538860
research-article2014
EJW0010.1177/1350506814538860European Journal of Women’s StudiesRydstrom
EJ WS
Article
Politics of colonial violence:
Gendered atrocities in French
occupied Vietnam
European Journal of Women’s Studies
1­–17
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1350506814538860
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Helle Rydstrom
Lund University, Sweden
Abstract
By drawing on testimonies gathered in rural Vietnam, this article focuses on the violence
to which local inhabitants were subjected when Vietnam was under French rule (1883–
1954). On a self-imposed ‘civilizing mission’, the control of local bodies was critical for
the colonial powers and they became the subject of brutal abuse. Violence was exercised
with impunity in the occupied areas and rendered ‘logic’ in accordance with western
imaginations about racial superiority. While such ideas informed colonial terror in
general, the differentiated registers of terror implemented in regard to women and men
disclose how sovereign attempts of reducing local inhabitants to bare life were designed,
in addition to race, along the lines of gender and sexuality. Vietnamese testimonies from
the French colonial period reveal experiences of a reality of horror which in the article
is considered through the prism of four different body typologies; typologies which
elucidate the symbolic, physical, and imaginary metamorphoses through which women
and men in differentiated ways were being increasingly dehumanized in the encounter
with the colonial power.
Keywords
Bare life, French colonialism, gendered violence, testimonies, Vietnam
Introduction
In the beginning of the new millennium I returned to Thinh Tri, a rural community in
northern Vietnam, to carry out yet another anthropological fieldwork this time with a
focus on violence.1 It was unnerving increasingly to realize how especially elderly
women were haunted by memories of the brutality inflicted upon inhabitants by the
Corresponding author:
Helle Rydstrom, Department of Gender Studies, Lund University, Lund, S-221 00, Sweden.
Email: [email protected]
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colonial forces during the period when Vietnam was under French rule (1883–1954).2
With pain, they would recall how the French troops ‘tortured’ (tra tan) people, ruptured
lives and caused much ‘anguish’ (dau xot). The experiences of French colonial atrocities
are thus embodied in the local memory but while the violence engrained in the war
between Vietnam and the USA has been widely documented,3 the brutality embedded in
French colonialism in Vietnam has only rarely been highlighted.4
Both Thinh Tri men and women were subjected to colonial violence, but local experiences bear witness to horrendous and differentiated abuse designed by French soldiers
along the lines of race, gender and sexuality. Western colonialism revolved around the
control of human bodies which was exercised violently with impunity (Arondekar, 2009;
Hansen and Stepputat, 2006; Pierce and Rao, 2006; Stoler, 2002). The violence was
designed to generate fear, loyalty and legitimacy as means for the French to bring into
realization an imagined community intrinsic to the project of western modernism. Those
located ‘outside’ a self-defined western ‘centre of civilization’ were diminished and considered beyond its realm of civilization, sociality and order (Anderson, 2006; Fanon,
2001; Mbembe, 2003; Pierce and Rao, 2006; Spivak, 1990). These people were rendered
less human in ways that resemble the figure conceptualized by Giorgio Agamben (1998,
2005) as homo sacer; a figure who is rendered ‘naked’ and included only by exclusion.
While Agamben (1998) has discussed how the bio-politics of race facilitate violence,
he does not pay attention to how gender and sexuality permeate different modalities of
violence (see also Butler, 2004, 2010). This omission has at least two implications for
feminist studies of violence. First, examinations of how gender and sexuality inform
repertoires of abuse (and, in doing so, materialize gender-differentiated experiences of
dehumanization) are discouraged. And second, women’s experiences of gender-specific
and sexual maltreatment risk being circumvented and unacknowledged, or disavowed, in
local and national commemorations of conflicts.
Vietnamese testimonies from the French colonial period reveal experiences of a reality of horror which I would suggest can be considered through the prism of four different
body typologies. These typologies elucidate the symbolic, physical and imaginary metamorphoses through which women and men in differentiated ways were being increasingly dehumanized in the encounter with the colonial power. Yet inspired by feminist
studies of violence, I wish to eschew an exclusive focus on women. While such a focus
has been imperative for the documentation of abuse of women across the globe, a
woman-only perspective also tends to sidestep explorations of the ways in which relations between women and men shape a wide range of violent acts and inflict genderspecific experiences of being violated.5
Testimonies
Opposition to French colonialism was not uniform in the local community or elsewhere in
Vietnam. In Thinh Tri, there were ‘betrayers’ (Viet gian/‘te’) who collaborated with the
French from within (see also Luong, 1992; Marr, 1981; Tai, 1996; Truong Buu Lam,
2003). Yet, the narratives about colonial violence that I have collected voice only one side
of a complex conflict which consisted of various political factions in Vietnam. In their
narratives, Thinh Tri inhabitants tend to cluster colonizers, betrayers and perpetrators
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together in opposition to the colonized, the ‘guerillas’ (du kich) and the tortured. Hence,
my data do not include Vietnamese voices of those who supported French governing in
Vietnam and the Indo-Chinese Union (hereafter referred to as Indochina) (Bradley, 2009;
Marr, 1981).6
Testimonies about French colonialism and the cruelty it brought to local sites provide
personal accounts of experiences that are intertwined with sociocultural practices, larger
national narratives and individual and collective memory work. They bear witness to
how the human and inhuman collapse into one to facilitate violence’s desubjectification
of its targets. Narrating experiences also holds the power to resubjectify the survivor by
providing a means through which the brutality to which one was subjected can be
opposed (Agamben, 1999; Jackson, 2002; Mills, 2003). Narrating the vindictiveness
once experienced becomes meaningful as a counterattack, because ‘with its every word,
testimony refutes precisely this isolation … of survival from life’ (Agamben, 1999: 155).
Testimonies also are speech acts enacted in dialogue. Narratives about the terror experienced in the past are volatile in character and do not necessarily take shape as completely scripted or outright spontaneous narratives (Hershatter, 2002). Tellers make
efforts to construct a coherent story of the brutal and scattered incidents that took place
under highly difficult and despairing circumstances (Das, 1997, 2007; Kleinman, 2000).
The retrospective narrative of a terrifying incident transforms into a new experience
when readdressed through narrative. The narrator then is the person whom the survivor
of violence became in order to cope with the aftermath of the painful event (Brown,
2006; Jackson, 2002; Ricoeur, 2004).
Narratives bring to life the horror witnessed as ‘narrative truths’, which differ from a
time-bound ‘historical truth’ aiming at investigating what ‘really’ happened (Ochs and
Capps, 2001; Ricoeur, 2006).7 The importance of remembering tormenting episodes of
the past thus does not only, or, from some perspectives, even primarily, lie in their historical accuracy. Their importance, instead, lies in their ability to voice individual and
collective experiences of being dehumanized; experiences that can be shared with others
by being heard by the listener and read by the reader.
Zones of exception
The ‘Forever French’ vision subscribed to western nineteenth-century dreams of geopolitical expansion beyond European territory, the generation of economic wealth and
global dominance (Marr, 1981; Truong Buu Lam, 2003). The European desire to chart
and conquer land in Africa, the Americas and Asia was nourished by ideologies of racial
superiority and an imagined imperial community considered worth fighting for
(Anderson, 2006).
Agamben (1998) has discussed how sovereignty refers to a power granted by the
juridical order to decide who stands outside the law. A sovereign power is able to suspend
the validity of the law and thus decide about the constituency of a state of exception. As
Achille Mbembe (2003: 24) has pointed out, the colonies are ‘the location par excellence
where the controls and guarantees of juridical order can be suspended – the zone where
the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization”’. The contiguity between sovereignty and the state of exception refers to an
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European Journal of Women’s Studies 
ambiguous zone that blurs the juridical and political status of individuals (Arondekar,
2009; Das, 2007; Fanon, 2001; Nguyen-vo Thu-huong, 2014; Pierce and Rao, 2006;
Stoler, 2002).
Such a power can take biological life as its primary target, as corporeality upon which
violence and death can be enacted. The figure upon which the intrusive destructiveness of
power is carried out Agamben has conceptualized as ‘bare life’, or homo sacer.8 As an
emblematic figure, homo sacer emerges as a product of a sovereign sphere wherein which
it is ‘permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice,
and sacred life [i.e. homo sacer] – that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed – is the
life that has been captured in this sphere’ (Agamben 1998: 83; italics removed). Such life
would be deemed ‘sacred’ by the sovereign power; banned from society as a person who
does not enjoy full citizen rights, but subject, nevertheless, to the law that bans it. Homo
sacer is, thus, an outlaw, a ‘naked life’, declared unprotected by law, without value as a
human being, considered worthless (Agamben, 1998: 114–115).9
Built upon racial assumptions, colonialism epitomizes the bio-political foundation of
homo sacer (Hansen and Stepputat, 2006; Mbembe, 2003; Pierce and Rao, 2006). In his
analysis of the ways in which racism, interconnected with violence, saturates the construction of bare life, Agamben refers, amongst others, to Hannah Arendt.10 According to
Arendt, the violences of racism (1970: 76) ‘are deliberate acts based on pseudo-scientific
theories. Violence in interracial struggle is always murderous, but it is not “irrational”; it
is the logical and rational consequence of racism.’ Race has shadowed western political
idea and practice, as elucidated by Mbembe (2003), as fantasies about people in nonwestern societies and how to rule over them (see Arondekar, 2009; Fanon, 2001; Kolsky,
2009; Spivak, 1990; Stoler, 2002).
Control of human life and bodies was at the fore of colonialism. This control was built
on juridical lapses in ‘the colony’ and elaborated bio-political modes of power (Hansen
and Stepputat, 2006; Pierce and Rao, 2006; Stoler, 2002). A case in point is provided by
the man who has been called the architect of French torture techniques, Paul Aussaresses.
Active in France’s colonial war in Vietnam, in the Second World War and in France’s war
against Algeria, he found spaces to develop and implement dismaying torture methods.11
Aussaresses taught his methods to the American Green Berets, amongst others, and they
brought their knowledge about torture with them back to Vietnam when they came in
their war against the country (Sessions, 2013).
Not only race but also gender and sexuality were exploited by the French colonial troops
as a means to incite and exacerbate violence in the Vietnamese colony (cf. Das, 1997, 2007;
Giles and Hyndman, 2004; Spivak, 1990). The ways in which Thinh Tri women and men
were dehumanized by a sovereign power’s attempt to render them ‘naked’ can be understood, as indicated, with reference to the notion of homo sacer. However, while the meaning of race is integrated into the figure of homo sacer, Agamben’s conceptualization of
homo sacer does not account for the gendered and sexualized dimensions of the perpetuation of bare life and its modes of materialization. The qualities of gender and sexuality thus
need to be invoked into the study of the ways in which bare life is configured in particular
spaces as lenses for explorations of the processes through which women and men are subjected to dehumanization in specific historical moments (Asibong, 2003; Davis, 1997;
Rydstrom, 2012; Sanchez, 2004).
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French colonialism in Vietnam
France portrayed its geopolitical expansions as a civilizing mission (which though also
provided a source of huge economic benefits) (Anderson, 2006; Ngo Vinh Long, 1991;
Tonnessen, 2010). French campaigns to seize control over Vietnam began in 1861. In
1863, the Vietnamese Emperor Tu Duc ceded three southern provinces to France. Four
years later, French troops occupied three additional southern provinces and included
Vietnam into the French governed Indo-Chinese Union. In 1883, when French forces
stormed the citadel in Hanoi, the Imperial Court at Hue (central Vietnam) officially recognized Annam (central and southern Vietnam) and Tonkin (northern Vietnam) as French
protectorates under French imperial rule (Bradley, 2009: 10–15; Marr, 1981: 190–192).
Even though the Vietnamese opposition was not homogeneous, French rule in Vietnam
increasingly was challenged not least due to the efforts of Nguyen Ai Quoc (i.e. ‘Nguyen
the Patriot’), who later became known as Ho Chi Minh (i.e. ‘He who Enlightens’). At a
conference of the Peasant International held in Moscow in 1924, Nguyen Ai Quoc argued
for a revolutionary rather than reformist anti-colonial movement (as represented by the
early opposition). Later the same year, he established the Vietnamese Revolutionary
Youth League,12 which became a frontrunner for the later communist organized opposition to French colonialism in Vietnam (Duiker, 1995: 27; see also Logevall, 2012; Ruane,
1998). In early 1930, the Vietnamese Communist Party (Dang cong san Viet Nam)13 was
established with the approval of Comintern14 and with Ho Chi Minh as its leader. Also in
1930, the Women’s Union for Emancipation was founded, and the goal of the increasingly well-organized opposition was national independence (Marr, 1981; Ruane, 1998;
Tai, 1996).
In 1940, while France was occupied by Nazi Germany, Germany’s ally, Japan, initiated a sudden attack on French forces along the Chinese–Vietnamese border and took
control over the northern part of Vichy French Indochina. With Chinese Kuomintang
troops fighting the Japanese forces in the north and British troops fighting Japanese soldiers in the south, Vietnam became a Second World War battlefield. Most of the leading
members of the Vietnamese Communist Party had been arrested by the French colonial
power prior to the Japanese invasion of Vietnam but the Party, nevertheless, managed to
organize local support and eventually seize control over the northern part of Vietnam
(Bradley, 2009; Duiker, 1995; Logevall, 2012; Ruane, 1998; Wiegersma, 1988). Women
in the north had an active role during the opposition to French colonialism, though,
above all in the rear by providing support for men’s organized opposition as also indicated by the slogan ‘let women replace men in all tasks in the rear’ (Turley, 1972: 797).15
In August 1945, Ho Chi Minh declared the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV)
with its capital in Hanoi (i.e. in northern Vietnam). Ho Chi Minh’s government was supported by the former Soviet Union, while Great Britain, France and the USA supported a
southern government located in Saigon (i.e. contemporary Ho Chi Minh City) led by
Emperor of Annam, Bao Dai, in close collaboration with France (Tonnesson, 2010: 114).
The Foreign Legion troops stationed in Vietnam had been incarcerated by Japan during
its occupation of Vietnam but they were released after the Japanese capitulation in 1945
and were rearmed with the aid of Great Britain (Bradley, 2009; Duiker, 1995; Goscha,
2011; Logevall, 2012; Ruane, 1998).
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To reassert French control over northern Vietnam, in November 1946, French troops
bombed the port of Hai Phong (in northeastern Vietnam) and killed at least 6000 civilians (Tonnesson, 2010: 133–136).16 The bombings kindled a Vietnamese rage already
well-founded because of French brutality in general and the recent loss of as many as
2 million Vietnamese who had starved to death in the years between 1943 and 1945
when French and Japanese soldiers had confiscated and burned rice for fuel, raised
taxes, and forced peasants to plant export crops (Ngo Vinh Long, 1991: 121–137;
Wiegersma, 1988: 103–106).
By the end of the Second World War, the Allied Powers were eager to settle the conflict
between France and the new Republic and thus agreed with China at the Potsdam
Conference, in July 1945, that Vietnam was to be partitioned at the 16th parallel into a
North and a South. Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek should be responsible for the North
and British Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten for the South. While China eventually withdrew its troops from the North, France maintained administrative, economic and political
influence in Vietnam and frenetically tried to regain its previous level of control over the
country (Duiker, 1995; Logevall, 2012; Marr, 1981; Ruane, 1998; Tonnessen, 2010).
Hence, on 19 December 1946, the Communist Party and the Vietnam Independence
League (Viet Nam doc lap dong minh; i.e. the Viet Minh) declared a war of liberation
against French dominance in Vietnam, and the First Indochina War broke out (Tonnesson,
2010: 1–4, 11–38; Wiegersma, 1988: 103–106). A prolonged struggle for an independent
and united country began. Not until almost 10 years later, in 1954, was victory achieved,
as a result of North Vietnamese soldiers storming the strategically important French garrison in the Dien Bien Phu valley in mountainous northwestern Vietnam (Duiker, 1995).17
An adventure of men
Colonialism was primarily an adventure for western men, as was common in the areas
which were not settlement colonies (Kolsky, 2009; Stoler, 2002). Hence, higher ranking
officers were sent from France to Vietnam to rule the colony from the cities (Goscha,
2011; Proschan, 2002a, 2002b; Tracol-Huynh, 2010; Truong Buu Lam, 2003). The
French colonial forces in Vietnam consisted of four different sections: i.e. the AnnamTonkin section, the Cochinchina-Cambodia section, the Mountain section and a regiment
of artillery. Each section was composed of men from Vietnam and Europe, a category
which also included men recruited from African countries occupied by France (Goscha,
2011; Truong Buu Lam, 2003).18
Almost 70% of the soldiers fighting for the French troops at the battle of Dien Bien
Phu were Foreign Legion, Africans and Vietnamese. The unruly Foreign Legion constituted the European unit of the French troops (Goscha, 2011: 2). Of those soldiers, according to Truong Buu Lam (2003: 21), who were ‘ethnically Europeans the majority of them
were Germans, who belonged to the notorious terror-striking section of the French army,
that is, its Foreign Legion, which was called upon whenever there was resistance to be
crushed’. The troops were disorganized and rampaging throughout the country on ruthless raids which included torturing and killing of Vietnamese combatants and civilians
– hence the common reference to the First Indochina War as the Dirty War (Goscha,
2011; Vecchione, 1983).19
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My data suggest that soldiers from the Annam-Tonkin section and from the Foreign
Legion were sent to Thinh Tri to fight local resistance. Thinh Tri, inhabitants proudly
told, was able to withstand many French attacks. The community, therefore, had won
a reputation as a stronghold for the war of resistance against French colonialism.
Inhabitants used to sound the alarm of any rumours of upcoming French attacks on the
community, so they could prepare their flight by collecting valuable and necessary
items in big baskets to carry with them. During the final – and frantic – stages of
French colonialism in Vietnam, in the years between 1949 and 1953, Thinh Tri thus
became the target of frequent and brutal raids. Once when I visited old Le, she described
with horror an incident which had taken place in the very same house where she lives
today with her family:
There were many grenades. The evenings were dark and foggy and we never knew when they
[i.e. the French soldiers] would come back again. We always had to hide in the darkness to
escape the grenades … . Once, after an attack, seven people were killed right here in this
room. The French had thrown grenades into our house so everybody in this room was killed.
All the remains of the dead were mixed; legs, arms, hands [etc.; listing limbs and organs]. All
mixed up.
Le remembered the gruesome task in which her family had engaged, of trying to distinguish between the remains of those who had been killed so each person could be buried
properly. She also described how the blood stained on the walls could never be fully
washed away. When fleeing colonial raids, Thinh Tri inhabitants would usually hide in
elaborated labyrinthine tunnels that had been dug beneath the ancient pagoda. On that
day, however, the group in Le’s house had been taken by surprise and killed. In the night,
under the protection of the darkness, when the gunfire had ceased, people emerged from
the tunnels and returned to their homes, sometimes only to realize that their houses had
been set on fire by the French forces. Razing villages was an integral part of the French
raids.
Staged punishment
Local opposition to French sovereignty would typically be carried out by men, who in
the colonial optic were possible candidates for enrolment into one of the sections of the
colonial army. Local combatants, men suspected of being ‘guerillas’, were identified by
the colonial troops and subjected to terrifying public punishment (Luong, 1992; TracolHuynh, 2010; Truong Buu Lam, 2003). ‘Once [they] pulled a man around in the commune’, old Hoa told me: ‘they were shouting “Where are the tunnels, where are all the
guerillas?” He said, “I don’t know, I don’t know”. But his life was not spared; he was
executed before they left.’ Rumours about the tunnels had thus spread, but the French
never succeeded in finding out where they were.
Colonial demonstrations of superiority through public humiliation, torture and killing
were used to set a cruel example which inhabitants observed in great disbelief and fear.
Hoa described the torture to which her distant cousin, Phong, had been subjected by the
French forces:
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Whenever the French forces came to our village, they killed some of the guerillas [du kich].
People whom the French suspected to be guerillas would be caught and get their hands tied on
their back. Then they were interrogated. If not willing to talk, they would be beaten. Their
clothes would be stripped off and they would be beaten with a cord; they got bruises on their
hands and backs … . Once Phong [Hoa’s male cousin] was caught [by the French soldiers] and
forced to lie down. They poured water into his mouth and then jumped on his stomach. Then
they pulled off his clothes and beat him with a cord.
As Hoa witnessed, torture was used by the invading soldiers as a means to obtain certain
information and intimidate local opposition. With its deliberateness, torture deconstructs
basic assumptions about the integrity of the human body and mind. Punishment techniques, as experienced in the local community, conflate the boundaries between private
and public, between the inside and outside. Public torture as spectacle spills out beyond
the body and pain of the individual into the sphere of a petrified collective (Asad, 1996;
Scarry, 1985; Zarkov, 2007; Zizek, 2009).
Violence cannot be disconnected from instrumental rationality (Arendt, 1970). Its
performative manifestations thus can be seen as ‘public rituals in which antagonistic
relationships are staged and prototypical images of violence enacted. Different kinds of
“war ceremonies” play an important part in the preparation and aftermath of war expeditions’ (Schmidt and Schröder, 2001: 3).
One particularly horrifying episode orchestrated by the French troops was imprinted
onto the individual and collective memory in Thinh Tri. Interestingly, however, information about the incident did not frame it as a myth of heroic suffering. Rather, information
was conveyed to me only sporadically and hesitatingly. Khanh, a single woman living
with her brother’s family where I used to visit, once spontaneously brought up the bloody
carnage that her father had witnessed and shared with his family when he, terrified, came
home only to prepare his escape. With great bitterness, Khanh described the atrocities to
which inhabitants had been subjected by the French troops:
My father was active in the war of resistance against the occupational forces. One day my father
was captured by the French soldiers together with many other people from the commune. There
were some betrayers in the commune. The French gathered everybody they had caught near the
huge pond for interrogation. But people refused to cooperate. They would not answer the
questions.
Then the French soldiers forced some men to execute those who did not answer the questions.
They were forced to kill their friends and relatives; they had to execute them by chopping off
their heads. Then they were told to throw the heads into the big pond.
After that, the French soldiers forced some men to climb into the pond to collect the heads, pull
them back, and place them on the ground before the crowd. Then the French soldiers forced
others to comb the hair on the heads. They were told that if they did as they were ordered, their
life would be spared.
My father was very afraid. When he came back home in the evening, he was too afraid to eat
the dinner which my mother had prepared. He decided to escape to try to hide from the French.
[Later, the entire family fled their home.]
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Such macabre incidents of performed terror have fostered a strong ‘hatred’ (cam thu)
against France in the local community. The episode, Khanh indicated, was meant as a
retaliatory act for local opposition organized against French sovereignty in Vietnam. The
testimony reveals colonial violence as spectacle, suggesting that the abuse had been
planned and prepared in advance. It appears as a choreographed massacre and as a public
scene of ritualized terror which, in addition to the gross violence, also sent an unambiguous message to Thinh Tri inhabitants in general and to guerillas in particular: ‘if you do
not comply with French colonialism, a ghoulish theater of murder will be back, for new
victims’ (see also Scarry, 1985; Schmidt and Schröder, 2001; Zarkov, 2007; Zizek, 2009).
Sexual abuse
If the terror experienced by men during this period was massive, the terror with regard to
women reached further stages of viciousness. Women were twice conquered; first as
Vietnamese and second as Vietnamese women (Tracol-Huynh, 2010: S74; see also
Proschan, 2002a, 2002b). ‘The French troops made life very difficult for everybody’,
Thinh Tri inhabitants remembered; there was very little food, it was unpleasant to hide in
the tunnels because of the limited space and stale air, men had to fight, and women had
to stay at home being in charge of the family and the rice fields.
And: ‘they raped women, sometimes until they died’.
The abuse inflicted upon Thinh Tri women epitomizes how brutality was shaped and
multiplied in accordance with ideas not only about race but also about gender and sexuality.20 As Mbembe (2003: 15) has reminded us, gender and sexuality are ‘inextricably
linked to violence and to the dissolution of the boundaries of the body and self … . The
truth of sex and its deadly attributes reside in the experience of loss of the boundaries
separating reality, events, and fantasized objects.’
Rape is a profoundly damaging weapon. Brutally enforced upon (usually) women and
girls in war (and even in peacetime), sexual assault pugnaciously intimidates its immediate victim by causing great pain, fear, humiliation, and not uncommonly stigmatization.
Experiences of sexual violence, therefore, not unlikely transform into tacit knowledge at
both the individual and collective level and, therefore, go unacknowledged (Hale, 2010;
Sjoberg and Via, 2010; Weaver, 2010).
Sexual assault of women and girls in war is a commonly used strategic weapon. As
‘producers’ of a population and thus reproducers of the collective (Yuval-Davis, 2008:
26), women are targeted and violated sexually by men in ways that are loaded with dreadful symbolism. Rape emerges as a ritualized means of torture, one of the messages of the
torture being that the perpetrators are capable of feminizing the men who belong to the
same group as the assaulted women (see also Das, 1997; Olujic, 1995; Zarkov, 2007).
Ruthless sexual maltreatment of women is used in war by male forces as a means to
extract information from women and girls who are suspected of being involved with the
enemy, or to punish entire groups of populations. As a strategic weapon, rape harms the
woman or girl upon whom it is inflicted and conveys at the same time an unequivocal
and disconcerting message about male superiority, control and power to a community
and its members (cf. Giles and Hyndman, 2004; Hale, 2010; Hearn, 1998; Linke, 1997;
Nordstrom, 1991, 1996).
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Pregnant women
While any woman was susceptible of being raped by the intruding colonial forces,
pregnant women were singled out by the invading soldiers. ‘If the French captured a
pregnant woman’, old Quyen recalled with repugnance, ‘they would say: “You are
pregnant” and then take her to a different place where she would face much suffering
[i.e. she would be raped]. We always begged the soldiers to spare pregnant women. But
women always suffer in wars.’ Experiencing the gross violation of being raped
while pregnant was truly devastating and excruciating for the women who were targeted. The gender-directed violence of the French forces thus sent waves of shock
through the community.
Pregnant women are prone to being attacked in war as the embodied symbol of an
enemy capable of projecting strength into the future by producing children – which, in
the eyes of the attacking forces, means more enemies. The murder of pregnant women
and their foetuses for perpetrators like the French forces thus come to symbolize the
definitive destruction of an ultimate enemy (see Das, 2007; Giles and Hyndman, 2004;
Hale, 2010; Nordstrom, 1991, 1996; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2005).
Old My told me how some of her female friends had been executed by the French
troops. While we were sitting on the porch of her house in the late summer afternoon, My
recalled how a group of friends accused of being Communist cadres had been captured
by the colonial forces. The women, several of whom were pregnant, were tied to a huge
tree for interrogation. When the women refused to provide information about local resistance, the soldiers plunged their bayonets into their bellies.
In the early 1990s, unwilling to accept the reduction of her friends into passive victims of brutality, My submitted a small text to the local newspaper to commemorate them
and their tragic deaths. While showing me the small newspaper clipping, My explained
how the text was intended as a way of ensuring that the courage and the suffering of her
friends would not sink into oblivion. In order to avoid past sacrifices being forgotten, old
inhabitants, they told me, would from time to time remind one another about the pain and
losses of various families in the community during the French colonial period.
Like the story told by Khan about the incident at the pond, the actions of the French
soldiers in My’s narrative suggest actions that were deliberate and calculated. The similarities between the two episodes also show how they are different, along the lines of
gender and sexuality.
For a sovereign power, the targeting of pregnant women causes multilayered destruction. Not only were both the women and their unborn children killed in the incident
described by My, the husbands of the murdered women and/or the fathers of the unborn
children were also targeted. Not only would losing one’s wife and expected baby be
unbearable; being unable to protect them from harm (as traditionally expected by a
Vietnamese husband/father) would magnify the pain and humiliation exponentially
(Cockburn, 2007; Giles and Hyndman, 2004; Hale, 2010; Hearn, 1998; Olujic, 1995;
Yuval-Davis, 2008).
Pregnant and injured women would sometimes be left alive by the colonial forces as
reminders of French power (see also Das, 2007; Scarry, 1985; Schmidt and Schröder,
2001; Zarkov, 2007). Old Quyen told me about an episode where the French troops
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targeted pregnant women, who due to their advanced pregnancy were heavy and unable
to escape quickly when the French soldiers attacked the commune:
Once, our gatekeeper signalled that the French enemy was coming. So we went down to the
tunnels [beneath the pagoda], but some did not [manage to come along]. Then the French
burned, and killed, and also raped about 10 [pregnant] women.
After the raping, the women had to go to other places [mentioning particular places] to be
cured. A few of them died immediately after the raping and abuse. And those of the women who
later got married suffered seriously from the raping. The women’s families knew about the
raping but they couldn’t do anything. They could just bring the women to places for treatment.
Some of the pregnant women upon whom the gross sexualized violence had been
inflicted thus did not survive. Others were brought for treatment, though only offered
help to heal their physical wounds after the abuse. Families ‘couldn’t do anything’ except
organize rudimentary physical emergency treatment in rural war-torn and poverty ridden
colonial Vietnam.
The ghastly abuse to which pregnant women were subjected is witness to the calculated atrocities perpetrated by colonial male troops. The women and the foetuses they
were carrying were inhumanly treated by brutally being reduced to symbols of conquest
of new territory. Through a shared colonial ideology subscribing to fantasies not only
about racial but also gendered and sexualized superiority, the ultimate enemy could be
configured as a pregnant woman from a Vietnamese village (see also Das, 1997; Giles
and Hyndman, 2004; Hale, 2010; Hearn, 1998; Olujic, 1995; Nordstrom, 1991, 1996).21
Conclusions
By forcefully inflicting pain, violence refracts the ontology of human life and the topography of human bodies. Horrifying testimonies about colonial techniques of abuse arise
as messages about the tormenting brutality of the past (Das, 1997, 2007; Jackson, 2002;
Kleinman, 2000). Vietnam’s victory at Dien Bien Phu did not mark an end to conflict
with western powers. Instead, it paved the way for the subsequent war between Vietnam
and the USA. Experiences of the terror perpetrated by French colonial soldiers thus
quickly were replaced and eclipsed by a new brutality, perpetrated, this time, by
Americans (Kwon, 2006; Weaver, 2010).
The abuse, torture and killing of local populations in the colonized areas enjoyed a
broad constituency of support in the colonizing nations (Asad, 1996; Fanon, 2001;
Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2005). Mbembe (2003: 25) remarks that, ‘all manifestations of war and hostility that had been marginalized by a European legal imaginary
find a place to reemerge in the colonies. Here, the fiction of a distinction between “the
ends of war” and the “means of war” collapses; so does the fiction that war functions
as a rule-governed contest, as opposed to pure slaughter without risk or instrumental
justification.’
Experiences of being humiliated and dehumanized by a sovereign power, as witnessed by Thinh Tri women and men, can be approached through the prism of four
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body typologies, each of which is composed of a blend of physiological, symbolic and
imagined realities. These typologies dismantle how human beings transmute from a
phenomenological position into nothing but an object of gender-differentiated destruction (see also Aimer et al., 2000).
The first body is signified by the phenomenological body; this is the body through
which we sense, perceive and experience, and which each of us thinks of as my body. The
phenomenological body provides a material foundation for sensing who we perpetually
are becoming, constituted in and through ideas about our race, gender, sexuality, abilities, age and so forth. As the axis for our being-in-the-world, this body incorporates our
emotions, pains and memories and, by doing so, it transforms lived experiences into
embodied knowledge (Bourdieu, 1992; Grosz, 1994; Kleinman, 2000; Merleau-Ponty,
1996; Valéry, 1990). Violence produces the increased objectification of the phenomenological body; of the experiencing and sensing human being thus rendering women and
men increasingly bare due to gender, sexuality and race/ethnicity.
The second body typology refers to the surface of the body: that which is turned
towards the ‘outside world’. This is the body which others see, perceive and interpret.
Embraced by the skin, the second body demarcates the boundaries of the horizon of our
corporeality and how it is recognized by its colour, femaleness, maleness, age and so on.
This is the site upon which investments of discursive bio-powers operate through micromanagement and the governing of the body and psyche (Foucault, 1978; Grosz, 1994;
Pierce and Rao, 2006; Stoler, 2002). Methods of abuse became a means through which
colonial imaginations about supremacy materialized. French soldiers’ degradation of
local men through torture and murder both instantiated and extended the colonial order.
Displacing women from the colonial order in a more complete sense than men as ‘colonized’ inhabitants who could not be enrolled into the colonial army, a colonial ‘logic’ of
violence provided the conditions that allowed for the infliction of horrific repertoires of
techniques of abuse upon women and their foetuses.
The third body typology is infused with individual and discursive fantasies and
desires. While the body with organs confines the realization of desires, the ‘Bodywithout-Organs’ confuses the boundaries between real and imagined bodies. This body
is composed of infinite plateaus of individual and collective desires and fantasies about
race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality. This is the body upon which imaginations, even the
violent, might be proliferated, projected and self-expanded (Deleuze and Guattari, 2002;
Grosz, 1994; Valéry, 1990). The bifurcation into gendered and sexualized targets of
abuse, as experienced by Thinh Tri inhabitants, is rendered ‘logic’, in a skewed and terrifying sense, when read against the third body typology – as colonial fantasies about
dominance through the conquering of foreign land and naked (female) bodies. Yet, this
is also the body of opposition and rejection, as informed by dreams about the future such
as a future liberated from western colonialism
The fourth body typology is the objectified and dehumanized body; the human being
who is treated as bare life. This body emerges as a reified object of organic entities
which are ground into being through technologies of violence. In eliciting the boundaries of natality and mortality, warfare technologies aim at exterminating human masses
while simultaneously allowing some to survive (Braidotti, 1994). This is the corporeality of destruction and pain; a body wrought by techniques of abuse aiming at rendering
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bare the phenomenological body, the experiencing and perceiving person, as fragmented
limbs and organs (Asad, 1996; Butler, 2004, 2010; Kolsky, 2009; Pierce and Rao, 2006;
Scarry, 1985).
Thinh Tri women and men experienced how they were being dehumanized through
acts of torture and killing. They were all subjected to the atrocious actions of the colonial
forces, as if they were naked life. Yet they were violated in differentiated ways depending
on whether they were men, women, or pregnant women. In highly gendered, sexualized
and racial ways, local inhabitants were treated as if they were nothing but a body stripped
of its humanity, upon which calculated, differentiated and inhuman acts of atrocities
were perpetrated.
Acknowledgements
I am particularly grateful to Don Kulick and Nguyen-vo Thu-huong for their invaluable comments
on earlier versions of the text. Over the years, I have presented the paper in various forms and
forums and appreciate the comments I have received at the ‘Gendered Memories of War and
Political Violence’ conference, Istanbul 2012; ‘Thought as Action’ conference, Bergen University
2012; ‘When Individuals and States Go Bad’ workshop, Lund University 2013; and at the symposium entitled ‘At the Edge of the Human’, UCLA 2014. In an early stage of the analysis, I was
invited by Daniéle Bélanger to present at the University of Western Ontario and by Agathe Goscha
to participate in the ‘Vietnamese Body’ workshop in Lyon. I had helpful conversations on the topic
of the article with Thomas Achen, Malathi de Alwis, Bui Thanh Xuan, Joyce Endeley, Jeff Hearn,
Catarina Kinnvall, Marianne Liljeström, Nalova Lyonga, Ellen Mortensen, Gaudencia Mutema,
Nguyen Huu Minh, Nguyen Thi Thu Huong, Ann Phoenix, Catherine Scornet and Tran Thi Kim
Thuan. I thank Ayse Gül Altinay, Kathy Davis and Hazel Johnstone for their kind support and the
anonymous referees of the European Journal of Women’s Studies for their useful suggestions. My
profound gratitude goes to the people in Thinh Tri with whom I worked for welcoming me and for
their willingness to share their time and experiences with me.
Funding
Generous funding for this research was provided by the Swedish International Development
Cooperation Agency (Sida) and the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences/the
Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond).
Notes
1. The name of the community and all personal names referred to in this article are pseudonyms.
2. From 1994 to 1995, I observed continuously the social interaction of five families in order to
examine children’s gender socialization. The fieldwork consisted of observations amongst the
children, their siblings, parents, grandparents, other kin, peers and teachers, in-depth interviews with all of these groups, and even with official representatives. The fieldwork resulted
in more than 64 hours of recording (transcribed in Vietnamese) (e.g. Rydstrom, 2001, 2003a).
During my second period of fieldwork in Thinh Tri (2000–2001), I worked together with
four families. In-depth interviews were carried out with adolescents, their peers, parents,
grandparents, other kin, teachers and official representatives. In addition, focus group discussions and observation were conducted. The fieldwork resulted in more than 40 hours of tape
recording (transcribed in Vietnamese), and even essays about past violence produced by 40
seventh grade students (e.g. Rydstrom, 2003b, 2010, 2012). Subsequent periods of fieldwork
in Vietnam, I have conducted outside Thinh Tri.
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3. For instance, Heonik Kwon (2006), Bao Ninh (1994) and Gina M Weaver (2010).
4. Ngo Vinh Long (1991), Luong Hy Van (1992) and Truong Buu Lam (2003), for example,
have provided accounts of the violence of French colonialism.
5. See e.g. Giles and Hyndman (2004), Cockburn (2007), Moore (1994), Sjoberg and Via (2010),
True (2012) and Yuval-Davis (2008).
6. For a discussion of contesting Vietnamese views on French colonialism, see e.g. Luong
(1992) and Tai (1996).
7. The collected data have not been read against the ‘historical facts’ of the archives.
8. Homo sacer is a male figure borrowed from Roman legal treatise.
9. Ultimately demonstrated in the camps of Nazi Germany (Agamben, 1998).
10. See Giorgio Agamben’s (1998, 1999) exploration of Auschwitz and the Holocaust.
11. The methods aimed at ‘neutralization’ through ‘interrogation, torture, and summary execution’ (Sessions, 2013).
12.I.e. Viet Nam thanh nien cach mang dong chi hoi.
13. In 1930, the Communist Party was called the Vietnamese Communist Party (Dang cong san
Viet Nam). Later in 1930, the name was changed to the Indochinese Communist Party (Dang
cong san dong duong), and in 1951 to the Workers’ Party (Dang lao dong). In 1976, the
Indochinese Communist Party was renamed the Vietnamese Communist Party again (Turley,
1980: 9–10). For simplicity, I use the Communist Party.
14. The Comintern (i.e. the Third International also called Communist International) was founded
in 1919 as an association of national communist parties (Encyclopaedia Britannica, at global.
britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/290606/Third-International; accessed 15 March 2014).
15. See Helle Rydstrom (2012) for an examination of wartime constructions of gender.
16. Stein Tonnesson (2010: 106–145) provides an overview of the politics of the Hai Phong
massacre.
17. Yet, the country remained divided and western powers became increasingly engaged in the
former French colony eventually erupting into a war between North Vietnam and the USA
(see Bradley, 2009; Tonnesson, 2010).
18. Algeria, Morocco, Tunis and Senegal, for instance (Truong Buu Lam, 2003: 20).
19. In other French occupied areas such as Algeria (Sessions, 2013) and Cameroun (personal
communication with Joyce Endeley and Nalova Lyonga), local populations were subjected to
gross violence by the French forces in general and when held in custody.
20. References to Vietnamese women as monkeys, birds, cats and other animals diminished them
as being less human than men (Tracol-Huynh, 2010: S77; see also Proschan, 2002a, 2002b).
21. See Nguyen Thi Thu Huong (2011) for a discussion of rape in Vietnamese society and Gina
M Weaver (2010) on rape during the war between Vietnam and the USA.
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