Narrative containment of the same-sex underworld in contemporary Vietnam. A critical exploration of the police presence and function in Bùi Anh Tấn's fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing from D.A. Miller's work on The novel and the police (1988) in Victorian fiction, this paper looks at narrative strategies through which the same-sex underworld is portrayed, policed and contained in contemporary Vietnamese fiction. The pioneering works of the prolific policeman-author Bùi Anh Tấn have spearheaded a strong connection between sex and crime in his representations of homosexuality. These potentially subversive representations take place within a liminal underworld, often depicted as an alternative space constitutive of personal identity characterized by same-sex desire outside of recognition by legal authorities or public morality. A critical exploration of the police presence and function within the narrative can uncover the underlying techniques and technologies of surveillance and discipline whereby depictions of the same-sex underworld are policed by and therefore complicit in an operational regime of pervasive hetero-normativity. By examining the thematics of criminality, sexual/social outcast, self-renunciation/acceptance, and cultural ambiguity in the sizable LGBT-themed oeuvre of Bùi Anh Tấn over the past two decades, this paper explores how this body of works partakes in the construction and containment of a transgressive yet marginalized homosexual underworld. Marked by the police presence and subjected to the policing function of the texts, this same-sex underworld is transformed into an object of increasing attention and fascination for an ever so curious yet still ambivalent Vietnamese society.