Queer Vietnam

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, "e;tradition"e; coexisted with and jostled against the modern. While current perceptions of Vietnamese history rest on the exclusion of the "e;queer"e;-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.