Paper short abstract:

This paper explores instances when Vietnamese government actors sought to govern love and how single women embraced these efforts by putting love to work to reject marriage and satisfy their maternal desires. Personal and political, love was a vehicle for undoing patriarchal reproductive practices.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores three instances when Vietnamese government actors sought to govern love and the ways single women led and/or embraced these efforts by putting love to work to satisfy their maternal desires. After touching on Vietnamese syncretic love and discourses of romantic and revolutionary love, I turn to the 1959 Law on Marriage and the Family when voluntary love, for the first time, became the legal basis for marriage. The law, meant to disrupt/undo the patriarchal family, was part of a larger effort to create new socialist citizens. Women then drew on these ideologies of love in their paths to single motherhood. After the Second Indochina War, government actors again appealed to love, this time drawing on essentialist notions of love and sexuality to justify older single women’s desires for maternal love and to alleviate concerns that these women — who had sacrificed conjugal love for the nation — jeopardized patriarchal family happiness. In essence, love provided a basis for procreating outside the patriarchal family. In the third instance, the Vietnamese state, by providing in-vitro fertilization services for single women, sought to govern single women’s maternal desires by monitoring who could get pregnant and how. However, contemporary single women have rejected this form of biopolitics. Instead, like their predecessors, they chose to get pregnant with a man with whom they shared sympathy and understanding – a form of love – while simultaneously drawing on notions of companionate love to justify their decisions not to marry.