The politics of emotion and domestic violence in northern Vietnam

Bibliographic Data

ID18934573
AuthorsLynn Kwiatkowski (0000-0003-0115-248X, Colorado State University, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume5
Issue1
Pages29-46
Publication date2024-05-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2643-7961 • E-ISSN: 2643-7961
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/fea2.12142
OpenAlexW4395683501
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited22

Changing social, political, and cultural processes in Vietnam are reshaping people's emotional and social responses to domestic violence on multiple levels. Socioeconomic reforms instituted in the 1980s, the related state revival of Confucian gender ideologies, and the influences in recent decades of international and local nongovernmental organizations’ approaches to domestic violence are significant shifts that have influenced these emergent responses. Using the framework of feminist critical medical anthropology, I explore how different emotional experiences of violence provide insight into patterns of help‐seeking and interventions addressing marital violence. I suggest that Vietnamese state discourses and laws shape people's feelings in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways. State actors, for one, are particularly influenced to express and experience emotional responses in support of the nation. On the other hand, abused women, community members, and professionals experience more ambivalent feelings toward state discourses and practices as they engage moral emotions of care, love, and concern, prioritizing abused women's health and safety. Complicating this is some state actors grappling with their own ambivalent and tangled feelings as they assist abused women. Awareness of the diverse cross‐cultural range of emotional complexity can aid feminist anthropologists and activists in attempts to understand and prevent domestic violence

Ambivalence · Criminology · Domestic violence · Feeling · Ideology · Poison control · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Suicide prevention · Vietnamese · Gender Studies · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Law · Medicine · Psychology · Social Psychology · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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