Extramarital relationships in the Vietnamese migrant community in Laos: reasserting patriarchal ideologies and double standards

Abstract

Undocumented migration from Central Vietnam to Laos stretches Vietnamese families and generates marital tensions and social anxieties around the extramarital relationships that migrant husbands establish with vợ hầu (second wives), an emic term that encompasses mistresses and more stable partners. This paper sheds light on these processes via an ethnographic study on how migration from Central Vietnam to Savannakhet – a town located in Central Laos bordering Thailand – shapes family formation, marital relationships and double standards in gender and sexuality. It argues that husbands and first and second wives manage these issues by preserving family integrity, negotiating extramarital relationships and retreating from marriage. These strategies are shaped by and constitutive of normative double standards that families refer to, reinforce and in some cases transcend to make sense of the marital challenges and disruptions caused by dislocation, translocality and the intrusion of second wives in their marriages. Overall, the study emphasises that families remain committed to a domestic division of labour and to the institutions of marriage and family, albeit with some adjustments. This argument resonates with broader discussions about migration, gender and sexuality in Vietnam.

Keywords:

• migration
• extramarital relationships
• gender
• Vietnam
• Laos

Acknowledgements

This study was undertaken as part of the Migration, Mobilities and HIV/STI Vulnerabilities participatory research project in Laos by the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (UMI 233) in collaboration with the Lao Ministry of Health, the Lao Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare, the Centre for HIV/AIDS, the University of Health Sciences and the Lao and French Red Cross. We thank Pascale Hancart-Petitet, the staff from Lao Red Cross, and particularly Johnee Su-Ann Oh, Didier Bertrand and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable support, edits and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by Expertise France/CRF (Grant number 13INI207).

Notes

1 Tiên uses the vulgar and pejorative term con đĩ or ‘whore’ to express her contempt for and humiliation of the mistress, as an equivalent of ‘bitch’ in English.