ABSTRACT
Recent political, legal, and social changes have served to highlight shifting understandings of sexualities in contemporary Vietnamese society. Such changes have included pride demonstrations; the establishment of organisations working with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) rights; new legislation; and increased openness to non-heteronormative sexualities. Despite these changes, however, dominant heteronormative sociocultural norms related to the importance of the family, the patrilineage, and the innate characteristics of males and females, continue to exert significant pressure on the daily lives of LGBTQ people. In this chapter, we explore this familial politics of pressure and consider the ways through which LGBTQ people have sought to resist the dominant heteronormative context. The chapter is based on secondary sources, legal documents, and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the urban centers of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, which involved participant observations in various settings, and informal and semi-structured interviews with employees at organizations dealing with LGBTQ issues, leaders of same-sex clubs, and LGBTQ people between the ages of 20 and 50. Our findings illustrate that rather than sacrificing their own happiness in order to fit into the dominant heteronormative framework, some LGBTQ people have instead resisted that restrictive framework in myriad ways, including through the co-option of the very framework within which their resistance takes place.
