Of Children and Lovers: Marriage, Morality, and Romance in Vietnam

• In Event: 150. Modern Intimacies: Romantic Love and Conjugal Projects in East and Southeast Asia

Abstract

The shift away from kin-arranged unions to those based on romantic love has long figured in development and modernization discourses, which in turn are linked to declining fertility rates and delayed childbearing in Asia and other parts of the world. In Vietnam, laws and policies aimed at promoting gender equality have for decades promoted companionate conjugal relations as virtuous antidotes to earlier “feudal” bonds and unchecked population growth. “Love marriage,” thus, is less a new phenomenon than an increasingly entrenched and publically legitimated institution across Vietnam’s different political-economic regimes. Yet the subjectivity attributed to love partners is not necessarily immutable across gender, class, or generation, but rather tied to different political and economic formations in which lovers—as partners, parents, and children—find themselves.
Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research among multigenerational families in Vietnam, I present the love stories of couples and their kin to trouble the linearities implicit in narratives that link “romance” to “modernity” and “individualism,” and that either frame it as empowering or oppressing women. Instead, the analysis calls for a more nuanced and historically-attentive account of what love and romance mean in shifting political-economic and personal contexts, and of how family members use love to construct themselves and others as (im)moral subjects. Person-centered ethnography helps theorize romantic love in relation to marriage and morality in contemporary Vietnam.

Author

• Merav Shohet, Boston University