“The Queer Optics of the Vietnamese Diaspora: Reframing the Visual Archive in ‘The opposite of looking is not invisibility. The opposite of yellow is not gold.’”

Abstract

Vietnamese diasporic artists who came to the U.S. post 1975 actively engage with the silences, losses, and distortions that fracture and fragment their families’ histories, memories, and images. My analysis argues that the photographic installation “The opposite of looking is not invisibility. The opposite of yellow is not gold” by Hương Ngô and Hồng-Ân Trương participates in this project of imaginative remembrance and reconstruction. I theorize how the installation produces a queer optics that unsettles our reliance on prescribed understandings of Vietnamese female refugees as compliant participants in the myth of the model Asian minority. This queer optics uses three techniques to literally and ideologically reframe Vietnamese diasporic female agency: deconstruction of family albums, juxtaposition of photos and text, and creation of a queer of color gaze of intimacy. This optics produces a countervisuality of affective knowledges about relationality and futurity, displacing normalized practices of looking with new interpretative possibilities.