In Response to "Emergence of Queer Vietnamese America"

Tiffany Do

ASA 2 Section 2

Week 10 Blog

In response to “Emergence of Queer Vietnamese America”:

Creating an organization like O-Moi provided queer Vietnamese females and FTM transgender a place to find community—to see that their queerness did not exclude them from being part of Vietnamese America. The need to create O-Moi separate from the Gay Vietnamese Alliance makes perfect sense to me. From what I know, men stay in and maintain strong ties to their nuclear family whereas women are integrated into the family of their in-laws. Although times are changing as well as the values in the Vietnamese American community, Vietnamese girls are expected to serve their families and women (once married) are expected to serve their in-laws. Being queer and defying gendered norms disrupts the social relations that heterosexual non-conforming Vietnamese have come to expect. I applaud O-Moi’s members for having the strength to come out in the first place and then found an organization to support and validate other queer Vietnamese females and FTM transgender. However, I still have a few questions.

Questions:

1.      The author talks about the “don’t ask, don’t tell” agreement between Vietnamese parents and their queer children. Does the Vietnamese community as a whole also employ this “don’t ask, don’t tell” mentality in order to avoid acknowledging Queer Vietnamese America?

2.      How might the needs of queer Vietnamese Americans change as first generation refugees die out?

source: http://www.clydefitchreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Intersectionality-chart.jpg

This is a diagram about intersectionality: the idea that the oppression you experience results from all these different facets of your identity and one can’t be isolated from the other. I think the article really highlights the intersectionality of the queer Vietnamese American community.