Long-Haired Warrior

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 2:54 PM, Isadora Wagner <iwagner@go.olemiss.edu> wrote:

Dear Vietnam Scholar's Group,

I've been a member of the group for several years now and have enjoyed the conversations, especially those that touch on my research areas of cultural, literary, and gender studies of the Vietnam War and women's experiences in the war.

I'm writing with a question about the Vietnamese phrasing for and origins of the appellation "long-haired warrior." The term describes Vietnamese women who took up arms to defend their country during the Indochinese and American Wars. I'm aware of Vietnam's 2,000 year-old history of women's inclusion in combat through the research of several members of this group, figures like the Tru'ng sisters and Phu'ung Thi Chinh, and a collection of war posters published in Vietnam in 2016. What I'm looking for is the Vietnamese phrasing from roughly the 1930s to the 1970s and some sense as to whether this phrasing shifted and, if so, how and why.

Thank you in advance for any resources and advice you may be able to share. My email to contact me directly is iwagner@go.olemiss.edu.

Sincerely,

Isadora Wagner

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Isadora J. Wagner, PhD

Department of English

University of Mississippi

P. O. Box 1848

University, MS 38677-1848

iwagner@go.olemiss.edu

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 5:42 PM, Erik Harms <elharms@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Isadora,

Thanks for posting this interesting question. While I can't answer it in any detail, I believe the term that I have most often heard is đội quan tóc dài (which I would translate more as "long haired army"). If you look that up on the internet, there is a wide range of discussion about the term, including a Vietnamese wikipedia entry with Nguyễn Thị Định as the central figure. The page will give you some sense of the cultural representations at play: https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%90%E1%BB%99i_qu%C3%A2n_t%C3%B3c_d%C3%A0i

If you look up "chiến binh tóc dài" which is how I might translate "long-haired warrior" the focus seems to be more on how to braid one's hair into a kind of "warrior" hair-style!:

http://thethaovaxahoi.vn/ai-cai-gi/pham-huong-ha-ho-tet-toc-chien-binh-dep-het-nac-hoang-thuy-an-theo-thi-can-loi-luon.html

best wishes,

Erik

Erik Harms

Associate Professor of Anthropology

Yale University

From: Vsg [mailto:vsg-bounces@mailman11.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Tim Gorman

Sent: Monday, March 19, 2018 8:49 AM

Cc: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: [Vsg] long-haired warrior question

Hi all,

May I kindly add that Nguyễn Thị Định's memoir is available in English from Cornell University Press (http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100624540), with a translation by none other than Mai Elliott. It's a good read, and Elliott briefly mentions the role of the "đội quan tóc dài" in NLF propaganda in the intro.

I don't want to open another ideological can of worms here, but Mai Elliott was recently interviewed by Chris Lydon on Open Source, a radio show based out of WBUR in Boston. Other guests on the same show include Mark Bowden and Fredrik Logevall. The one hour program is available here: http://radioopensource.org/the-fog-of-vietnam

Best regards,

Tim

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Timothy Gorman

Ph.D. Candidate

Department of Development Sociology, Cornell University

Email: tmg56@cornell.edu

US Tel: (+1) 607-216-9845

Website: www.cornell.academia.edu/TimothyGorman