Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"The book is a must read for anyone who would like to understand how gendered norms impact choices made by individual women and how the personal is necessarily political and social at the same time. As the book is well written and easy to read, it can serve not just other scholars but can also be adopted to universities as teaching material for undergraduate courses on gender and South East Asian studies. Phinney’s book is a welcome contribution to scholarship on women in Vietnam as it manages to be free from essentialistic interpretations of Vietnamese women while acknowledging the frameworks that have contributed to gendered sexual norms."
* South East Asia Research *
"Single Mothers and the State's Embrace makes a significant contribution to our understanding of kinship and gender in postwar Vietnam. Phinney's longitudinal perspective beautifully illuminates how individuals make choices within social contexts; society comes to identify those choices as categories of action and being; government renders the categories legible through discourse and policy; and the resulting interpellation shapes individuals’ subjectivity and future action."
* Journal of Southeast Asian Studies *
"This well-crafted and soundly argued study is a must-read for scholars interested in Vietnamese women’s reactions to social norms and state policies."
* Journal of Vietnamese Studies *
