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Editorial Reviews
Review
“This is an excellent book and I highly recommend it. Theoretically sophisticated, insightful, and well-written, this study draws on a wide range of Vietnamese-language materials and field interviews and experience to develop a clear and strong argument. Skillfully and concisely crafted, The Ironies of Freedom is an important addition to the literature on sex work, Vietnamese studies, and contemporary political economy.”―Journal of Contemporary Asia
“[T]he rich ethnography allows the author to ground the scholarship on ‘governmentality’ in context, pressing the limits of received theory with the hard facts of social differentiation and the two faces of Vietnam today. The ‘ironies of freedom’ are many: self-mastery coexists with conformity; choice with coercion; consumer freedom with social obedience; and today’s Vietnamese Marxism allows class prerogatives to dictate unequal governance.”―American Anthropologist
“Nguyen-Vo uses the commercial sex trade in Vietnam to demonstrate how both the government and individuals have emerged from their dark communist past and adapted to economic, political, and social liberalization, market forces, and entrepreneurship. Recommended.”―Choice
“The Ironies of Freedom is a path-breaking effort to document the explosive growth and evolving character of commercial sex in contemporary Vietnam and to explain the complex social, cultural, economic, and political significance of this well-known but poorly understood phenomenon. But it operates, as well, as a remarkably sophisticated, lucid, and ambitious attempt to mobilize insights gleaned from the Vietnamese ‘case’ to revise influential (post) Marxist and (neo) Foucauldian notions of the relationship between dominant modes of government and the current neoliberal economic order.”―Peter Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley
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