Talk “Việt Kiều Intimacy, K-POP Cover Dance”

Mon 09 Jun 2014, 6 pm
Manzi Art Space

From Manzi:

Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Vietnam, Queer Forever! and Manzi Art Space are pleased to invite you to a program of talks by Nguyễn Tân Hoàng and Dredge Byung’chu Käng.

Program

18h00 – Fooled by Love: Việt Kiều Intimacy in Contemporary Vietnamese Cinema

Nguyễn Tân Hoàng will look at the portrayal of returning overseas Vietnamese in Charlie Nguyen’s Vietnamese box office hit, the romantic comedy Để Mai tính (Fool for Love) (2010). The two central Việt kiều characters–Mai, young Vietnamese German aspiring singer-songwriter and Hội, a gay Vietnamese American entrepreneur–are set apart from the locals by their non-normative gender and sexual expressions. She shamelessly asserts her career ambitions, while he puts his effeminate mannerisms to good use in his cosmetic company dealings. Both are representatives of global capitalism’s enticing cosmopolitanism and transnational mobility. However, Mai’s and Hội’s economic interests are compromised by their erotic attachments to Dũng, a working-class heterosexual Vietnamese male. Hoàng names the difficult relationship between Việt kiều and local Vietnamese “Việt kiều intimacy,” a relationship that is marked by qualities of desire and disgust, past and future,public and private, far away and too close.

19h00 – 19h30: short break, refreshment

19h30 – K-Pop Cover Dance as a Model of Asian Development

For the past five years, K-pop cover dance—the copying of choreographed movements in K-pop music videos—has become a popular social activity among Asian sissies. Cover dance is organized into an extensive contest circuit leading to an annual competition in Korea. Thai sissies cover dances are performed in public spaces such as bars and shopping malls and get circulated extensively on the Internet. Indeed, Thai cover dance groups such as the Wonder Gay have achieved national fame. Dredge describes how cover dance constitutes a new social arena for feminine Thai males to express themselves through the idiom of modern Korean female embodiment. He argues that Thai K-pop cover dance can be read as both an aspiration for personal and national development that represents participation in a new cosmopolitan Asia. The cover dance phenomenon in Thailand highlights recent shifts in Asian regionalism, music fandom, and transgressive gender performance.

About authors

Nguyễn Tân Hoàng is a video artist and academic whose work examines forms of desire in queer Asian male identities, Vietnamese diasporic cultural production, and Southeast Asian cinemas. His critical writings have appeared in Porn Studies, Vectors, and Resolutions 3: Video Praxis in Global Spaces. His book A View from the Bottom is forthcoming from Duke University Press in August 2014. He is Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, USA.

Dredge Byung’chu Käng, MA is a PhD/MPH candidate in anthropology and global epidemiology at Emory University in Atlanta, USA. His critical essays have appeared in Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Asian Studies Review, and Transgender Studies Quarterly. Dredge’s dissertation, “White Asians Wanted: Queer Racialization in Thailand,” argues that middle class Thai gay men are directing their romantic desires toward newly ethno-racialized “white Asians” (light-skinned Asians from developed nations such as Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan or economically powerful Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia).

Language: Talks in English with Vietnamese translation

Free entrance.

Communication partner Hanoi Grapevine.

Manzi Art Space 14 Phan Huy Ich, Hanoi