Diseased Bodies: Venereal Disease and Clandestine Prostitution in Northern Vietnam, 1920-1945

• In Event: 132. Putting Bodies to Work: New Directions in the History of Colonial Medicine in Southeast Asia

Abstract

In 1928, the French colonial government reported 89,000 new infections of venereal disease—syphilis and gonorrhea—treated in Tonkin (northern Vietnam) alone. Venereal disease was so virulent that a 1934 colony-wide public health study declared it to be the most detrimental public health concern in Indochina after malaria. In an effort to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections, the French colonial government sanctioned controlled prostitution within certain cities in Tonkin, provided that sex workers register with the state and submit to regular venereal exams.

The French regulatory system, however, limited sex workers’ profits, mobility, and freedoms and savvy sex workers evaded authorities by working illegally in the black market sex trade. Despite all the money and bureaucratic resources devoted to regulating and policing the sex trade, venereal disease continued to spread because colonial administrators in Tonkin knew surprisingly little about the clandestine sex industry. This paper explores the modes of venereal disease transmission. Drawing from public health records, hospital records, epidemiology studies, court cases, and files of the Hanoi Vice Squad, as well as Vietnamese-language newspaper articles, this paper investigates the spread of venereal disease within the black market sex industry. I explore the ways in which the state attempted to regulate bodies and sex, how clandestine sex workers—as well as women wrongly accused of prostitution—were affected by public health measures. I then trace the ways that clandestine sex workers evaded state regulations, disguised infections, and prevented or treated infections using traditional medicine.

Author

• Christina Firpo, CalPoly University