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Viet Nguyen's The Sympathizer has a problem with women but it is a problem that the novel carefully and even deliberately confronts. While the novel could be read as the story of the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the essentially fragmenting and divisive process of assimilation, or even the implications of American imperial power globally, I read it through the lens of gender, considering the ways in which the physical bodies of women set the stage and even reframe the narrative for all of these readings. Because women's bodies are often implicated in struggles for power, they become, in this novel, the sites upon and through which male characters act out and process their desires for power and belonging. Because I read the novel as a feminist woman who lives in the world, I react to it viscerally as a woman; I cannot help but do so. As Sarah Ahmed writes in her book Living A Feminist Life, a feminist has a "sensible reaction to the injustices of the world, which we must register at first through our own experiences" (21). In order to "make sense of what does not make sense," I read through what Ahmed calls my own "feminist story" to personalize the disembodied, critical reading of texts. In a similar way, this novel is in some ways about the narrator's reformulation of his own story as he learns to view it in a new way.
While the main character of the novel is a man, the women of the novel refract his understanding of self, and even when he struggles to look directly at their inherently sexualized, often obscene treatment, Nguyen's relentless return to women's sexualized bodies provides the narrator a lens by which to reenvision his own doubled identity and complex story. At the same time, the lurking, even ominous presence of obscenity enacted upon and through women's bodies haunts my perspective as a reader, and I suspect many others'-as readers, should we force ourselves to look through the shadowy narration of reluctantly acknowledged bodily experience, we, like the narrator, will begin to see the multifaceted, complex web of interlocking stories that undergird not only The Sympathizer and the prevailing understanding of the Vietnam War, but also the plight of women...