Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism

Conclusion: Family Politics and the Art of Collaboration

Conclusion: Family Politics and the Art of Collaboration Peter Davies concludes his book Dangerous Liaisons: Collaboration and World War Two with a discussion of the Nazi collaborator, Maurice Papon, who was freed from prison in 2002, following his ten-year sentence for sending French Jews to concentration camps during World War II. After working exhaustively through the nuances of collaboration in Europe during WWII, Davies ends with a simple proposition: “Perhaps the legacy of collaboration is as significant as the story of collaboration .”1 My conclusion affirms Davies’s statement. Treacherous Subjects begins with the story of collaboration that limns the histories of many Vietnamese families. It ends by speaking to the postwar legacy of collaboration , the haunting effects of which are material and linger in the lived experiences of the Vietnamese and the diaspora. The legacy of collaboration is alluded to in the absences and presences that mark the picture of my family that was taken by a local news reporter in Butler, Pennsylvania, when we first came in 1975. My mother is not the only member of my family absent from the picture; two of my sisters are missing in this photo as well. Indeed, in looking through all my family’s photo albums, I cannot find a truly complete family portrait; someone is always missing and deeply missed.2 Even so, reunions have occurred for my family. An older sister, after having spent nine months in a refugee camp in Guam, arrived in the United States in 1990. These missing parts in the lives of whole families are one of the war’s lasting legacies. Premised upon such afterimages of war, Treacherous Subjects 180 / conclusion places great emphasis on these intervals to account for those who have been left out and left behind. To paraphrase Tim O’Brien, the things we carry are these family ties. Through literary and filmic examples, this book has explored familial ties that bind, focusing on the politics of collaboration and their discursive relation to betrayal and loyalty. The cultural productions examined here reference collaboration to discuss the colonial history and postcolonial reality of Việt Nam. Themes of collaboration index the political imaginaries of the Vietnamese and Vietnamese diaspora, signaling the ways in which artists understand Việt Nam’s history. Through the lens of collaboration, we witness how the portrait of Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic cultural production alludes to a familial narrative and the many fissures arising from war, occupation, and displacement that mark it. This book has interrogated the disciplining practices integral to the formation and maintenance of the constructions of family, community, and nation within Việt Nam and the diaspora. In the postwar era, the state and community denounce some women artists as traitors while celebrating men as auteurs. Such a perspective overlooks how assumptions about authorship and auteurship can prevent audiences and critics from acknowledging the actual practices of collaboration that many male artists engage in. Conversely, this view also dismisses the validity or even the possibility of artistic collaborations that are feminist and queer in nature, which I have explored in the book’s later chapters. The book has shown the extent to which the acts of inclusion and exclusion enacted by these collaborations are not only proscriptive but also prescriptive for those subjects who stand outside the norms of ideal citizenry, defined as industrious, respectful, and heterosexual. Treacherous Subjects names these gendered traitors of the national family both in Việt Nam and the diaspora as being mostly women and queer subjects whose sexuality is seen as deviant, unruly, and nonprocreative. Numerous Others—religious and political minorities, mixed-race peoples, and ethnic minorities—remain outside of this symbolic order as well, all with the potential to be treacherous subjects. The effacement of certain subjects from the portrait of the national family occurs within the borders of the nation-state—Việt Nam, France, and the United States—and within the bounds of a diasporic community. Treacherous Subjects investigates the cultural politics of collaboration to counter the forms of heterosexist patriarchy and nationalism underpinning denunciations or celebrations of collaborative acts. I enunciate this challenge through what I call trans-Vietnamese feminism. I conclusion / 181 conclude by reiterating my design for a feminist mode of analysis and collaborative practice, using artist Hanh Thi Pham’s work as further reinforcement of a need to “reframe the family”—to borrow from the title of one her...