Book Talk with Richard Tran (independent scholar)

Monday, April 13, 2026
6:00 PM - 7:30 PM (Pacific Time)
Webinar

Queer Vietnam recovers the forgotten stories of variant genders and sexualities in early twentieth-century Vietnam. By the beginning of the 1900s, European imperialism had spread Western notions of gender across much of Asia, narrowing and delegitimizing what had been a wide range of acceptable gender practices.

But in Vietnam, Western influence on gender remained uneven at best. Through archival research and innovative readings of literary sources, Richard Quang-Anh Tran argues that Vietnamese culture embraced a much less rigid view of the human body, and that a far more capacious vision of gendered personhood existed in this period than has been previously assumed. Popular love stories involved crossdressing monks and traditional women who don male garb to fight in battle. And accounts of proto-lesbian friendships and a futuristic human civilization populated by a higher form of hermaphroditic species all found avid readers. Together, this material reveals that in Vietnam’s interwar period, “tradition” coexisted with and jostled against the modern. 

While current perceptions of Vietnamese history rest on the exclusion of the “queer”—subjects who depart from heteronormative ways of being— this book brings them to the center, and opens up new directions for both the historical study of gender and Vietnam’s modernity.

Richard Quang-Anh Tran’s research resides at the intersection of queer studies, South-East Asian history, critical theory, and post/colonial studies. A key dimension of his research is to examine the historical development of hegemonic frameworks and logics that contributed to the formation of the normatively sexed and gendered subject and, by extension, “perverse” ones. These frameworks have not only persisted far into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but have also foreclosed other modes of being and becoming in the present. The historical mapping of such normative limits and the imaginative possibilities that lie beyond them represent two central components of his scholarship.

His first book, Queer Vietnam: A History of Gender Transgression, 1920-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2025) investigates this problem in relation to late French colonial Vietnam to argue that, unlike elsewhere in Asia, premodern paradigms that embraced a far more capacious vision of the gendered body prevailed through the country’s interwar period. This is the first book-length study on this topic. Support for the research came, in part, from the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and the book’s publication, from a generous subvention of the Association for Asian Studies. 

He is currently at work on a second book project tentatively titled, Sexing the Human in Communist Vietnam, 1954-1999. There, he traces the historical development of psychoanalysis, a complex corpus of thinking about the relation between the mind and body, during Vietnam’s high communist period. Engaging with debates on Marxism, psychoanalysis, and conceptions of the “human,” the second book examines how the advent of certain epistemic frameworks helped tether the normative body and psyche together. Early research on this topic was supported, in part, by the American Historical Association. This second book, together with the first, is intended to form a duology.

From 2023 to 2025, he was a scholar-in-residence in Berkeley’s Program in Critical Theory. He is now a Bay Area independent scholar. 

Sponsor(s): Center for Southeast Asian Studies