Encountering “Hot” Anger

This article examines husband-to-wife violence within a rural Vietnamese community. In Vietnam, domestic violence is tied to a complex field of cultural forces that consists of a patrilineal tradition of ancestor worship, assumptions about females' versus males' character, Confucian virtues, and a history of war. Females are expected to encourage house-hold harmony by adjusting themselves and, in so doing, make social life smooth. Males, on the other hand, are assumed to have a hot character, meaning that a male might fly into a rage and even behave violently. Local ways of constructing females and males, the article suggests, provide conditions for considering females as a corporeal materiality that can be manipulated into the right shape by the means of (male) violence. Domestic violence, like any other violence, by ignoring the corporeal limits thus brutally alters assumptions about the topography of the human body.