Narrative containment of the same-sex underworld in contemporary Vietnam. A critical exploration of the police presence and function in Bùi Anh Tấn's fiction

ABSTRACT

Drawing from D.A. Miller's work on The novel and the police (1988) in Victorian fiction, this paper looks at narrative strategies through which the same-sex underworld is portrayed, policed and contained in contemporary Vietnamese fiction. The pioneering works of the prolific policeman-author Bùi Anh Tấn have spearheaded a strong connection between sex and crime in his representations of homosexuality. These potentially subversive representations take place within a liminal underworld, often depicted as an alternative space constitutive of personal identity characterized by same-sex desire outside of recognition by legal authorities or public morality. A critical exploration of the police presence and function within the narrative can uncover the underlying techniques and technologies of surveillance and discipline whereby depictions of the same-sex underworld are policed by and therefore complicit in an operational regime of pervasive hetero-normativity. By examining the thematics of criminality, sexual/social outcast, self-renunciation/acceptance, and cultural ambiguity in the sizable LGBT-themed oeuvre of Bùi Anh Tấn over the past two decades, this paper explores how this body of works partakes in the construction and containment of a transgressive yet marginalized homosexual underworld. Marked by the police presence and subjected to the policing function of the texts, this same-sex underworld is transformed into an object of increasing attention and fascination for an ever so curious yet still ambivalent Vietnamese society.

KEYWORDS:

• Contemporary Vietnam
• homosexuality
• underworld
• police function
• narrative containment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Vinh Quốc Nguyễn, currently based in New York City as an adjunct lecturer in the Vietnamese Language Program at Columbia University, was a PhD candidate at Harvard University where he has received his BA in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and MA in Regional Studies – East Asia. He has done dissertation research in Vietnam under fellowships from the Fulbright Program and the Social Science Research Council. His areas of specialization are the Tây Sơn period in late eighteenth–century Vietnam, the transition from traditional dynastic to modern nationalist historiography, nôm literature and gender/queer studies. A bilingual version of his paper 'Deviant Bodies and Dynamics of Displacement of Homoerotic Desire in Vietnamese Literature from and about the French Colonial Period (1858–1954)' appeared in the online review Talawas in 2002, and his paper 'Cultural Ambiguity in Contemporary Vietnamese Representations of Homosexuality: A New Historicist Reading of Bùi Anh Tấn's Fiction' was published in the Journal of Vietnamese studies in 2015.