Define globalism and neo- liberalism using no fewer than three sources from the syllabus, and explain why these processes are important to LGBTQ history

An Epistemology of Gender Historical Notes on the Homosexual Body in Contemporary Vietnam, 1986–2005 Author(s): Richard Quang-Anh Tran Source: Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring 2014), pp. 1-45 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/vs.2014.9.2.1 Accessed: 22-04-2018 18:34 UTC

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R E S E A R C H E S S A Y S

R I C H A R D Q U A N G – A N H T R A N

An Epistemology of Gender: Historical Notes on the Homosexual Body in Contemporary Vietnam, –

This essay proposes to trace the meaning of same-sex sexuality in Viet-nam from the Renovation period to the early years of the millennium. A growing body of scholarship has demonstrated the contingent character of

sexuality. Scholars agree that although the specific relation between the

sexual body and society remains in dispute, the body is nevertheless embed-

ded in complex social and cultural processes. Its function, potential and

meaning is protean and shifting over time and space. As new idioms, tech-

nologies and societal developments emerge and impinge on the body, so too

is the meaning that people attach to the body transformed. How people act,

speak, desire and self-identify in a given time and place becomes an object of

scholarly inquiry and interpretation.

In this study, I examine the meaning of same-sex sexuality in

Vietnamese-language popular sources from  to  to argue that one

dominant meaning prevailed: namely, the belief that homosexual identity is

synonymous with gender-crossing. By “gender crossing” I mean a transgres-

sion of heterosexual gender norms. As feminists and queer scholars have

shown, “sexuality” in certain times and places is tethered to an array of

gender practices, fantasies and norms, what Judith Butler called the “grid

1

Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. , Issue , pps. –. ISSN -X, electronic -. ©  by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’ Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: ./vs.....

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of intelligibility through which bodies, genders and desires are naturalized.”

In some cultural regimes, for instance, a heterosexual man in order to be

a “man” is expected to behave in gender-specific ways. Conversely, if a man

behaved or was perceived to behave otherwise, he would not be considered

a heterosexual man.

The idea that sexuality is gender transitive—that the subject (sexuality)

requires a predicate (gender)—is in fact a culturally specific idea. Scholars

studying homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan have shown that male same-sex

sexual relations were not predicated on gender comportment but on other

vectors, such as status and power. Likewise, in the contemporary West,

gender has increasingly been de-coupled from homosexual definition. As

scholar David Halperin explains, the male homosexual in the West is argu-

ably the “straight-acting and –appearing gay male, a man distinct from other

men in absolutely no other respect besides that of his ‘sexuality.’” Eve

Sedgwick has similarly remarked that, “the study of sexuality is not coex-

tensive with the study of gender.” Gender and sexuality, in other words, are

not ontological correlates. Their relationship, if any, to one another, the ways

and means by which they are organized, and the meaning attached to them

depend in large part on the cultural and historical context.

In the Vietnamese context, the sources insist on the gender transitivity of

homosexuality. The popular discourse of this period exhibited a persistent

anxiety surrounding the epistemology of gender. In its anxiety, this discourse

produced a morphology of the homosexual embodied in the ambiguous

figure of the gender-crosser. I shall suggest two primary factors that helped

shape and explain the production of this figure. The first is a late nineteenth-

century European medical discourse that entered the Vietnamese discourse

and survived through the period in question. This discourse, in turn, con-

tained two different paradigms of homosexuality: one which conceived of it

as a form of hermaphrodism; the other which conceived of it as a case of

gender inversion, the idea of the man “trapped” in a woman’s body and vice

versa. The second factor that helped propagate the idea of the homosexual as

gender-crosser is the state. After Vietnam’s integration into global markets,

the discourse of revolutionary liberation lost political and cultural traction.

In response, the state turned its gaze towards governing the ideals of the

“cultured” nuclear family, a historical shift that is heavily documented in

2 T R A N

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Renovation and Post-Renovation scholarship. These ideals carry with them

specific norms of gender recognition and constitution. In enforcing these

norms, the state simultaneously had to produce constitutive exclusions, one

of which is incarnated in the figure of the gender-crossing homosexual.

These two discourses, one medical and the other state-sponsored, converged

in this period in Vietnam to produce the imagined contours of the homo-

sexual body.

This essay will be divided into five main sections. First, it situates the

research within the scholarship of queer theory and Vietnam studies to

suggest the continuing need to historicize the subject of sexuality. Second,

it provides an overview of the documents gathered including a discussion of

the genre, quantity and quality of the sources. Third, the essay contextualizes

the two aforementioned discourses that, I suggest, help explain the figure of

the gender-crosser. Fourth, it draws on archival sources to survey the vocab-

ulary used to name homosexuals. This survey provides not only a lexical key

to the analysis, but also furnishes evidence of the centrality of gender in

Vietnamese homosexual definition. Finally, the essay drives home these

claims by presenting evidence from popular sources.

Historicizing the Subject of Sexuality

Q U E E R T H E O R Y A N D H I S T O R I O G R A P H Y

This essay takes the constructivist approach as a premise of its research over

and against other methodologies that sidestep the question of history. Such

a project takes desire, sexual or otherwise, not as a universal constant across

time and space but as a cultural practice that is far less uniform and more

context-based. Much of the work of queer critique has been to denaturalize

the social regimes that organize gendered and sexual life and analyze what

David Halperin has called the “cultural poetics of desire,” by which he means

the “processes whereby sexual desires are constructed, mass-produced, and

distributed among various members of human living-groups.” The critical

purchase of such a project, according to Foucault, is in “making visible

a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical

constant.” If gender and sexuality have a history, so the logic goes, then

they are no longer immutable truths but contingent forms of social and

HISTOR ICAL NOTES ON THE HOMOSEXUAL BODY IN CONTEMPORARY V IETNAM, 1986–2005 3

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cultural organization that have assumed the status of timelessness. It follows,

therefore, that other forms of social organization are possible, forms that

hold open the promise of alternative and viable visions of gendered and

sexual personhood.

This historicist approach, however, has been critiqued by some scholars.

Most notably, Eve Sedgwick in The Epistemology of the Closet has criticized

this approach for its overemphasis on discontinuities. She characterizes this

approach as delineating the “supersession” of one historical model of homo-

sexuality and the “withering away” of another. Such a historiography,

Sedgwick argues, fails to capture prior forms of gendered and sexual life

that endure in a given time frame. She advocates an alternative framework

whereby contradictory and multiple meanings of same-sex sexuality can

accrue within the same historical frame, what she calls the “unrationalized

coexistence of different models during the times they do coexist.” But

Sedgwick’s critique does not stop there. Her point is not simply to seek a

more refined historiography but to propose that one sidestep the historicist

project altogether in favor of her approach. She writes: “This project does not

involve the construction of historical narratives alternative to those that

have emerged from Foucault and his followers.” She continues: “Rather, it

requires a reassignment of attention and emphasis within those valuable

narratives—attempting, perhaps, to denarrativize them somewhat by focus-

ing on the performative space of contradiction,” which she explains is the

“unexpectedly plural, varied, and contradictory historical understandings”

of same-sex relations in the present. Because the historicist project coun-

terposes the alterity of the past to a present that Sedgwick claims scholars

take for granted as already knowable, Sedgwick seeks to underscore not the

alterity of the past but that of the present and to explore whatever enduring

resonances of the past that may (or may not) exist in the present.

While I acknowledge Sedgwick’s critique of a certain version of histor-

icism, I reject her proposal to sidestep the historicist project. The coexis-

tence of dissonant meanings need not lead to the proposition that one

cease if not eliminate altogether the practice of historical reconstruction.

Rather, as David Halperin suggests, the recognition of dissonance raises

anew precisely what are historical questions: the conditions under which

the dissonance was animated, the degree and the relative period in which it

4 T R A N

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was experienced in a culture. Hence, in this essay I shall continue the

practice of historical reconstruction, even as I draw on Sedgwick’s valuable

concept of the “performative space of contradiction” in the analysis.

C O N T E X T U A L I Z I N G R E S E A R C H O N G E N D E R A N D S E X U A L I T Y

I N R E N O V A T I O N V I E T N A M

Much of the scholarship on Renovation Vietnam takes as its point of depar-

ture an understanding of gender that is defined by the State. Since Vietnam’s

open-door policy and transition to a market-economy, this body of scholar-

ship has demonstrated how the State has shifted its fundamental regulatory

target to the “household” or “family” unit. As a result, scholars have appro-

priated this unit as a concept through which to examine social problems

related to gender. Danièle Bélanger and Jane Werner note that even though

this unit is not the only site of gender’s constitution, they nevertheless take the

family unit as the locus of analysis because it is where the “state and the global/

market economy currently meet to regulate constructions of gender.” For

example, scholars have explored issues such as the deleterious effects of the

market on women-run households, which in turn are linked to the effects of

widespread prostitution. Still, other scholars have looked at how the new

economy has opened up opportunities, allowing women to support them-

selves, choose to remain single, or look towards other horizons in the trans-

national marriage market. Generally speaking, in the current scholarship,

cultural analysis tends to begin—and often end— with this foundational

concept of gender that links it definitionally to marriage and the household.

In taking up the State’s fundamental definitions, however, scholars both

gain and lose certain kinds of knowledge. They gain insight into the contours

of the proper subject recognized by the State in this period, namely hetero-

normative gender constructions and intimate relations. However, they lose

sight of those gendered and sexual subjects that in no way conform to official

standards of recognition, and so fail to understand that an alternative history

of gender emerged within this period that is bound up with cultural ideas

about homosexuality. Bélanger and Werner, in fact, acknowledge that there

is a gender continuum. They observe: “‘Gender’ . . . comprises the set of prac-

tices, meanings, and symbols, based on sexual difference, which are expressed

or made manifest in congruence with specific sites in the institutional matrix

HISTOR ICAL NOTES ON THE HOMOSEXUAL BODY IN CONTEMPORARY V IETNAM, 1986–2005 5

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of society.” They continue: “In this volume, we focus on one end of the

fulcrum (womanhoods), but this by no means excludes moving along the