Competing Masculinities
Date: Wed, 04 Jan 2006 18:58:51 -0500
From: "Mimi Thi Nguyen" <mimin@umich.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Vsg] Competing Masculinities?
I was wondering if anyone had any citations for research examining
competing narratives of "proper" masculinity between South Vietnamese
and North during the war. I was doing some reading on U.S. Cold War
discourses of communist perversity (i.e., the imagined linkage between
ideological affiliation and homosexuality) and wanted to know if such
linkages were transnational in their application--? Any suggestions
will be greatly appreciated!
Best,
Mimi Nguyen
From: "Matt Steinglass" <mattsteinglass@yahoo.com>
To: "'Vietnam Studies Group'" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: RE: [Vsg] Competing Masculinities?
Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 09:29:47 +0700
Hi Mimi,
As an aside, I'd be interested in anything you've come across that bears
on the statements by former US POW's at Hoa Lo Prison that some of their
guards were homosexual. (See John McCain's account, excerpted in the
Library of America's "Reporting Vietnam" compilation, and personal
communication from one POW I interviewed.) I wonder to what extent this
is accurate, and to what extent a misinterpretation of body language, or
a reproduction of the Cold War discourses you refer to? (Or a
misinterpretation of sexual forms of humiliation and mistreatment,
commonly practiced against male POWs - see Croatia, Iraq, etc.)
Best
Matt Steinglass
Mimi and all,
I have never had the stomach to read through the U.S. literature of the
VN-US war era for such things, but you may find the following articles of
mine of interest as offering historical perspective:
2002 "Syphilis, opiomania, and pederasty": Colonial Constructions of
Vietnamese (and French) Social Diseases. Journal of the History of Sexuality
11(4), 610-636.
2002 Eunuch Mandarins, Soldats Mamzelles, Effeminate Boys, and Graceless
Women: French Colonial Constructions of Vietnamese Genders. GLQ 8(4), 435
467.
The latter (esp. the section on "Soldats Mamzelles") bears directly on your
topic. I would be surprised if the English-language literature has much by
way of comparison between North and South masculinities--for Americans as
for their French predecessors, all Vietnamese males were marked as
inadequately masculine. The primary war-era work that explicitly discusses
masculinity is the pseudonymous "Marnais" work:
Marnais, Philip. 1967. Saigon after dark. <New York>: MacFadden-Bartell
Book.
There's also a section of the REMF Bibliography by David A. Wilson and Nancy
Kendall that covers war-era pornography,
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/
Bibliographies/REMF_bib/REMF_bib_porn.html
at least one or two of which may have something relevant to your
research--although the books themselves, as with much erotica, will be
notoriously difficult to retrieve through libraries.
Best of luck.
Frank Proschan
Project Director
Subject: RE: [Vsg] Competing Masculinities?
Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 01:52:41 -0500
From: "DiGregorio, Michael" <M.DiGregorio@fordfound.org>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear Mimi,
This website may also be of help to you.
http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/IES/vietnam.html
Mike