Ocean of Storms: Vietnam War Photography and Queer Transpacific Critique of Militarized Intimacies

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study into Vietnam War photography as a site of relational struggles that exceed the vision of violence, freedom, and humanity currently normalized by liberal humanist imaginaries of war. It forwards what I am calling a “queer transpacific critique”, which disrupts normative Cold War epistemologies by interrogating the Pacific region as a place of relations, connections, desires, and racial and sexual formations that are disciplined by and diverge from liberal humanist thought. It examines disciplinary, historical, conceptual, social and intellectual connections that are made possible by the war, but are masked under liberal narratives of progress and freedom. The radical relationality the Vietnam War’s visual archive performs makes visible the co-implication of settler colonialism, mass incarceration, and racial-sexual violence in overseas war, and relatedly, the co-constitution of Asian, Black, Indigenous, and queer histories. The Vietnam War’s visual archive brings into relation often separated histories of colonial and racial subjection, and opens a discussion about how these entangled histories might found the basis of another collectivity beyond Man and its inhuman Others. Indeed, the Vietnam War was made possible by the violent, militarized intimacies of contemporary life, and but was also a site and moment of collective refusal of the liberal humanist episteme that mandates such violences. It is my hope that this work can announce a different politics of “being with” in the world. That is, a desiring orientation towards one another, and an elsewise possibility for modern relationality grounded in the struggles and joys of those who exist outside of state-organized human life. It is these intimacies between those struggling against imperialism that offer possibilities of new ways of being with each other without conquest.Ph.D