Power over Body: Governing Women’s Sexuality and Reproduction in Thailand and Vietnam
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Abstract
In the history of sexuality, women have been subjected to control through patriarchal state ideologies and social moralities that seek to discipline their bodies into docility through techniques of power. In Thailand, the disciplining of women’s bodies has been governed by state population policies that promote childbirth, encouraging women to conform to normative ideals of femininity within a Buddhist moral society. These ideals have discouraged abortion and aligned with the development of medical technologies that support reproduction. In contrast, in Vietnam, the control of women’s bodies has been exercised through family planning and population policies aimed at limiting births. Women’s bodies have thus been rendered docile under Confucian social norms of ideal womanhood, supported by medical technologies that restrict reproduction. Despite differences in social contexts and patriarchal ideologies, women in both contexts bear the burden of nation-building through the regulation of sexuality within the state. This article seeks to reveal and compare the power structures governing women’s sexuality in Thailand and Vietnam by examining how disciplinary techniques render women’s bodies docile. The analysis is framed through Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower, which elucidates how modern state power operates by regulating and infiltrating individual bodies in everyday life.
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