaying and desiring marriage 209
8. Conclusion 240
References 271
Index 302

Catherine Earl is a social anthropologist and research assistant at Federation Business School, Federation University, Australia. She is a frequent visitor to Vietnam and she has published on social mobility, social welfare and social change in Vietnam and in Australia.

Source : NIAS Press

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