The Politics of reproduction and negotiating subjectivities: vietnamese women’s abortion in Hanoi city, Socialist Republic of Vietnam

Abstract

This dissertation is qualitative research that applies the poststructuralism method to study how women have been shaped and reshaped their bodies in various dimensions. The dissertation selects Vietnamese married women who had abortions in different ages, statuses, occupations, beliefs, and experiences. The main argument of the study proposes to debate with the Western binary debate on abortion between pro-life and pro-choice, which they struggle for individual rights and personhoods. This binary debate on abortion cannot bring us to understanding the abortion situation as universal. There are different conditions, patriarchal ideologies, cultures, and contexts. In this regard, it convinces the dissertation to go beyond the binary debate on abortion and shift to study the politics of abortion in Vietnam which is different from the Western claim. Women in Vietnam have encountered Confucian patriarchal ideologies and Socialist state discourses that control women and their bodies to be “docility”. As a result, the dissertation is divided into two main parts: the first part analyzes the dominant structure of Vietnam, which has governed by the technique of power over life. The genealogy of women’s reproduction elucidated that women’s bodies are differently governed by the technique of modern power. Therefore, the study analyses from the French colonial era until the Socialist state, in which women’s reproduction was shaped by the powers of to ‘make’ live, and to ‘let’ die. In this regard, women’s bodies have been reproduced for long history. Recently, women in Vietnam still struggle with dominant power and discourse that regulate them through two mechanisms (1) the state: population control, small-size family, and the medicalization of health, and (2) Confucian sexual morality: virtuous womanhood and motherhood, proscribing premarital sex, and son-preference. The power is called biopower and exercises the different levels of power relations between individuals, families, and the state. The technique of power tames women and bodies to be docile. In the second part of negotiating subjectivities, the study does not describe women being “docile body”, but it also analyzes women’s reclaiming power over the womb. It is the way in which negotiate with the regulatory power and discourse on the bodies. The meaning of the womb shifts according to women’s subjectivities. Abortion is, therefore, the act of transgressing the traditional sexual norms and reflects the diverse meaning of subjectivities.