Dismembered Lives

Abstract

This chapter uses the twin concepts of dismemberment and rememberment to investigate the media discourse surrounding a controversial art exhibit held in 2009 in Orange County, California involving mass protests by hundreds of people demonstrating against a community-based art exhibit for showcasing creative reinterpretations of the South Vietnamese national flag and Vietnamese women’s role, as proper gendered national subjects fueled a public outcry against the exhibit as profane, pro-communist trash. The chapter concludes by discussing the ban on LGBT people from the community’s annual new year TET parade, and how this had to do with more than homophobia, but South Vietnamese nationalism, which allows for no alternative identities within the diasporic family. This chapter ultimately aims to broaden the scope for studying Vietnamese American “homeland politics” by venturing to speak to the puzzling ways the overseas communities and identities formed by refugees from South Vietnam are shaped, circumscribed, and policed in the current day by the politics of anti-communism.