Gender in Vietnamese Comtemporary Cinema: from the Issue of Prostitution

My paper is going to discuss the representation of female prostitutes in Vietnamese cinema in the context of the country’s embracement of globalization.  From a gender perspective, I will examine the impacts of the transition from a socialist economy to a capitalist economy on the culture and society in the late 1980s and 1990s. The question of how the drastic changes in the economic roles of genders have influenced the striking shifts of female stereotypes in cinema interests me.

The year 1986 marked a milestone in Vietnam history:  the country took up marketization and integration into the global economy after having keenly followed a socialist economy. The  State’s slogan “industrialization and modernization” has been spread over the population since the 1990s. This immediately brought not only crucial development but also caused cultural ruptures in the nation. Many films of the 2000s deal with the prostitution theme as an implicit indication of the aftermath of globalization. Women, the embodiment of the nation, have been displayed as the victims in this transition. Accordingly, prostitution metaphorically refers to the cost the country has had to pay for globalization, reflecting the social anxiety of a national identity crisis in the midst of a changing economy. Rather than focusing on the victimization of women, I examine how filmmakers make use of a frangible female body to claim their unstable positions as artists in the process of the reformation of cinema in the post-communism period.  I argue that male filmmakers use prostitution and HIV/AIDS and its consequences, one of the most threatening topics in the country, to blame the State’s responsibility in the national identity crisis in general and masculinity in particular, setting up a new idea of patriarchy to control women’s independence. By considering victims as prostitutes, they avoid their own responsibility as a “pillar of the family”, contributing to the physical and moral decline of women. Embracing feminism, I read prostitute-theme films against traditional nationalist and humanist readings that these male intellectuals manipulate for films of their choosing. I will take Bargirls (2003) and Street Cinderella (2004), by Le Hoang, and The Little Heart (2006), by Nguyen Thanh Van, the two state-invested films, as case studies.