"I am tired but if I don't try to have sex, my wife will think I've been fooling around in the city": work, migration, and sex among Vietnamese migrant laborers.

Mostly operating from a risk and risk-reduction paradigm, existing research on migrants in Vietnam tends to conceptualize sex and risky sexual behaviors as isolated life domains. This study begins to develop a contextually rich understanding of migrants' sex lives by examining the relationships among sex, work, and the constant pendulum-like migrating movements of 23 Vietnamese married migrants in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Using data from in-depth interviews, it was found that most participants had no sex in the city; this was followed by visits to the home village, where they had sex with their spouses as often as possible to make up for the "long drought" in the city. Within this sexual schema, sex came secondary, and even peripherally, to migrants' working lives; thus, exhaustion from work was cited by migrants as the overwhelming factor leading to their sexual problems. This study suggests that migrants' intimate lives are more strongly linked to their working lives than has previously been recognized, and that their sexual behaviors should be viewed in tandem with the hardships of their working lives.

In full swing? How do pendulum migrant labourers in Vietnam adjust their sexual perspectives to their rural-urban lives?

Having emerged only recently due to fast urbanisation and globalisation, pendulum migrant labourers in Vietnam are economically, culturally and socially difficult to locate - though they are estimated to number in their millions. Defined by their frequent migration between village and city, pendulum migrant labourers occupy an extended period of liminality. Are they traditional villagers or liberal city people when it comes to sex? Does city life radically change their views on sexuality? Starting with the premise that living environments play a key role in structuring the practical and symbolic realities of sex, this paper explores how extended periods of circular migration between the village and city - living environments that differ markedly in terms of socioeconomic and cultural conditions - affect the sexual views and perspectives of Vietnamese pendulum migrant labourers. Analysis from in-depth interviews with 23 married pendulum migrant labourers revealed that even though they had been living the pendulum life for several years, they continued to identify themselves, sexually, as traditional villagers. Among labourers the link between sexuality and living environment was a matter of pragmatism - matching 'suitable' sexual behaviour to social, even if imagined, location - and of privilege or 'leagues' - matching behaviour and comportment to social pedigree.