Cultural Ambiguity in Contemporary Vietnamese Representations of Homosexuality: A New Historicist Reading of Bùi Anh Tấn’s Fiction

• In Event: Pleasure, Pain and “Perversions” in Modern Vietnam

Abstract

Starting from an anecdote about wild dogs in a 1939 short story by Xuân Diệu, I will pursue a New Historicist reading of Bùi Anh Tấn’s fiction to explore present-day representations of the homosexual outcast in a hetero-normative world. This cultural ambiguity toward homosexuality is grounded not only in the circumstances of contemporary Vietnam where such a condition is both productive of and produced by culturally ambiguous representations, but also from the dialogical ways in which the texts present and undercut their own arguments when they are all embedded in a network of material practices in a market economy of cultural capital. Deployed throughout the crime-and-tragedy-filled world of gay suffering are Foucaldian strategies of narrative discipline of its subject matter that occasionally veer off into a crisis of representation that ruptures the narrative fabric. The analytical technique of thick description reveals that despite the author’s humane and positive viewpoint towards his gay characters, the fiction of Bùi Anh Tấn remains fraught with cultural ambiguity when it comes to such themes as social outcast, sexual deviance, hetero-normativity and self-renunciation. At the end, I will also reflect upon my own autobiographical role as reader and interpreter of and even as personification in these texts, as well as theoretical issues of the applicability of a New Historicist practice to Vietnamese literary and cultural studies.

Author

• Vinh Quoc Nguyen, Harvard University