Balloon Hearts & Grenade Lighters: The Symbol and Flesh of Remembrance in Vietnam’s Museums Restricted; Files Only
Wu, Die (Spring 2025)
Abstract
This thesis examines the representation of women in Vietnamese museums, focusing on how the discourse surrounding these representations shapes collective memory. Through qualitative research at the Southern Vietnam Women’s Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, the study adopts a post-structuralist framework and phenomenological approach to critique curatorial strategies that essentialize women as idealized emblems of the socialist republic and erase the complexities of the war history. It reveals how exhibits construct through the representations of women a synchronic network of meaning, which conveys a mythic temporality of the completeness of a socialist revolution and spatiality that dissolves specificities into narratives of national unity. Nevertheless, the study argues that these representations harbor subversive potential. Drawing on queer theory, it examines how objects of representation, such as the sculpture Incomplete Sucking, provoke reinterpretations that disrupt hegemonic understandings of identity and memory. By foregrounding fragmentation as an epistemic stance and a creative practice, the thesis critiques the museum’s illusion of historical coherence and emphasizes the contested dynamics of remembrance, especially in the context of transnational scholarship. Ultimately, it advocates for engagements that embrace partial perspectives and imaginative resistance to contemplate the entanglements of power and lived agency in postwar Vietnam.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Key Concepts 7
Literature Review 12
Case Study 16
Methodology 17
Chapter I. Women in Museum as a Matter of Time and Space 20
A Synchronic Network of Meaning within Museum Representations 21
Mothers and Daughters of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: The “Time” of War, Nation, and Womanhood 24
Silhouette of a Southern Vietnamese Woman: Disappearance of the Place 33
Chapter II. A Sculpture of a Young Woman 41
The Statue 44
Figure and Its Interpretation 48
Women Holding a Rifle: Desiring the Vietnamese Sniper Women 50
Incomplete Sucking: On Queer (Dis)inheritance 55
Chapter III. Truth in Fragmentation 59
Women and the Truth of Womanhood 60
The Ethics of Remembrance 63
The Status of the Museum 65
Fragmentation 67
Experimentation 68
Conclusion: Writing as Curating 77
Works Cited 78
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File download under embargo until 22 May 2026 | 2025-04-08 00:51:55 -0400 | File download under embargo until 22 May 2026 |
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