Queer Vietnam: A History of Gender Transgression, 1920-1945

by Richard Quang-Anh Tran

Overview

Queer Vietnam recovers the forgotten stories of variant genders and sexualities in early twentieth-century Vietnam. By the beginning of the 1900s, European imperialism had spread Western notions of gender across much of Asia, narrowing and delegitimizing what had been a wide range of acceptable gender practices. But in Vietnam, Western influence on gender remained uneven at best. Through archival research and innovative readings of literary sources, Richard Quang-Anh Tran argues that Vietnamese culture embraced a much less rigid view of the human body, and that a far more capacious vision of gendered personhood existed in this period than has been previously assumed. Popular love stories involved cross-dressing monks and traditional women who don male garb to fight in battle. And accounts of proto-lesbian friendships and a futuristic human civilization populated by a higher form of hermaphroditic species all found avid readers. Together, this material reveals that in Vietnam's interwar period, "tradition" coexisted with and jostled against the modern. While current perceptions of Vietnamese history rest on the exclusion of the "queer"—subjects who depart from heteronormative ways of being—this book brings them to the center, and opens up new directions for both the historical study of gender and Vietnam's modernity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781503642751
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	05/13/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	225
File size:	18 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Richard Quang-Anh Tran is a Scholar-in-Residence in the Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Historical Context: A Milieu of Cultural Pluralism
2. The Variety of Male Genders, Relations, and Practices
3. Women Cross-Dressing as Men: The Persistence of a Classical Trope since 1920
4. Gender Plasticity: New Bodies and Genders in the Public Imagination
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"There is no other book like Queer Vietnam that offers such an unprecedented, gripping cultural history of gender transgression in this region of Southeast Asia. The empirical findings are rich and historical insights pathbreaking. Uncovering a riveting array of sources, Richard Tran wields interpretive evidence with critical theory judiciously to make a profound intervention in the history of sexuality." —Howard Chiang, University of California, Santa Barbara

"Richard Tran's Queer Vietnam recovers the lively presence of queer subjects in early twentieth century Vietnam who at once challenged notions about the fixity of gender and transgressed the imagined frontiers of intimacy and desire during a time of profound socialchange. This impressively researched book further deepens our understanding of colonial modernity in Vietnam by putting gender at the center of the story, by defying conventional wisdom about what counts as 'tradition,' and by recounting in careful and empathetic detail those bodies who refused capture." —Claire Edington, University of California, San Diego

From the Publisher