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E-book
Author Nguyen, Minh T. N., author

Title Vietnam's socialist servants : domesticity, class, gender, and identity / Minh T.N. Nguyen
Published Abington, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2015
©2015

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Description 1 online resource (201 pages) : illustrations, maps
Series Asia's transformations ; 44
Asia's transformations ; 44
Contents Introduction -- Live in, live out, live in the middle of nowhere: labour regimes and market structure -- Power at work: between harmony and hierarchy -- Unruly servants, erotic bodies and cultural delinquents: the representation of domestic service -- Needs, consumption, and domestic service -- Between work and home: boundaries, connections and gendered expectations -- Narrating identity: the power and limits of individual life choice -- Domesticity, gender, class, and identity
Summary "Since Vietnam introduced economic reforms in the mid-1980s, domestic service has become an established sector of the labour market, and domestic workers have become indispensable to urban life in the rapidly changing country. This book analyzes the ways in which the practices and discourses of domestic service serve to forge and contest emerging class identities in post-reform Vietnam. Drawing on a rich and diverse range of qualitative data, including ethnographies, interviews, and narratives, it shows that such practices and discourses are rooted in cultural notions of gender and rural-urban difference and enduring socialist structures of feeling, which, in turn, clash with the realities of growing differentiation. Domestic workers' experiences reveal negotiations with class boundaries actively set by the urban middle class, who seek distinction through emerging notions and practices of domesticity. These boundaries are nevertheless riddled with gender and class anxiety on the side of the latter, partly because of the very struggles and contestations of the domestic workers. More broadly, Minh T.N. Nguyen links the often invisible intimate dynamics of class formation in the domestic sphere with wider political economic processes in a post-socialist country embarking on marketization while retaining the political control of a party-state. As a pioneering ethnographic study of domestic service in Vietnam today, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Southeast Asian culture & society, social anthropology, gender studies, human geography and development studies"--Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Household employees -- Vietnam
Socialism -- Social aspects -- Vietnam
Sex role -- Vietnam
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS -- Labor.
POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Labor & Industrial Relations.
Household employees
Sex role
Vietnam
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781317690610
1317690613
9781315776484
1315776480
132209425X
9781322094250
9781317690597
1317690591
9781317690603
1317690605
9781138091955
1138091952