Class, Gender and the Representation of Peasant Women in Vietnamese Literature

The paper seeks to explore how peasant women are portrayed in Vietnamese literature and tries to highlight that, throughout the development of Modem Vietnamese literature, the way in which peasant women are portrayed is closely related to political agendas and ideological struggles. It also proposes that the construction of peasant women in Vietnamese literature is not only gender- based, but also class-bound. In the period between 1930 and 1945, the victimisation of peasant women was used as a tool to criticise the colonial administration. In the 1945-75 period, literature took part in mobilising the force of peasant women in the building of a socialist nation. However, post-1975 literature reflected the failure of the Communist government and its Socialist ideology to eradicate the residue of the old values in the country side, including the patriarchal concepts and the kinship system. The post-war writers use the pictures of unhappy women in the remote villages to criticise and ridicule the rhetoric and promises of the revolution

Communism · Ideology · Peasant · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Vietnamese · Gender Studies · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies