Sexuality as Translation. Locating the “Queer” in Vietnamese Debates on Sexuality

Richard Quang-Anh Tran

doi:10.30687/annor/2385-3042/2020/56/014

Richard Quang-Anh Tran

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.30687/annor/2385-3042/2020/56/014

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Abstract

Transnational debates on LGBTQ identities have centred on the conflict between universalism and particularism. Do LGBTQ identities, which are presumptively ‘Western’ come to colonize other local cultures? Does the use of the idea of ‘queer’ constitute an infelicitous Western imposition onto other cultures? In this study, I challenge some of the nativist responses to these questions by problematizing territorial claims of ‘Asian values’ and so-called ‘Western’ queer sexualities by showing the cultural infelicities and hybriding moorings in both. The article does so by examining a public debate that exploded in the Vietnamese print media in the late 1920s over the phenomenon of amorous relations between primarily male youth in the then newly emerging French-Vietnamese secondary schools. Based on this archive, the study maintains that same-sex sexuality foregrounds the dynamic practices of cross-cultural translation from East Asia and France, reflecting both the anxieties and aspirations of the interlocutors. Belonging neither solely to Eastern nor Western cultures, the phenomenon reveals its fundamental cultural impurity. In so doing, the archive brings into high relief the constructed artifice of Vietnamese nationalist ‘tradition’ and the ‘foreigness’ of queer sexuality.

Highlights

Same-sex sexuality, what it is, its meaning, and its significance, remains a subject of scholarly dispute and interpretation
I will briefly elaborate on the controversy over this epic, because the figure of Kiều will serve as a key cultural reference when we examine the debate over male same-sex sexual relations
The paper published an investigative story about a phenomenon called thủ xú, a local argot to refer to male-male amorous relations taking place in the newly emerging French-Vietnamese secondary schools

Summary

Conclusion

The article has analyzed one meaning of same-sex sexual relations in the late 1920s in Vietnam based on a debate in the People’s Voice (Tiếng Dân), a prominent newspaper during the interwar period. Based on an examination of the newspaper, this study has argued that the meaning of same-sex sexual relations is a cultural translation of East Asian and Western traditions. Caught in the traffic of both Eastern and Western discourses, Vietnamese same-sex sexuality signified contingent practices of cultural difference. Put another way, it was a protean ‘queer’ figure – a cathectic object onto which different interlocutors projected both their anxieties and aspirations. The thủ xú phenomenon problematizes some of the dualisms in the debates in sexuality studies. According to one such dualism, the West imposes its universal identity constructs onto other local cultures. While the thủ xú phenomenon appears to have been a fleeting moment in Vietnamese cultural history, it provides one indication of the rich and complex meanings of variant genders and sexualities yet to be further excavated

Introduction

Same-Sex Sexuality as a Sign of Western Decadence?