The Queer Methodologies of Vietnamese Diaspora Artists: Stardom, Spectatorship, and Other Pop Cultural Encounters

This thesis is a survey of four Vietnamese-American artists, whose queer identifications and disidentifications trouble easy categories of identity. The Vietnamese refugee and the queer figure have largely been overdetermined by minoritizing forces, which is to say that the refugee has been understood as a consequence of United States military intervention, and the queer figure has been understood as a corrupting, infectious monster. These identities themselves are not inherently challenging to the dominant mode of history, in which the heterosexual white male imposes his will on the world and contains these racial and sexual others in their categorical confines. However, it is in the mobilization of these identities in tandem that the works of Mimi Thi Nguyen, Hanh Thi Pham, Nguyen Tan Hoang, and Viet Le endeavor towards truth’s undoing. These artists and creators utilize convolutions of pop-cultural signs and signifiers, looking towards their respective stars, divas, and outlaws to embody an aesthetic of affect, rather than straightforward auto-ethnography. Mimi Thi Nguyen’s 1997 zine evolution of a race riot weaponizes Hanh Thi Pham’s unflinching self portrait, Misbegotten No More (1991-2) as the publication’s cover. This serves Nguyen not as an academic citation of queer Vietnamese women, but rather as a borrowing of Pham’s affective power recontextualized as a de-individualized punk feminist icon. This mobilized Pham’s rejection of gender and the state from the fine art sphere into the subcultural networks of D.I.Y. punk publication, where her iconography as a racial, gendered, and sexual outlaw was virally popular. Nguyen Tan Hoang’s auto-ethnographic documentary PIRATED (2000) on VHS tells the story of his departure from Vietnam at the age of 7, getting attacked by Thai Pirates, and ultimately saved by German Sailors. The film rips clips and music from the popular Vietnamese-American direct-to-video variety show Paris By Night, and intermingles it with pirated footage of The Crimson Pirate, Querelle, and his own self-made gay Asian pornography to make the trauma-porn of his narrative all the more erotic, and as a result, unbelievable. Finally, Viet Le’s photo series boy bang/gang band (2008) and his self-made music video loveBANG! (2008) explore the viral modes of popular media in the context of a post-Đổi Mới, or liberalized Vietnam. Boy bang specifically flirts with the repressed desire of the Vietnamese state and local audiences for metrosexual cosmopolitan Asian boy band masculinities. loveBANG! is a saccharine pop cultural spectacle through which its audience is invited to be distracted from traumatic Southeast Asian histories of Cold War conflict, interrupted development, and state censorship which nonetheless haunt the video’s backdrop. Though each of these artists are also active academics whose scholarly work otherwise builds histories of Southeast Asian, queer, and diaspora subjects, it is in their artistic work that queerness works beyond the gaps in the archive to produce pleasurable fantasies wherein history might be contested, rewritten, or forgotten