Art, Media, & Feminism

Huong Ngo

I am an research-based artist and independent scholar here in Vietnam with the Fulbright US. Scholars

program. I'm currently working on an interdisciplinary project which will debut in Hanoi this summer

and travel to DePaul Art Museum next year, and a curriculum for a class at Northwestern University

this fall.

So I want to begin with some quick definitions of terms that I will be using. These are terms that are

getting redefined and complicated all the time in English, so I wanted share with you my working

definitions so when you hear me say them, you'll know what where my perspective is coming from. It's

important to note that I grew up and was educated in the United States, so when I use these terms, they

are drawing from that canon. One of my goals of working in Vietnam is to begin understanding how

some of these words are used or not used here, how they are translated, and to understand how and

where such conversations are happening.

So, I want to start with the word feminism, which can be defined as social, political, and ideological

movements that are working towards the goal of gender equality. I imagine that everyone here probably

is familiar with the difference between gender and sex, but just in case, sex is the biological difference

among women, men, and those who are intersex, which is defined at birth. Gender, on the other hand,

is the fluid category of how we express or perform our identities and the expectations of society for

particular genders. It is a social construction and as such, can change through time and vary between

cultures.

Intersectional feminism, first theorized in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, writer and Professor of Law at

the University of California, Los Angeles and Columbia University in New York, and introduced into

the larger discourse of feminism by Patricia Hill Collins in 1990, began to inflect the conversation of

feminism with considerations of other forms of identity. Specifically, Crenshaw, in her article

“Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”,

analyzes how gender must be examined in conjunction with race and class to fully understand how the

experience of for instance, being black, poor, and a woman in the US differs from the experience of

being a middle-class white woman. Her work resonated with me as well because of her investigation of

domestic violence amongst immigrants, particular women who had immigrated to the US to marry US

citizens. Crenshaw found that legislation intended to help these women seek support and refuge from

abusive partners did not take into consideration their particular dependence on their partners because of

their immigrant status, language and cultural barriers, and lack of social network. Intersectional

feminism has grown to include many axes of identity such as ability, religion, sexual orientation, and

class, among others.

Transnational feminism, could be considered an intersectional feminism across nations and

communities, layered with an analysis of colonialism, imperialism, nationhood, and exploitation on a

global scale. Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Jacqui Alexander have been influential in creating the

framework for this discourse. In her book Feminism Without Borders, Mohanty describes this as an

antiracist feminist struggle, borrowing her title from the organization “Doctors without Borders.”

Mohanty explains:

“Feminism without borders is not the same as a 'border-less' feminism. It acknowledges

the fault lines, conflicts, differences, fears, and containment that borders represent. It

acknowledges that there is no one sense of a border, that the lines between and through

nations, races, classes, sexualities, religions, and disabilities, are real – and that a

feminism without borders must envision change and social justice work across these lines

of demarcation and division. I want to speak of feminism without silences and exclusions

in order to draw attention to the tension between the simultaneous plurality and

narrowness of border and the emancipatory potential of crossing through, with, and over

these borders in our everyday lives.”

I really appreciate Mohanty and Crenshaw's emphasis on the everyday struggles as the basis for

theorization, and their resistance against a homogenization of female identity or experience. I want to

emphasize that the purpose of looking at identity through these lenses is not to predetermine what one's

experiences might be like in society, but rather to examine structural reasons for which struggles for

equality are different and begin to address those reasons. To do so, it helps to look at both quantifiable

trends in populations, for instance, the number of women in leadership positions throughout the world,

government and corporate policy around maternity leave, or equity in education among women. But, as

these scholars have also taught me, numbers and policy can only tell you one aspect of the story, and

that the intersection of different types of identity might not be easy to predict. This is a where

individual voices can make a difference in nuancing the conversation around feminism. So, I've put

together a selection of artists whose projects take both intersectional and/or transnational approaches to

understanding the effects of identity, but are also coming from deeply personal and everyday

experiences. I'm hoping these examples might help especially those of you for whom these terms are

new to see yourself in this movement more easily.

Ok, so I want to begin with two of Adrian Piper's pieces from 1986-1990. The first is called My Calling

(Card) #1 and the second is My Calling (Card) #2. Both are business card sized with type in sans-serif

font.

The first one on brown paper reads:

“Dear Friend, / I am black. / I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed

at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past, I have attempted to alert white people to my

racial identity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as

pushy, manipulative, or socially inappropriate. Therefore, my policy is to assume that

white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe there are no black

people present, and to distribute this card when they do. / I regret any discomfort my

presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is

causing me.”

The second on white paper reads:

“Dear Friend, / I am not here to pick anyone up, or to be picked up. I am here alone

because I want to be here, ALONE. / This card is not intended as part of an extended

flirtation. / Thank you for respecting my privacy.”

At first glance, Piper seems to be separating her different identities, one as a woman, one as a light-

skinned African-American, quite literally, into these two cards, which serve as a parody of a “Calling

Card” while also suggesting Piper's “Calling,” her need to speak out about injustices in her lived reality.

However, I'd like to argue first of all that the artwork itself is not just the card, but also Piper's

performance of giving the card to an offender. As secondary audience to this (viewing this work via

documentation), we complete the work by imagining her performance of it. In her performance, she is

both a woman and light-skinned African-American. As such, she will experience unwelcome romantic

solitications and racist jokes in different ways that have historical bearing. For instance, theorized by a

number of scholars, most notably Deborah Gray White in her 1999 book Ar'n't I a Woman, is the

perception of African women as being hyper-sexual, almost uncontrollably sexual, that has been used

as an implicit excuse for slave owner's sexual exploitation of black women in the United States. This

Jezebel character is still at play in the representation and policing of black and brown bodies in social

media, as examined by Rachel Dubrofsky and Megan Wood in their article “Gender, Race, and

Authenticity: Celebrity Women Tweeting for the Gaze.” In Piper's “My Calling (Card ) #1,” she calls

out racist microaggressions that are often defended with the familiar rebuttal “Can't you take a joke?” A

line so close to “You should smile more, you look prettier” that is often launched at women by

catcallers and political pundits alike. In this world where women are told to smile, to laugh, in which

black women are told that they their rape is inevitable and excusable, Piper's artwork as intersectional

performance is an act of survival.

So, I won't be talking about this piece in depth, but I just want to introduce you to another one of

Piper's performaces, this is from a series and it's entitled Catalysis IV from 1971. Piper explains this

piece to Lucy Lippard in an interview from 1972, “I dressed very conservatively, but stuffed a large red

bath towel in the side of my mouth until my cheeks bulged to about twice their normal size, letting the

rest of it hang down my front, and riding the bus, subway, and Empire State Building elevator.” In the

first of the series Catalysis I, she “saturated a set of clothing in a mixture of vinegar, eggs, milk and cod

liver oil for a week, then wore them on the D train during evening rush hour.” As in her Calling Cards,

where Piper makes visible the invisible, in the Catalysis series, Piper pushes the extent to which her

presence as a black female body both exists in the world, but is also rendered invisible through societal

perception and neglect.

Piper's work, coming on the heels of the civil rights movement in the United States and anticipating

protests against the Vietnam war, is a good anchor in understanding how intersectional and

transnational ideas, while not called such at the time, were surfacing and finding material realization. I

wanted to show you a magazine published at the same time in 1971. It was called Triple Jeopardy, and

was produced by the Third World Women's Alliance, based in NY. The “Triple” in Triple Jeopardy

stands for their struggle against Capitalism, Racism, & Sexism, a ready-made manifesto for the nascent

transnational feminist movement. In Triple Jeopardy, an interview with Angela Davis is placed

alongside a feature of a Vietnamese guerilla fighter, the occupation in Palestine, Chilean anti-fascist

movement, Guinea-Bissau independence, and women involved in the Filipino Revolution. Similar to

the decolonial quarterly mazazine Tricontinental, strategies of solidarity mix with Marxist and

decolonial analysis of concurrent struggles.

After the beautiful demonstrations of solidarity amongst civil rights struggles from this period, it is

easy to imagine the disappointment and disallusionment of many African-Americans, which has caused

them to unite behind the current #blacklivesmatter movement, mobilizing against increased police

violence and incarceration amongst the African-American community. The US has the highest

incarceration rate in the world. From the Prison Policy Initiative of 2010, the figures are at

approximately 3,553 people per 100,000, with African-Americans representing roughly two-thirds of

that number. The #blacklivesmatter movement has been working to make more visible the often

unexamined deaths of black people due to police brutality. For a project entitled “Funk, God, Jazz and

Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn,” organized by Creative Time and the Weeksville Heritage Center,

artist Simone Leigh, inspired by the history of social services started by the Black Panthers such as free

breakfasts for children and free health clinics, opened the “Free People's Health Clinic” in collaboration

with Stuyvesant Mansion, the home of Dr. Josephine English, the first black female OB-GYN doctor in

New York. The clinic, while limited in scope because of legal restrictions on medical services, provided

allopathic healing services, yoga and pilates classes, and free HIV screenings for members of the

community.

All of these historical organizational connections are quite important, as they were key to African-

Americans accessing healthcare at a grassroots level when they were not provided by the state, or when

doctors might not be sensitive to the circumstances of African-Americans. In an interview with Art in

America, Leigh cites as significant to her project multiple recent studies which have emerged

confirming that both black and white people, including medical personnel, assume black people feel

less pain than white people. She states, “The general lack of empathy for black people is a factor in

every aspect of interaction with medical providers. It goes to the core of what is difficult to name and

change in terms of structural racism and sexism. This is another reason why #BlackLivesMatter is such

an appropriate title for a civil rights movement here and now.”

Not only is the project looking at care in general as an issue within the black community, but as it is

recognizing women in the black community and their role as caretakers. I believe that the project was

actually made stronger by the fact that Leigh was not able to offer what we would imagine as standard

medical care, thus offering modes of self-care that fall outside these institutions but perhaps should be

more recognized as valid platforms not only for healing, but for community. These include

gynecological services through established midwifery and doula services, massage, acupuncture, dance

(based on Katherine Dunham's technique and choreography), yoga, pilates, blood pressure screenings,

HIV testing and counseling, and lectures on herbalism. They also included a publication called Waiting

Room Magazine, a collection of poetry, art, fiction and essays as a way to re-imagine the space of the

waiting room as one of care and culture.

For comparison to the context of Asian-American identity, I want to introduce one of my past projects,

a collaboration with the artist Hong-An Truong, that reflects on the history of immigration into the

United States. This project was prompted by an invitation from the artist Mary Walling Blackburn as

part of a larger framework of imagining radical citizenship. Truong's family and mine both immigrated

as refugees to the US following the reunification of Vietnam, and wanted to reflect on our own

experiences in relation to the history of Asian immigration, particularly the years of Chinese exclusion

from the US, which set the precedence for many of the United States' current immigration policies. A

little history about Chinese exclusion: it began in 1882 and was officially repealed in 1943, with

lingering effects for at least another two decades. It was the first time that the US had introduced quotas

based on an immigrant's national identity, the first time the government required photo identification,

thus initiating culture of visual surveillance, along with the introduction ofmiscegenation laws designed

to keep Chinese men (which were the demographic of most of the immigrants) from settling into the

US. At the same time, there were also restrictions on these new immigrants bringing their families to

the US based on their social class, so this was the first time that immigration was restricted by class.

Alongside changes in policy was a media war between parties for or against this discrimation, often

times the latter. Political cartoons often portrayed Chinese immigrants with exaggerated features,

clothes, and customs, stressing their difference from the existing population. On top of this, Chinese

immigrants, many of whom had to prove a familial relation to current US residents in order to be

admitted, underwent grueling interviews, often which took several hours and stretched over days while

they stayed in detention camps, in order to be admitted. The interviews often went into great detail

about the interviewee's former home and neighborhood, basically to catch descrepancies between

interviewees and current residents (if you've ever seen the movie Green Card, it's like this, but with

much less romantic humor and no Gérard Depardieu). Truong and I used transcripts of these

interviews, combined with questions from current immigration exams, to construct an immigration

interview for a fictional state, aimed at 1) giving residents with birth-right citizenship (who were born

in the US) a chance to experience the process of interviewing for immigration, and 2) to hold these

questions, our responses, and the construction of power that we give ourselves over to, in the light of

examination. Many interviewees are shocked at the questions that they are required to answer and

acknowledged that they had to intentionally lie in order to answer the questions as they believed we, or

'the state' wanted them to answer.

We reiterated this performance in many different forms, sometimes interviewing one person at a time in

private, sometimes interviewing a single person in front of an audience, and in the most recent

iteration, working with immigration lawyers who helped us revise our interview and actually performed

as the immigration officials. We've presented this work in installation form here, along with annotated

archival materials. More recently, we've begun an extension of this project that focuses on our mothers

and their labor as women and refugees in the US. We are taking as our starting point two photographs

that we found of our mothers, from completely different sides of the country (my mom in North

Carolina and Truong's in Arizona) striking almost the exact same pose in front of similar huge white

American cars, both in formal dress. Truong and I are interesting in how examining the history of our

mothers and the larger context in which they are working and how they are remembered might help to

complicate the myths of the model minority and the American dream that work to homogenize

individual stories of struggle and traumas of war as well as gloss over institutional discrimination and

the injustices of global capitalism.

A new media artist who is also examining Asian identity in a very different way is Jennifer Chan,

whose project “Boyfriend” from 2014 combines internet tropes and heartfelt videoblogs culled from

Youtube to construct a video that examines Asian masculinity and questions the bias of the white

heterosexual male as the default internet user, which encourages a patriarchal and often misogynistic

atmosphere online, as demonstrated by #gamergate, a sexual harassment campaign organized around

the twitter tag with the same name, and similar activity on the anonymous network 4chan. Chan creates

a performance via Youtube video in which her identity, as the supposed female audience for the videos

that she collects, completes the work and revalues the actions of these men. Chan “translates” the

videos, but as an audience member without an understanding of Chinese and because of its context as

video art, the certainty of the translations are thrown into question, creating a barrier between the

audience and the “meaning” of the work and questioning for whom this content is made. In this

Brechtian move, I as a viewer suddenly feel like a tourist trespassing in this territory of the internet

where I have to question the assumption of my own belonging.

And here, I just want to mention this article from Hyperallergic.com, a popular art magazine based in

New York, that takes white feminist media culture to task on the representation of female people-of-

color. Chan is a very vocal part of this community and a strong voice in this article, just so you can see

that this conversation is extending into virtual spaces.

In the context of Vietnamese art and culture, I wanted to introduce the Queer Forever Festival, which

held its second iteration just this last winter. Begun in 2012, the festival, held in Hanoi both years, hosts

a range of artists, filmmakers, scholars, writers, activists, and participants. Here is the poster from 2012

(left) and the cover of a zine by the artist Gabby Miller and collaborators, circulated during the recent

festival (right). Here is the schedule from the two years to give you an idea of the programming.

I want to pause here because in the last examples, the intersectional and transnational feminist

considerations were for the most part gender plus race, ethnicity, nationality and sometimes, plus class.

In the US, the LGBTQ+ movement is very much linked and indebted to other civil rights struggles

including feminism. In Vietnam, as I'm able to gather from speaking to key actors in the movement,

they have less overlap, but I am currently in the process of interviewing participants and organizers of

this festival and might have a better idea of intersectionalities once I hear from them. But for now, I just

want to introduce a couple of the projects that were presented in which I see intersectional or

transnational thinkings or origins.

The first is Việt Lê's Video, “Love Bang! Series,” a hip hop, pop, hybrid spun into a time-traveling

fantasy that through the process of fantastical queering, throws into question expectations of women in

Vietnam and purist notions of identity through nation, gender, sexual orientation, or medium. The video

combines English, Vietnamese, and Khmer, as part of a trilogy that is exhibited in Hô Chi Minh City,

Phnom Penh, and Los Angeles, and crosses borders between video art and music video. Lê further

hybridizes the typical role of a music video producer (whose work usually comes after the music) by

initiating collaborations with a musician, music producer, rapper, singer, videographer, costume

designer, and drag queen performers to produce this project, also complicating or “queering” his

monolithic identity as an artist.

With a similarly collaborative/curatorial approach is the zine Vănguard. In a 2016 interview with the

magazine Diacritics, one of the founders Aiden Nguyễn attributes inspiration for the zine from the

writer and artist Mimi Thị Nguyễn who created the zine Evolution of a Race Riot. Mimi Thị Nguyễn's

work, which includes her book The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages,

examines the figure of the post-Vietnam war refugee in the context of the war on terror, neo-liberal

globalization, and US empire. I find this looping back of inspiration, from a Vietnamese diaspora writer

in the US back to a queer community in Vietnam very interesting, and Aiden's reflection on that even

more so: “if Vietnamese activists continue to use the queer liberation movement in the United States (or

other 'Western' countries) as their foundation, I will say this: if they want to effectively approach

activism, I advise them to use that foundation as a place to learn and grow, instead of blindly following

them in their footsteps. Similar to a lot of the activism in the United States, the prominent activist scene

in Vietnam seems to favor a top-down approach rather than the more radical bottom-up approach. Just

to sum up these approaches, top-down refers to the ideology that if those who are at the very top (those

in power with the most privilege) receives their benefits first then it will ‘trickle down’ to those at the

bottom.”

I realize that many of these projects that I have presented are collaborative in some way and defy the

typical medium and framework of “art.” Some enter terrritories of social practice, activism, self-

publication, and daily performance. I'm interested in reflecting on these discourse-driven practices as I

move into my own project and to think about how intersectional and transnational feminist approaches

demand new aesthetic strategies. I haven't fully theorized this question or what it means for a

movement to “demand” a new approach, but I'm interested in it a generative provocation for my own

work.