Introduction for Queer Vietnam

INTRODUCTION

AT THE LONG GIÁNG Buddhist temple, located in a remote rural region of Vietnam, Ngọc, a young man dressed in modern urban clothing, observes from afar a young monk in traditional garb. The two had exchanged introductory greetings upon Ngọc’s arrival at the temple. “How strange,” Ngọc thinks to himself as he considers the monk’s delicate features. “How is it possible that in the countryside there is someone so handsome with such fair skin and a sweet, pure voice, just like that of a young woman.”¹ Ngọc becomes engrossed by his increasing suspicion that the other person may, in fact, be a woman and embarks on a mission to force disclosure. When he discovers that the monk is indeed a woman named Lan, resolutely devoted to the religious faith, the hero realizes that his growing feelings toward Lan can never be consummated. The story concludes with Ngọc vowing forever to love Lan platonically.²

This story is from Khái Hưng’s novella Butterfly Soul Dreaming of an Immortal (Hồn Bướm Mơ Tiên). Serialized in ten parts from 1932 to 1933, the novella was first published in Mores (Phong Hóa), the periodical of the Self-Reliant Literary Group, which sought to modernize Vietnamese culture.³ The novella’s stylistic innovations certainly departed from classical literary conventions, but classical antecedents persisted in the story’s mise-en-scène, which parallels the renowned premodern tale of the Bodhisattva of Mercy (Quan Âm Thị Kính, or Kuan-yin or Avalokiteśvara).⁴ In that tale, the heroine Thị Kính, dressed as a man, seeks refuge at a temple and becomes a monk. On a visit to the pagoda, Thị Mầu, the daughter of a wealthy family, immediately falls in love with Thị Kính and attempts to seduce him. When Thị Mầu later becomes impregnated by another man, she blames her condition on Thị Kính. The latter’s innocence is revealed only after she dies and her body is discovered to be female.⁵ This well-known Buddhist tale was inscribed into verse by at least the nineteenth century and translated into the modern Vietnamese vernacular in the early twentieth century, at about the same time Hưng’s novella was published.⁶ Both the novella and premodern tale share a concern with cross-dressing.⁷ Insofar as dress is considered a symbolic marker of gender and sexual difference,⁸ revealing the cultural conceptions of masculinity and femininity, the topos of cross-dressing raises questions about gender—its constitution, its limits, its instabilities, and its potential transgressions in a given culture.

The modernist version of this story, for example, could be read as an affirmation of the binary conception of gender and sexuality, for the hero Ngọc believes that the cross-dressing monk he pursues is a woman in disguise. Alternatively, the story could be read as an invitation to explore other modalities of sexual erotics. In this view, even though the hero ultimately declares his love for the woman, the story nevertheless intimates the possibility of same-sex desire: the demarcation between the hero’s desire for the monk versus the actual woman could be rather ambiguous and difficult to disentangle. Finally, the story could also be read as an allegory of gendered embodiment. In this reading, the focus would be on the heroine’s act of gendered transformation. In each case, the question of gender is central to how readers understand the story.

The two stories mentioned here were by no means exceptional cases in Vietnamese culture of the interwar period. Gender crossing—as well as other sexual variant subjects—was conspicuous in Vietnam’s public sphere during this time. In short stories, novellas, poetry, reform theater, urban reportage, and journalistic accounts of tales both local and foreign, hundreds of such narratives involving gender- and sexual-variant subjects were circulating, which reveals a Vietnamese society in which the fixity of gender and sexual norms was less rigid than scholars have previously assumed.

Queer Vietnam: A History of Gender Transgression, 1920–1945 explores the meanings of variant genders and sexualities in late French colonial Vietnam to glean something of the overall cultural norms of the time. The book focuses on the interwar period, from about 1920 to 1945. With the arrival of the French in the nineteenth century in the region that we today call Vietnam and the eventual dissolution of Asian dynastic systems by the middle of the twentieth century, the period was one of cultural disorientation, transition, change, and modernization. The period witnessed, to varying degrees, many of the conditions of European modernity: the rise of capitalism, the formation of the bourgeois world, the establishment of state systems, and the foundation of modern science.⁹ Scholarship on queer Asia and the transnational histories of sexuality in Asia has shown that these conditions, together with Western imperialism, generally led to a reorganization of sexual norms, typically a narrowing and delegitimization of what had been a wide range of acceptable practices.¹⁰ In the case of late French colonial Vietnam, however, my research on popular culture and literature suggests a slightly different picture. While the period certainly witnessed the modern reorganization of Vietnamese society, the efflorescence of gender and sexual variance in the Vietnamese cultural archive suggests that certain fundamental questions concerning the periodization and conceptualization of sexual modernity need to be rethought.

Queer Vietnam argues that a far more capacious vision of gendered personhood existed in this period than has been supposed. Vietnamese popular culture and literature embraced the dynamic plasticity of the human body: stories both fictional and biographical involving “queer” subjects abounded. This period of gender and sexual dynamism can be explained, I suggest, in large part because Sino-Vietnamese and Southeast Asian traditions that tolerated greater gender and sexual variance persisted far into the early decades of the twentieth century. While certain modern strands of French and European discourses on the plasticity of sex and gender entered Vietnamese culture, sexology’s pathologizing rhetoric was not yet the dominant signifying frame in and through which the period understood queer subjects.

While the term “queer” is increasingly used in today’s general discourse, often to refer to LGBT identities, its meaning is nevertheless worth clarifying here. In this book, the historical subjects we can understand as “queer” depart from the ideological fiction that naturalizes one’s sex, gender, desire, morphology, and psyche into neatly aligned and mutually complementary binary oppositions: male-female, heterosexuality-homosexuality, normal-abnormal, and so forth. Queer studies scholars are particularly interested in the dislocations of the prior elements in revealing how such alignments are arbitrary, though no less powerful, normative constructs. One aim of critical historiography is to reconstruct the ways and means by which some identities and practices in certain times and places are rendered normative while others are not.¹¹

The term “transgression” in the book’s subtitle follows from the prior definition of “queer” in referring to the crossing of a normative limit. The transgression need not be indefinite. Nor does it need to entail a subversion or overthrowing of the status quo. Rather, by “transgression,” the study implies acts or performances that Bataille once called “limited” transgressions that interrupt the world of the profane, a world characterized by interdictions and prohibitions.¹² Bataille points to historical examples such as potlatches, festivals, rituals, and unbridled sexual activity that exceed the limits of utilitarian models or restricted economies based on the principle of scarcity.¹³ Likewise, I focus on historical cases in Vietnam that transgress the limits of the heteronormative model. Because the Vietnamese sources are primarily preoccupied with gender embodiment, and less so on biological “sex” or sexual desire, the book’s subtitle reflects the historical and thematic centrality of both the cultural interpretations of masculinity and femininity and of the body, here understood as irreducible to anatomy.¹⁴

From an emic perspective, however, the empirical cases of gender transgression that this book examines, while certainly context bound and governed by internal rules, were not necessarily nonnormative to the actors or the social world from which they came. So using less judgmental language, the “transgressions” that the study identifies are akin to gender “crossings” that lead to a remaking or rearrangement of elements that, at times, might also lead to individual subjective transformation. But these latter terms, “crossings,” “remakings,” and “rearrangements,” do not quite capture the powerful normative constraints on gender and sexuality both in the past and today: a history of gender “remaking” seems to evoke a world in which one could alter at will the normative organization of sex, gender, or desire. Vietnam’s interwar period, relative to today’s heteronormative regime, saw greater tolerance for gender plasticity in popular culture and literature. But that does not mean there were no limits. Therefore, the term “transgression” more accurately captures the central narrative arc that this book seeks to reconstruct and the historical and contemporaneous disjuncture that it brings into relief. Like the word “queer,” then, “gender transgression” does not serve historical verisimilitude but offers a useful analytical category for understanding cases of gender ambiguity or androgyny.¹⁵

By “Vietnam,” this study generally refers to the geographic region that we today associate with the corresponding nation-state. Before the twentieth century, this nation-state had not yet been formed politically. For most of the nineteenth century, the area that we call Vietnam was ruled by the Nguyễn dynasty. Founded in 1802, the Nguyễn dynasty emerged in the aftermath of a brutal civil war between the Lê dynasty in the north and the Nguyễn dynasty in the central and southern regions.¹⁶ Gia Long, the founding Nguyễn emperor, united the kingdom and relocated the capital from Hà Nội in the north to Huế in the central region. Under his reign, the kingdom stretched from the north to the south, assuming for the first time the country’s geographical S shape noticeable in today’s political maps.¹⁷ This territorial expansion southward had already begun in the fifteenth century, leading the Vietnamese ethnic majority, the Kinh, to come into contact with indigenous populations such as the Cham and Khmer who resided in the central and southern regions.¹⁸ In founding the new kingdom, Gia Long and his heirs sought to emulate China and its imperial gravitas, turning Vietnam, its symbols, its customs, and its rituals into the image of the great northern neighbor.¹⁹

When the French arrived in 1858, they fragmented the country once again. They first seized the southern region of Cochinchina and gradually moved northward, claiming the middle and northern regions of Annam and Tonkin, respectively. Eventually, the French also seized what today are considered the countries of Laos and Cambodia. The territories of the three mainland countries of Southeast Asia—Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia—would form what was then called French Indochina. The southern region of Vietnam was formally deemed a French colony. The central and northern regions of Vietnam were French protectorates, indirectly governed by France in consultation with the Nguyễn Court in Huế.²⁰ So in the early twentieth century, Vietnam as a nation-state had not yet been formed. Nevertheless, I retain the usage of the term “Vietnam” in this study on the basis of the study’s focus on Vietnamese perspectives drawn from Vietnamese-language sources, as opposed to the state-centric French perspective of Indochina, and on the basis of its utility: “Vietnam” is presumably more familiar to the contemporary reader and thus usefully serves as a concise descriptor of the region of this study.

The book focuses on the years 1920–1945 for several reasons. First, this was the first time in the modern period when Vietnam evinced a flourishing public sphere.²¹ It was largely ushered in at the turn of the twentieth century by the advent of modern print technology and the adoption of the romanized alphabet as the national script (quốc ngữ). This alphabet marked a departure from the previous predominant use of classical Chinese and nôm—the Vietnamese demotic script that employed Chinese ideographs to transcribe the Vietnamese language. Due in part to its ease of learning and rapid dissemination, the adoption of the modern vernacular helped create an available Vietnamese readership and explosion in print publications. According to French colonial state records, the northern region of Tonkin had four newspapers in 1918. By 1937, the number had ballooned to sixty-three. In the same year, the southern region boasted thirty-seven periodicals. Between 1919 and 1939, in the southern region alone, 163 Vietnamese-language periodicals were reportedly in circulation. Between 1922 and 1940, 13,381 different books and tracts were published in Vietnamese.²² These numbers all point to an increasingly robust forum in which literate Vietnamese from a wide variety of walks of life could participate.²³ In so doing, this public sphere provides unusual access to Vietnamese perspectives on matters pertaining to gender and sexuality.

While the French colonial state did impose press censorship, it did so only selectively, according to region and subject matter. Regionally, metropolitan laws guaranteeing press freedoms were mostly applied only to the southern region of Cochinchina, a direct French colony. In the absence of such legal guarantees, censorship in the protectorates of the central and northern regions was more stringent. This uneven distribution of press freedom partly explains why the south was historically renowned for its flourishing journalistic culture.²⁴ The French colonial state’s censorship was also selective in terms of subject matter. Concerned primarily with security issues that could subvert its continued existence, the colonial state was relatively indifferent to almost all other matters, including writings on sex, gender, and desire.²⁵

Second, the years from 1920 to 1945 are widely considered the period of Vietnam’s transition to modernity. Modernity in the Vietnamese context was marked by rapid social, cultural, and economic change. This included a profound departure from traditional practices, beliefs, and epistemologies; the creation of a market economy, and hence an openness to new ideas through the global circulation and exchanges of products, commodities, trends, and fashions; a booming printing press, albeit one punctured by political censorship; and a corresponding heightened collective anxiety about the uncertainties of the modern era.²⁶ Observing the effects of French colonial modernity on the “soul” of a younger generation of Vietnamese at the time, the two brother poets Hoài Thanh and Hoài Chân remarked: “A strong wind from far away suddenly blew in this direction. In one fell swoop it shook the entire foundation of the past.”²⁷ “The West,” they explain, “has now penetrated the deepest part of our souls. We can no longer feel happy the way we used to feel happy, feel sorrow the way we used to feel sorrow, love, hate, be angry as before.”²⁸ These modernist poets reveal something of the profound sense of disorientation and emotional intensity their generation felt, occasioned by the arrival of Western culture and the onslaught of modernity.

In many parts of the world, modernity was also marked by the growing influence of sexology, the theory of sex that emerged toward the middle of the nineteenth century in Europe and spread from there across the globe to Asia.²⁹ Sexology encompassed an array of disparate disciplinary fields, but especially medicine and psychiatry, that together sought to create a set of normative classifications of sexual practices, morphologies, and identities arranged on a spectrum from so-called normal to perverse. It was nineteenth-century sexology—also known as scientia sexualis, or sexual science—that inaugurated the dyadic categories of “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality”; promulgated the notion of sexual inversion, whereby a man or woman was “trapped” in the opposite-sexed body; and labeled certain practices, such as sodomy, masturbation, and cross-dressing, as “perversions”—deviations from a wholesome sexual norm. These categorizations have persisted far into the late twentieth century and arguably into the twenty-first.

When I first began this research project, I reasoned that because the 1920–1945 period represents the tail end of French colonization in Vietnam, when European culture would have exerted its strongest influence, I should be able to locate the so-called seeds of the pathologization of homosexuality in this period—that is, the conceptual frameworks, signifying practices, and vocabularies that contributed to its stigmatization in Vietnam’s postsocialist period.³⁰ An examination of the cultural archive, however, took me in a different direction. As the episode in Khái Hưng’s novella that opens this introduction illustrates, earlier discourses and traditions that existed before French or Western influence on Vietnam did not wither away after the twentieth century. Permutations, for example, of the premodern topos of gender crossing persisted through the 1930s. The practice of gender crossing did not appear in a cultural vacuum. Rather, it was a recurring trope in varied Southeast Asian and Sino-Vietnamese traditions that had longer histories in the region, traditions studied more closely in the first three chapters of this book. These traditions and histories were carried over in modern translation with the adoption of the romanized script. In fact, the new script led to an exhilarating period of linguistic and literary translation. While the period certainly saw the translation of French and European works, Vietnam’s interwar period was also, in fact, the golden age of translation of Chinese fiction.³¹

“Translation” here ought to be understood not so much in the narrow sense of linguistic fidelity to an original as a creative process of cultural and epistemic negotiation, mediation, and innovation.³² Like Vietnam’s national classic, Nguyễn Du’s The Tale of Kiều, some of the literary sources that Queer Vietnam examines are, at times, Vietnamese creative adaptations of East Asian literary works.³³ Others are translations of nineteenth-century nôm works that were themselves transcriptions of oral folklore. Still other times, they are translations of Chinese fiction adopted for Vietnamese political ends. Through these works in translation, premodern traditions that admitted greater gender and sexual variance persisted through the interwar period. Explaining the dramatic changes that took place in late colonial Vietnam, Peter Zinoman aptly described this period as exhibiting the coexistence of an “incongruity” between “traditional epistemologies” and “modernizing development.”³⁴ As we will observe in this study, some Vietnamese intellectuals of the time demonstrated an acute awareness of this incongruity in their urban reportages, in which the practices of tradition and modernity jostled with each other in an uneasy cultural palimpsest.³⁵

At the same time, the Vietnamese print public sphere received with inspired awe marvelous news emanating from abroad—especially from France—of the existence of dynamic “queer” bodies that seemingly defied comprehension. In the aftermath of World War I, France experienced the traumas of war in the face of enormous loss of life. This led to a natalist discourse and accompanying anxieties over the potential sterility and eventual obsolescence of French civilization—a “civilization without sexes.”³⁶ Simultaneously, the interwar period in Paris was a socially decadent one in which challenges to sexual and gender norms were in the air.³⁷ This discourse of sexual subversion was amplified in the Vietnamese colony by frequent news stories of scientific experiments involving sex changes in animals and humans, occasioned by the advent of the emergent field of endocrinology. These French and European discourses on gender and sexual plasticity, rather than nineteenth-century sexology, dominated the Vietnamese public sphere.

In response, Vietnamese debated in the print public sphere the question of sexual and gender variance and the interrelated problems of kinship, desire, intimacy, and the grounds on which societal relations ought to be built. Some drew on the cultural resources of the Vietnamese classical past to interpret the explosive growth of “queer” stories arriving from abroad. Others envisioned radically new configurations of social and cultural organization. In a notable piece of imaginative fiction, for example, a Vietnamese writer by the name of Chung Anh described a futuristic world in which the sexual distinctions between male and female are transcended, the idea of the family superseded by new forms of kinship ties between and among a higher form of humans, a newly evolved “hermaphroditic” species. Whether they were premodern tales translated and adapted for various modern political ends or newly invented stories with futuristic sensibilities, a bevy of such wondrous narratives concerning queer subjects pushed the imagined frontiers of the human body.

In this context, we can better comprehend the relative status and place of nineteenth-century Western sexology in the Vietnamese public sphere. The “West” was not one homogenizing block. Sexology’s influence was certainly already underway, traces of its pathologizing rhetoric evident in some Vietnamese sources. But it was in competition with Sino-Vietnamese and Southeast Asian traditions that had longer histories in the region, as well as a set of other French and European discourses on gender and sexual plasticity specific to the interwar period: demographic anxieties, emergent sexual emancipation movements, and the advent of reproductive science.

From this corpus of Vietnamese sources, we can draw certain key conclusions about the character and periodization of sexual modernity in Vietnam’s early twentieth century. One key finding is that the diagnostic categories of nineteenth-century sexology, such as gender “inversion,” had not yet garnered meaningful traction. There are historical reasons for this, chief among them that the French colonial state failed to effectively transpose Western medical models onto Indochina. Vietnam, instead, was still significantly influenced by premodern Sino-Vietnamese paradigms of the body, illness, and health. In fact, the contemporary Vietnamese term for “sex/gender” (giới tính) had not even been invented yet. There was no formal, uniform vocabulary to refer to the modern Vietnamese sense of sex or gender, which, according to a standard dictionary published in 2005, is defined as the “characteristics of the body and psychology [cơ thể và của tâm lí] that . . . distinguish males and females.”³⁸ Instead, a variety of older terms were used to refer to the different composite elements of sex, gender, morphology, and desire.

Just as there was no formal term for “sex/gender” in the contemporary sense, neither was there a self-consciously “perverse” modern subjectivity. Historical scholarship tracing the development of modern sexual science has shown that diagnostic categories helped bring into being perverse sexual subjects, such as the “homosexual,” whom European sexology labeled an “invert,” trapped in the wrong-sexed body. Homosexuals, in turn, would come to embrace their stigmatized identity, organize as a collective, and form a “reverse discourse” around the same identity.³⁹ But in Vietnam, such developments came later. In the interwar period, more often than not, gender bore little to no correlation with sexual desire. Certainly, gender was connected to sexual desire insofar as the latter is often routed through cultural notions of gender. But unlike the figure of the homosexual “invert” in European sexology, acts of gender transgression in the Vietnamese archive were not decisive markers of homosexual desire. On the contrary, in some cases, men and women who transgressed gender boundaries did so within a historically distinct normative regime. Women characters who cross-dressed as men to fight in battle, for example, reverted to their former female selves upon returning home to serve as loving and devoted wives to their husbands. One principal reason for this peculiar Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation is that the demarcation between the public and private spheres in premodern Asia was simultaneously a gendered one: women who entered the androcentric public sphere could normatively do so only as “men.” By the same token, male poets in the world of arts and letters would often write in a woman’s voice, assuming female personae and female subjectivities, precisely because there was normatively no space for “real” women in this public sphere.

The persistence of premodern gender practices far into the early decades of the twentieth century suggests the need to rethink the prevailing historical periodization that has characterized scholarship on Vietnam’s late French colonial period. In this body of scholarship, the interwar period was characterized by a transition from tradition to modernity. David Marr’s seminal work Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, for example, demonstrates fundamental changes at the level of “political and social consciousness” among the Vietnamese intelligentsia, changes that call into question traditional modes of thinking and practices.⁴⁰ Other works stress the cultural dimensions of modern change. Nguyễn Văn Ký’s Vietnamese Society Faces Modernity (La société vietnamienne face à la modernité) looks at the “three” agents of modernization—schools, science, and medicine—driving some of the transformations in the spheres of art, literature, journalism, bodily practices, and women’s fashions. More recent works of scholarship have furnished even finer-grained portraits. Through an examination of the 1930s Self-Reliant literary group, Martina Nguyễn has identified a strain of “cosmopolitan nationalism” to which the group adhered, whereas others have examined innovations in modernist literary aesthetics by some Vietnamese writers in the wake of the collapse of the mandarin civil service system and the explosive growth of the modern Vietnamese language.⁴¹ Finally, some scholarship has broached the subject of queer genders and sexualities during the late colonial period. Ben Tran touches on the question of queerness from the perspective of modernist literary aesthetics.⁴² Likewise, Nguyễn Quốc Vinh has written an essay claiming the deviancy of “homoerotic desire” in Vietnamese literary sources during the French colonial period.⁴³

While this body of scholarship remains important, Queer Vietnam suggests the need to rethink the meaning of “tradition” in asking after the more fundamental question as to who or what defines it. In the early twentieth century, Vietnamese modernist reformers depicted the nineteenth century and its legacy as a backward, feudal period in need of reform. Like their counterparts in the New Culture Movement in China (1915–1919),⁴⁴ Vietnamese modern reformers of the 1920s and 1930s conceived of themselves and their peers as radically departing from historical precedent, denouncing the pernicious effects of so-called Confucian traditional mores. Yet as some of the examples of gender transgression I have presented thus far suggest, the extent to which and the manner in which “traditional” Confucian ideas appeared in Vietnam’s early twentieth century needs to be reconsidered. While it is true that modern ideas entering Vietnam in the early twentieth century led to significant cultural changes, it does not follow that Confucian ideas were entirely superseded. Nor does it follow that nineteenth-century Confucian ideas took the form that modernist reformers have presented them to be. In fact, in Chapter 3, we will examine cases in which advocates of the modern Vietnamese women’s emancipation movement took inspiration from classical heroines who transgressed gender norms in the Confucian “tradition.” Thus, it is not simply that there was a transition from one way of thinking to the other; rather, that tradition may have already existed, albeit uneasily, at the heart of Vietnamese modernity.

Queer Vietnam draws on popular print sources written in the modern Vietnamese vernacular that flourished beginning in the 1920s. Many of these are the same key sources that Vietnam studies scholars have relied on to reconstruct the cultural history of the period. They include newspapers, short stories, novels, hygiene manuals, popular sex manuals, grammar guides, personal letters, memoirs, dictionaries, reference works, other cultural works, and journals. In terms of geographic distribution, the major print sources from the northern, central, and southern regions were examined. In the north, the renowned journals included These Days (Ngày Nay), Mores (Phong Hóa), and Science Journal (Khoa Học Tạp Chí); in the central region, People’s Voice (Tiếng Dân), the longest-running newspaper of the interwar period; in the south, Women’s News (Phụ Nữ Tân Văn) and Women’s Bell (Nữ Giới Chung). These newspapers and journals were often in dialogue with one another: as we will see, Vietnamese intellectuals engaged in fierce pen wars. Hence, the study’s findings are based on some of the most significant print sources of the period from all three regions. Together, they form one of the liveliest periods of exchange among Vietnamese in the print public sphere. After 1945, however, this period of lively public debate was interrupted by the beginning of the First Indochina War.

To restore to public memory the forgotten history of variant genders and sexualities during this vibrant period of Vietnamese history, the first chapter illuminates the conditions that contributed to the period’s sexual and gendered efflorescence. In particular, Chapter 1 reconstructs a milieu of cultural pluralism in which Sino-Vietnamese, Southeast Asian, and Western discourses coexisted as well as jostled with one another. It looks at the competition between Sino-Vietnamese and Western models of medicine, the absence of the contemporary formal Vietnamese term for sex or gender (giới tính), and the array of Sino-Vietnamese terminology that existed previously instead. The chapter concludes with an examination of male sodomy, showing that rather than being understood as a symptom of homosexual identity, “sodomy” was a semiotic sign of Vietnam’s embeddedness in cross-cultural contact.

Chapters 2 and 3 each look at a specific form of gender and sexual pluralism. Chapter 2 suggests that men, especially among the scholar literati, could hold a wider variety of gender and sexual subject positions than modern and contemporary binary divisions of sex, gender, and desire typically allow. Specifically, the chapter demonstrates a persistent separation of sexuality from gender such that gender transgression need not signify male homosexuality, a key motif of the nineteenth-century sexological model. Instead, the men in the documents examined could assume plural forms of gendered and erotic subject positions.

Chapter 3 looks at a plethora of stories involving women who transgressed gender and sexual boundaries. Many of the stories were originally premodern tales that were translated into the modern Vietnamese vernacular in the early twentieth century but reinterpreted and redeployed by Vietnamese writers for a variety of different, and sometimes contradictory, political purposes. These include the reaffirmation of a lost Confucian tradition, the celebration of nationalistic sentiment, and the advancement of the modern women’s emancipation movement. Regardless of the ostensible purpose for translating these premodern stories, they nevertheless furnished a rich cultural repertoire of female figures who transgressed the limits of gendered norms in the early twentieth century.

Chapter 4 shifts the study’s attention to modern changes that scholars have already observed about the period to argue that gender plasticity represents a significant but overlooked variable. The modern transformation that shook Vietnamese society at the time simultaneously destabilized perceived traditional notions of gender. The return of a sizable number of Vietnamese students who studied abroad in France; news of the shifting changes in gendered norms taking place in Europe and elsewhere; and discoveries, experiments, and innovations in the natural sciences all combined to create an atmosphere that pushed the imagined frontiers of the gendered and sexed human body.

Taken together, these chapters show that a far livelier presence of “queer” subjects existed in Vietnam during the interwar period than has been supposed. Queer Vietnam simultaneously insists that any understanding of the question of variant genders and sexualities in Vietnam today would be incomplete without acknowledging this other, earlier gender history.

Notes

1. Khái Hưng, “Hồn Bướm Mơ Tiên” [Butterfly Soul Dreaming of an Immortal], Phong Hóa [Mores] (Hà Nội), November 4, 1932, 12. Henceforth, all translations unless otherwise noted are mine. The original quotation: “Quái lạ! Sao ở vùng nhà quê lại có người đẹp trai đến thế, nước da trắng mát, tiếng nói dịu dàng, trong trẻo như tiếng con gái.”

2. Khái Hưng, “Hồn Bướm Mơ Tiên” [Butterfly Soul Dreaming of an Immortal], Phong Hóa [Mores] (Hà Nội), January 6, 1933, 3.

3. For more on the Mores journal, the Self-Reliant Literary Group, and its modernizing project, see Martina T. Nguyễn, On Our Own Strength: The Self-Reliant Literary Group and Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Late Colonial Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, 2021), 1–14.

4. On stylistic innovations, see Hà Minh Đức, preface to Tổng Tập Văn Học Việt Nam [General Collection of Vietnamese Literature], ed. Hà Minh Đức (Hà Nội: Nhà Xuất Bản Khoa Học Xã Hội, 2000), 12–13; Nhất Linh, preface to Tổng Tập Văn Học Việt Nam [General Collection of Vietnamese Literature], ed. Hà Minh Đức (1933; Hà Nội: Nhà Xuất Bản Khoa Học Xã Hội, 2000), 23. On its antecedents, the scholar Phan Cự Đệ has proffered three classical sources from which Khái Hưng may have adapted his thematic storyline, one of which is the premodern tale of the Bodhisattva of Mercy. Phan Cự Đệ, “Tự Lực Văn Đoàn” [The Self-Reliant Literary Group], in Tự Lực Văn Đoàn: Trào Lưu—Tác Giả [The Self-Reliant Literary Group: Movement and Authors], ed. Hà Minh Đưc (Huế: Nhà Xuất Bản Giáo Dục, 2007), 470.

5. This synopsis is based on the late nineteenth-century versions written in nôm, the Vietnamese demotic script, on which early twentieth-century translations are based. According to Nguyễn Đinh Hòa, the scene in which the heroine cross-dresses as a monk also appears in eighteenth-century verse. The figure of the female Boddhisatva of Mercy can be traced back even earlier, as the story had been popularized since the sixteenth century in theatrical performances. See Maurice Durand, “Truyện Quan Âm Thị Kính (觀音氏敬)” [The Story of Kuan Yin], in Thế Giới Của Truyện Nôm [The Universe of Nom Stories], ed. Olivier Tessier (Ho Chi Minh City: Nhà Xuất Bản Tổng Hợp Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh, 2022), 212–22; Nguyễn Đinh Hòa, Vietnamese Literature: A Brief Survey (San Diego, CA: San Diego State University, 1994), 97–99; George E. Dutton, Jayne S. Werner, and John K. Whitmore, eds., The Child-Giving Guanyin (Sixteenth-Seventeenth Century), Sources of Vietnamese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 180–86. For the Chinese versions, see Chün-fang Yü, Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteśvara (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 293–94.

6. For more on the tale’s early twentieth-century translation into the modern vernacular, see “Quan Âm Thị Kính,” in Tổng Tập Văn Học Việt Nam [General Collection of Vietnamese Literature], ed. Lê Văn Quán (Hà Nội: Nhà Xuất Bản Khoa Học Xã Hội, 1993), 425–27.

7. Of course, the stories differ in significant ways. The identities and actions of the temple visitors are different. Whereas the Buddhist tale was written in verse, Khái Hưng wrote in novelistic form. Finally, the eighteenth-century popular narrative emphasizes the triumph of moral righteousness. According to the critic Nguyễn Đinh Hòa, Thị Kính’s “true” gender ultimately serves to reveal her innocence. In contrast, according to the critic Vũ Ngọc Phan, Hưng’s novella demonstrates the impossibility of romantic love. See Hòa, Vietnamese Literature: A Brief Survey, 99; Vũ Ngọc Phan, “Khái Hưng,” in Nhà Văn Hiện Đại: Phê Bình Văn Học [Contemporary Writers: Literary Criticism] (1940; Sài Gòn: Nhà Xuất Bản Thăng Long, 1959), 828–29.

8. See, e.g., Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1993), viii.

9. On the economic conditions, see Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery, Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954 (Berkeley: University of California, 2009), 116–180. On the emergence of science, see C. Michele Thompson, “Indochina,” in The Cambridge History of Science: Modern Science in National, Transnational, and Global Context, ed. Hugh Richard Slotten, Ronald L. Numbers, and David N. Livingstone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 593–608. On the overall colonial context, see David G. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1925–1945 (Berkeley: University of California, 1981).

10. The burgeoning scholarship on “queer Asia” is too vast to cite comprehensively here. Notable works include Howard Chiang, After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Audrey Yue, “Queer Singapore: A Critical Introduction,” in Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citienzship and Mediated Cultures, ed. Audrey Yue and June Zubillaga-Pow (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012); Evelyn Blackwood and Mark Johnson, “Queer Asian Subjects: Transgressive Sexualities and Heteronormative Meanings,” Asian Studies Review 36, no. 4 (2012). On narrowing acceptable practices, see Tamara Loos, “Transnational Histories of Sexualities in Asia,” American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (2009).

11. One task of critical historiography is to trace the lines of normative continuity—the social norms that appear seamlessly smooth and straight, much like a thick electrical power cord densely packed together—to its chronological and epistemological limit point. At this limit point, the electrical cord reveals its frayed ends. The ends that were once flattened, straightened, normalized can then appear as distinct elements in their sheer plurality. Likewise, at this limit point, the social structures that insist on heteronormative ways of being rupture, thereby relinquishing other subjects of history, other ways in which those of the past have lived. In such a history, we observe subjects for whom the categories of sex, gender, desire, and sexuality are not aligned according to heterosexual norms but dislocated in rather strange, indeed, “queer,” ways. The value in reconstructing such a history is to illuminate for us other ways of being and becoming and, ultimately, to recognize the contingency of how we organize gender and sexuality. On the task of critical historiography, see Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York: New Press, 1998), 369–91; Joan W. Scott, “After History?,” in Schools of Thought: Twenty-Five Years of Interpretive Social Science, ed. Joan W. Scott and Debra Keates (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2001), 98–99.

12. Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (1957; San Francisco: City Light Books, 1986), 68.

13. Bataille develops his notion of the general economy, which, unlike utilitarian models, is characterized by an expenditure without return, a “play of energy that no end limits.” See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 1:9–77, at 1:23.

14. Regarding biological sex, scholars have questioned the extent to which sex, understood as the raw matter of nature, may already be acted on by culture, and hence sex may already be a form of gender. The issue is not that there is no nature but that “nature” may, in fact, admit more than the binary sexes that certain cultural ideologies demand. For a presentation of the problem, see David Halperin, “Sex/Sexuality/Sexual Classification,” in Critical Terms for the Study of Gender, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Gilbert Herdt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 449–86. On the subtitle and its reflections, in this respect, the term “queer” also shares an intimate kinship with the burgeoning field of transgender studies, according to which a critique of heteronormativity need not be reduced to same-sex object choice as the sole or fundamental axis of difference. See Susan Stryker, “(De)subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (London: New York, 2006), 7.

15. This is one viable approach that Howard Chiang astutely proposes in the study of “transgender China.” See Howard Chiang, “Imagining Transgender China,” in Transgender China, ed. Howard Chiang (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 3–19.

16. Christopher Goscha, Vietnam: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 41–44.

17. Goscha, New History, 49; Keith W. Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 398; Li Tana, Nguyễn Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1998).

18. See, e.g., Goscha, New History, 32; Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese, 218–23; Tana, Nguyễn Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 102–3; David Biggs, Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018), 23–26; William B. Noseworthy and Van Son Quang, “A View of Champā Sites in Phú Yên Province, Vietnam: Toward a Longue Durée of Socio-Religious Context,” Religion 13, no. 7 (2022).

19. Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of the Nguyễn and Ching Civil Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 13–14.

20. On the making of French Indochina, see Brocheux and Hémery, Indochina, 15–69; Goscha, New History, 73–93.

21. Defined as the space located below the state but above the city or village wherein individuals engage in symbolic exchange and contestation, the “public sphere” is a term coined by Jürgen Habermas in the context of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Shawn McHale argues it can be applied, with modifications, to the years 1920–1945 in Vietnam. See Shawn McHale, Print and Power: Confucianism, Communism and Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), 7.

22. McHale, Print and Power, 18.

23. McHale, 26.

24. For a study of the south’s journalistic culture, see Philippe Peycam, The Birth of Vietnamese Political Journalism: Sài Gòn, 1916–1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

25. McHale, Print and Power, 8.

26. Peter Zinoman, ed., Dumb Luck: A Novel by Vu Trong Phung (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 4.

27. Hoài Thanh and Hoài Chân, “Một Thời-Đại Trong Thi Ca” [A Period of Poetry], in Thi Nhân Việt-Nam [Vietnamese Poets] (1942; Sài Gòn: Nhà Xuất Bản Hoa Tiến, 1968), 43.

28. Thanh and Chân, “Một Thời-Đại Trong Thi Ca,” 11.

29. See Howard Chiang, “Deciphering Desire,” in After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 125–77; Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 235–85. For sexology’s global spread, see Veronika Fuechtner, Douglas E. Haynes, and Ryan M. Jones, “Introduction: Toward a Global History of Sexual Science: Movements, Networks, and Deployments,” in A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–1960 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 1–26; Paolo Ben, “Global Modernity and Sexual Science: The Case of Male Homosexuality and Female Prostitution, 1850–1950,” in A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–1960, ed. Veronika Fuechtner, Douglas E. Haynes, and Ryan M. Jones (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018); Chiang, After Eunuchs.

30. See my article: Richard Quang-Anh Tran, “An Epistemology of Gender: Historical Notes on the Homosexual Body in Contemporary Vietnam, 1986–2005,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 9, no. 2 (2014).

31. Pastreich observes that the success of the dissemination of Sinitic fiction in Vietnam depended, ironically, on the adoption of the romanized alphabet. Emanuel Pastreich, “The Reception of Chinese Literature in Vietnam,” in The Columbia History of Chinese Literature, ed. Victor H. Mair (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 1102–3.

32. Cultures, it must be emphasized, are formed through translation. This is so even for nations today like China that propagate an image of homogeneity and monolingualism that are, in fact, consequences of modern nation building projects in translating diverse regional dialects into a standardized language. See Dagmar Schäfer, “Translation History, Knowledge and Nation Building in China,” in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Culture, ed. Sue-Ann Harding and Ovidi Carbonell Cortés (London: Routledge, 2018), 134–53; Jeffrey Weng, “What Is Mandarin? The Social Project of Language Standardization in Early Republican China,” Journal of Asian Studies 77, no. 3 (August 2018). For the notion that translation is a process of epistemic negotiation and innovation, see William J. Spurlin, “The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation: New Approaches,” Comparative Literature Studies 51, no. 2 (2014).

33. The novel on which The Tale of Kiều is based is Jin Yun Qiao zhuan (金雲翹傳; The Story of Jin, Yun, and Qiao), by Qingxin cairen (青心才人). See Paola Zamperini, Lost Bodies: Prostitution and Masculinity in Chinese Fiction, Women and Gender in China Studies (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2010), 13–14; Huỳnh Sanh Thông, introduction to The Tale of Kiều: A Bilingual Edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), xx–xxi.

34. Peter Zinoman, “Vũ Trọng Phụng’s Dumb Luck and the Nature of Vietnamese Modernism,” in Dumb Luck (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 4.

35. See also my article on colonial Vietnamese urban reportages: Richard Quang-Anh Tran, “Sex in the City: The Descent from Human to Animal in Two Vietnamese Classics of Urban Reportage,” International Quarterly of Asian Studies 50, nos. 3–4 (2020).

36. Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson, Women in Culture and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994), 4. See also Carolyn J. Dean, The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France (Berkeley: University of California, 2000), 101–2.

37. See, for example, the book and related film by Andrea Weiss, Paris Was a Woman: Portraits from the Left Bank (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1995). See also Shari Benstock’s study of American and English expatriate women in Paris challenging patriarchal norms: Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

38. See Từ Điển Tiếng Việt [Vietnamese Dictionary] (Hà Nội: Nhà Xuất Bản Văn Hóa Thông Tin, 2005), 874.

39. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 1:101.

40. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1925–1945, 2.

41. Martina Thục Nhi Nguyễn, “Wearing the Nation,” in On Our Own Strength: The Self-Reliant Literary Group and Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Late Colonial Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i), 79–114; Ben Tran, Postmandarin: Masculinity and Aesthetic Modernity in Colonial Vietnam (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 4–5.

42. Ben Tran, “Queer Internationalism and Modern Vietnamese Aesthetics,” in Post-Mandarin: Masculinity and Aesthetic Modernity in Colonial Vietnam (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 105–18.

43. Nguyễn Quốc Vinh, “Deviant Bodies and Dynamics of Displacement of Homoerotic Desire in Vietnamese Literature from and about the French Colonial Period (1858–1954),” 1997, http://www.talawas.org/talaDB/suche.php?res=1056&rb=0503&von=.

44. See, for example, the denunciation by the May Fourth intellectuals against an older, more “traditional” cohort of 1910 writers. Perry Link, The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 177–78.