In Single Mothers and the State’s Embrace: Reproductive Agency in Vietnam, Harriet M. Phinney examines what leads single women in northern Vietnam to “ask for a child,” or ask for a man to engage in sexual relations for the purpose of conception [xin con]. In response to single women’s desire for reproductive rights, Phinney shows, the Vietnamese state has embraced xin con as a “socially intelligible kinship” practice (4). Phinney focuses on agency, governmentality, and subjectivity as they affect single women’s reproductive desires as “empirical realities and as analytic categories” (5). This book offers insight into Phinney’s long-term research into the topic of xin con, which she has conducted since the 1990s. Instead of seeing Vietnamese women as victims of society and state policies on reproduction, Phinney focuses on Vietnamese women as agents for change.
According to Phinney, xin con is a “revolutionary transformation” in postwar...
University of California Press