Content area

Full Text

This article examines the ways Vietnamese sniper women have been narrated and imagined in North America. Part nightmare, farce, icon, historical figure, and real person, the weaponized Vietnamese woman was a troubling figure to comprehend for US soldiers and the public alike. Navigating across historical, aesthetic, and performative texts, the article thinks through the different authorized narratives about this figure, and the queer futures made unintelligible in their making. It argues that liberal capitalism plays an important role in the determination of the relationship between past to present, and what may be imagined as possible, now and in the future. Vietnamese women soldiers during the US war in Vietnam (1955-1975) both frustrate and realize a queer Asian diasporic desire for historical ground on which to challenge racialized, gendered, and sexual epistemological regimes of the war. That is, while militant Vietnamese women were used as evidence of liberal capitalist logics, they also often failed to complete its fantasies, opening up important alternative and queer pasts-ones that inevitably fail to reach dominant conceptions post-Vietnam War presents, but also, for that very reason, critically arrive at an alternative modality for living in the present as a queer Asian and Vietnamese woman.

Keywords: liberal capitalism / militarism / queer Asian women / queer of color critique / time studies / transpacific studies

My father was thinking of ways to skip school when his house was bombed. "It was a woman with a fruit basket trying to kill the group of officers having breakfast downstairs," he told me. I thought you knew everyone in your village. Who was it? He was too slow to answer. I ran through all of the nameless women in the extraordinary stories he would tell me throughout my childhood. He patiently said no to all of them. "It was too chaotic. The blood, the smoke, broken dishes everywhere. I ran to find my parents. She disappeared before anyone could find her."

After he told me the story of the bomber, I pestered him for days after, at times with unintentional insensitivity. Yeah, but what was she wearing? Did anyone survive and tell you what she looked like? Did she hide her Northern accent? She didn't have a gun, right? That would be too obvious.

He...

Show less