1. Art, Media, & Feminism
Huong Ngo
I am an research-based artist and independent scholar here in Vietnam with the Fulbright US. Scholars
program. I'm currently working on an interdisciplinary project which will debut in Hanoi this summer
and travel to DePaul Art Museum next year, and a curriculum for a class at Northwestern University
this fall.
So I want to begin with some quick definitions of terms that I will be using. These are terms that are
getting redefined and complicated all the time in English, so I wanted share with you my working
definitions so when you hear me say them, you'll know what where my perspective is coming from. It's
important to note that I grew up and was educated in the United States, so when I use these terms, they
are drawing from that canon. One of my goals of working in Vietnam is to begin understanding how
some of these words are used or not used here, how they are translated, and to understand how and
where such conversations are happening.
So, I want to start with the word feminism, which can be defined as social, political, and ideological
movements that are working towards the goal of gender equality. I imagine that everyone here probably
is familiar with the difference between gender and sex, but just in case, sex is the biological difference
among women, men, and those who are intersex, which is defined at birth. Gender, on the other hand,
is the fluid category of how we express or perform our identities and the expectations of society for
particular genders. It is a social construction and as such, can change through time and vary between
cultures.
Intersectional feminism, first theorized in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, writer and Professor of Law at
the University of California, Los Angeles and Columbia University in New York, and introduced into
the larger discourse of feminism by Patricia Hill Collins in 1990, began to inflect the conversation of
feminism with considerations of other forms of identity. Specifically, Crenshaw, in her article
“Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”,
analyzes how gender must be examined in conjunction with race and class to fully understand how the
experience of for instance, being black, poor, and a woman in the US differs from the experience of
being a middle-class white woman. Her work resonated with me as well because of her investigation of
domestic violence amongst immigrants, particular women who had immigrated to the US to marry US

2. citizens. Crenshaw found that legislation intended to help these women seek support and refuge from
abusive partners did not take into consideration their particular dependence on their partners because of
their immigrant status, language and cultural barriers, and lack of social network. Intersectional
feminism has grown to include many axes of identity such as ability, religion, sexual orientation, and
class, among others.
Transnational feminism, could be considered an intersectional feminism across nations and
communities, layered with an analysis of colonialism, imperialism, nationhood, and exploitation on a
global scale. Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Jacqui Alexander have been influential in creating the
framework for this discourse. In her book Feminism Without Borders, Mohanty describes this as an
antiracist feminist struggle, borrowing her title from the organization “Doctors without Borders.”
Mohanty explains:
“Feminism without borders is not the same as a 'border-less' feminism. It acknowledges
the fault lines, conflicts, differences, fears, and containment that borders represent. It
acknowledges that there is no one sense of a border, that the lines between and through
nations, races, classes, sexualities, religions, and disabilities, are real – and that a
feminism without borders must envision change and social justice work across these lines
of demarcation and division. I want to speak of feminism without silences and exclusions
in order to draw attention to the tension between the simultaneous plurality and
narrowness of border and the emancipatory potential of crossing through, with, and over
these borders in our everyday lives.”
I really appreciate Mohanty and Crenshaw's emphasis on the everyday struggles as the basis for
theorization, and their resistance against a homogenization of female identity or experience. I want to
emphasize that the purpose of looking at identity through these lenses is not to predetermine what one's
experiences might be like in society, but rather to examine structural reasons for which struggles for
equality are different and begin to address those reasons. To do so, it helps to look at both quantifiable
trends in populations, for instance, the number of women in leadership positions throughout the world,
government and corporate policy around maternity leave, or equity in education among women. But, as
these scholars have also taught me, numbers and policy can only tell you one aspect of the story, and
that the intersection of different types of identity might not be easy to predict. This is a where
individual voices can make a difference in nuancing the conversation around feminism. So, I've put

3. together a selection of artists whose projects take both intersectional and/or transnational approaches to
understanding the effects of identity, but are also coming from deeply personal and everyday
experiences. I'm hoping these examples might help especially those of you for whom these terms are
new to see yourself in this movement more easily.
Ok, so I want to begin with two of Adrian Piper's pieces from 1986-1990. The first is called My Calling
(Card) #1 and the second is My Calling (Card) #2. Both are business card sized with type in sans-serif
font.
The first one on brown paper reads:
“Dear Friend, / I am black. / I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed
at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past, I have attempted to alert white people to my
racial identity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as
pushy, manipulative, or socially inappropriate. Therefore, my policy is to assume that
white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe there are no black
people present, and to distribute this card when they do. / I regret any discomfort my
presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is
causing me.”
The second on white paper reads:
“Dear Friend, / I am not here to pick anyone up, or to be picked up. I am here alone
because I want to be here, ALONE. / This card is not intended as part of an extended
flirtation. / Thank you for respecting my privacy.”
At first glance, Piper seems to be separating her different identities, one as a woman, one as a light-
skinned African-American, quite literally, into these two cards, which serve as a parody of a “Calling
Card” while also suggesting Piper's “Calling,” her need to speak out about injustices in her lived reality.
However, I'd like to argue first of all that the artwork itself is not just the card, but also Piper's
performance of giving the card to an offender. As secondary audience to this (viewing this work via
documentation), we complete the work by imagining her performance of it. In her performance, she is
both a woman and light-skinned African-American. As such, she will experience unwelcome romantic

4. solitications and racist jokes in different ways that have historical bearing. For instance, theorized by a
number of scholars, most notably Deborah Gray White in her 1999 book Ar'n't I a Woman, is the
perception of African women as being hyper-sexual, almost uncontrollably sexual, that has been used
as an implicit excuse for slave owner's sexual exploitation of black women in the United States. This
Jezebel character is still at play in the representation and policing of black and brown bodies in social
media, as examined by Rachel Dubrofsky and Megan Wood in their article “Gender, Race, and
Authenticity: Celebrity Women Tweeting for the Gaze.” In Piper's “My Calling (Card ) #1,” she calls
out racist microaggressions that are often defended with the familiar rebuttal “Can't you take a joke?” A
line so close to “You should smile more, you look prettier” that is often launched at women by
catcallers and political pundits alike. In this world where women are told to smile, to laugh, in which
black women are told that they their rape is inevitable and excusable, Piper's artwork as intersectional
performance is an act of survival.
So, I won't be talking about this piece in depth, but I just want to introduce you to another one of
Piper's performaces, this is from a series and it's entitled Catalysis IV from 1971. Piper explains this
piece to Lucy Lippard in an interview from 1972, “I dressed very conservatively, but stuffed a large red
bath towel in the side of my mouth until my cheeks bulged to about twice their normal size, letting the
rest of it hang down my front, and riding the bus, subway, and Empire State Building elevator.” In the
first of the series Catalysis I, she “saturated a set of clothing in a mixture of vinegar, eggs, milk and cod
liver oil for a week, then wore them on the D train during evening rush hour.” As in her Calling Cards,
where Piper makes visible the invisible, in the Catalysis series, Piper pushes the extent to which her
presence as a black female body both exists in the world, but is also rendered invisible through societal
perception and neglect.
Piper's work, coming on the heels of the civil rights movement in the United States and anticipating
protests against the Vietnam war, is a good anchor in understanding how intersectional and
transnational ideas, while not called such at the time, were surfacing and finding material realization. I
wanted to show you a magazine published at the same time in 1971. It was called Triple Jeopardy, and
was produced by the Third World Women's Alliance, based in NY. The “Triple” in Triple Jeopardy
stands for their struggle against Capitalism, Racism, & Sexism, a ready-made manifesto for the nascent
transnational feminist movement. In Triple Jeopardy, an interview with Angela Davis is placed
alongside a feature of a Vietnamese guerilla fighter, the occupation in Palestine, Chilean anti-fascist
movement, Guinea-Bissau independence, and women involved in the Filipino Revolution. Similar to

5. the decolonial quarterly mazazine Tricontinental, strategies of solidarity mix with Marxist and
decolonial analysis of concurrent struggles.
After the beautiful demonstrations of solidarity amongst civil rights struggles from this period, it is
easy to imagine the disappointment and disallusionment of many African-Americans, which has caused
them to unite behind the current #blacklivesmatter movement, mobilizing against increased police
violence and incarceration amongst the African-American community. The US has the highest
incarceration rate in the world. From the Prison Policy Initiative of 2010, the figures are at
approximately 3,553 people per 100,000, with African-Americans representing roughly two-thirds of
that number. The #blacklivesmatter movement has been working to make more visible the often
unexamined deaths of black people due to police brutality. For a project entitled “Funk, God, Jazz and
Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn,” organized by Creative Time and the Weeksville Heritage Center,
artist Simone Leigh, inspired by the history of social services started by the Black Panthers such as free
breakfasts for children and free health clinics, opened the “Free People's Health Clinic” in collaboration
with Stuyvesant Mansion, the home of Dr. Josephine English, the first black female OB-GYN doctor in
New York. The clinic, while limited in scope because of legal restrictions on medical services, provided
allopathic healing services, yoga and pilates classes, and free HIV screenings for members of the
community.
All of these historical organizational connections are quite important, as they were key to African-
Americans accessing healthcare at a grassroots level when they were not provided by the state, or when
doctors might not be sensitive to the circumstances of African-Americans. In an interview with Art in
America, Leigh cites as significant to her project multiple recent studies which have emerged
confirming that both black and white people, including medical personnel, assume black people feel
less pain than white people. She states, “The general lack of empathy for black people is a factor in
every aspect of interaction with medical providers. It goes to the core of what is difficult to name and
change in terms of structural racism and sexism. This is another reason why #BlackLivesMatter is such
an appropriate title for a civil rights movement here and now.”
Not only is the project looking at care in general as an issue within the black community, but as it is
recognizing women in the black community and their role as caretakers. I believe that the project was
actually made stronger by the fact that Leigh was not able to offer what we would imagine as standard
medical care, thus offering modes of self-care that fall outside these institutions but perhaps should be

6. more recognized as valid platforms not only for healing, but for community. These include
gynecological services through established midwifery and doula services, massage, acupuncture, dance
(based on Katherine Dunham's technique and choreography), yoga, pilates, blood pressure screenings,
HIV testing and counseling, and lectures on herbalism. They also included a publication called Waiting
Room Magazine, a collection of poetry, art, fiction and essays as a way to re-imagine the space of the
waiting room as one of care and culture.
For comparison to the context of Asian-American identity, I want to introduce one of my past projects,
a collaboration with the artist Hong-An Truong, that reflects on the history of immigration into the
United States. This project was prompted by an invitation from the artist Mary Walling Blackburn as
part of a larger framework of imagining radical citizenship. Truong's family and mine both immigrated
as refugees to the US following the reunification of Vietnam, and wanted to reflect on our own
experiences in relation to the history of Asian immigration, particularly the years of Chinese exclusion
from the US, which set the precedence for many of the United States' current immigration policies. A
little history about Chinese exclusion: it began in 1882 and was officially repealed in 1943, with
lingering effects for at least another two decades. It was the first time that the US had introduced quotas
based on an immigrant's national identity, the first time the government required photo identification,
thus initiating culture of visual surveillance, along with the introduction ofmiscegenation laws designed
to keep Chinese men (which were the demographic of most of the immigrants) from settling into the
US. At the same time, there were also restrictions on these new immigrants bringing their families to
the US based on their social class, so this was the first time that immigration was restricted by class.
Alongside changes in policy was a media war between parties for or against this discrimation, often
times the latter. Political cartoons often portrayed Chinese immigrants with exaggerated features,
clothes, and customs, stressing their difference from the existing population. On top of this, Chinese
immigrants, many of whom had to prove a familial relation to current US residents in order to be
admitted, underwent grueling interviews, often which took several hours and stretched over days while
they stayed in detention camps, in order to be admitted. The interviews often went into great detail
about the interviewee's former home and neighborhood, basically to catch descrepancies between
interviewees and current residents (if you've ever seen the movie Green Card, it's like this, but with
much less romantic humor and no Gérard Depardieu). Truong and I used transcripts of these
interviews, combined with questions from current immigration exams, to construct an immigration
interview for a fictional state, aimed at 1) giving residents with birth-right citizenship (who were born

7. in the US) a chance to experience the process of interviewing for immigration, and 2) to hold these
questions, our responses, and the construction of power that we give ourselves over to, in the light of
examination. Many interviewees are shocked at the questions that they are required to answer and
acknowledged that they had to intentionally lie in order to answer the questions as they believed we, or
'the state' wanted them to answer.
We reiterated this performance in many different forms, sometimes interviewing one person at a time in
private, sometimes interviewing a single person in front of an audience, and in the most recent
iteration, working with immigration lawyers who helped us revise our interview and actually performed
as the immigration officials. We've presented this work in installation form here, along with annotated
archival materials. More recently, we've begun an extension of this project that focuses on our mothers
and their labor as women and refugees in the US. We are taking as our starting point two photographs
that we found of our mothers, from completely different sides of the country (my mom in North
Carolina and Truong's in Arizona) striking almost the exact same pose in front of similar huge white
American cars, both in formal dress. Truong and I are interesting in how examining the history of our
mothers and the larger context in which they are working and how they are remembered might help to
complicate the myths of the model minority and the American dream that work to homogenize
individual stories of struggle and traumas of war as well as gloss over institutional discrimination and
the injustices of global capitalism.
A new media artist who is also examining Asian identity in a very different way is Jennifer Chan,
whose project “Boyfriend” from 2014 combines internet tropes and heartfelt videoblogs culled from
Youtube to construct a video that examines Asian masculinity and questions the bias of the white
heterosexual male as the default internet user, which encourages a patriarchal and often misogynistic
atmosphere online, as demonstrated by #gamergate, a sexual harassment campaign organized around
the twitter tag with the same name, and similar activity on the anonymous network 4chan. Chan creates
a performance via Youtube video in which her identity, as the supposed female audience for the videos
that she collects, completes the work and revalues the actions of these men. Chan “translates” the
videos, but as an audience member without an understanding of Chinese and because of its context as
video art, the certainty of the translations are thrown into question, creating a barrier between the
audience and the “meaning” of the work and questioning for whom this content is made. In this
Brechtian move, I as a viewer suddenly feel like a tourist trespassing in this territory of the internet
where I have to question the assumption of my own belonging.

8. And here, I just want to mention this article from Hyperallergic.com, a popular art magazine based in
New York, that takes white feminist media culture to task on the representation of female people-of-
color. Chan is a very vocal part of this community and a strong voice in this article, just so you can see
that this conversation is extending into virtual spaces.
In the context of Vietnamese art and culture, I wanted to introduce the Queer Forever Festival, which
held its second iteration just this last winter. Begun in 2012, the festival, held in Hanoi both years, hosts
a range of artists, filmmakers, scholars, writers, activists, and participants. Here is the poster from 2012
(left) and the cover of a zine by the artist Gabby Miller and collaborators, circulated during the recent
festival (right). Here is the schedule from the two years to give you an idea of the programming.
I want to pause here because in the last examples, the intersectional and transnational feminist
considerations were for the most part gender plus race, ethnicity, nationality and sometimes, plus class.
In the US, the LGBTQ+ movement is very much linked and indebted to other civil rights struggles
including feminism. In Vietnam, as I'm able to gather from speaking to key actors in the movement,
they have less overlap, but I am currently in the process of interviewing participants and organizers of
this festival and might have a better idea of intersectionalities once I hear from them. But for now, I just
want to introduce a couple of the projects that were presented in which I see intersectional or
transnational thinkings or origins.
The first is Việt Lê's Video, “Love Bang! Series,” a hip hop, pop, hybrid spun into a time-traveling
fantasy that through the process of fantastical queering, throws into question expectations of women in
Vietnam and purist notions of identity through nation, gender, sexual orientation, or medium. The video
combines English, Vietnamese, and Khmer, as part of a trilogy that is exhibited in Hô Chi Minh City,
Phnom Penh, and Los Angeles, and crosses borders between video art and music video. Lê further
hybridizes the typical role of a music video producer (whose work usually comes after the music) by
initiating collaborations with a musician, music producer, rapper, singer, videographer, costume
designer, and drag queen performers to produce this project, also complicating or “queering” his
monolithic identity as an artist.
With a similarly collaborative/curatorial approach is the zine Vănguard. In a 2016 interview with the
magazine Diacritics, one of the founders Aiden Nguyễn attributes inspiration for the zine from the

9. writer and artist Mimi Thị Nguyễn who created the zine Evolution of a Race Riot. Mimi Thị Nguyễn's
work, which includes her book The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages,
examines the figure of the post-Vietnam war refugee in the context of the war on terror, neo-liberal
globalization, and US empire. I find this looping back of inspiration, from a Vietnamese diaspora writer
in the US back to a queer community in Vietnam very interesting, and Aiden's reflection on that even
more so: “if Vietnamese activists continue to use the queer liberation movement in the United States (or
other 'Western' countries) as their foundation, I will say this: if they want to effectively approach
activism, I advise them to use that foundation as a place to learn and grow, instead of blindly following
them in their footsteps. Similar to a lot of the activism in the United States, the prominent activist scene
in Vietnam seems to favor a top-down approach rather than the more radical bottom-up approach. Just
to sum up these approaches, top-down refers to the ideology that if those who are at the very top (those
in power with the most privilege) receives their benefits first then it will ‘trickle down’ to those at the
bottom.”
I realize that many of these projects that I have presented are collaborative in some way and defy the
typical medium and framework of “art.” Some enter terrritories of social practice, activism, self-
publication, and daily performance. I'm interested in reflecting on these discourse-driven practices as I
move into my own project and to think about how intersectional and transnational feminist approaches
demand new aesthetic strategies. I haven't fully theorized this question or what it means for a
movement to “demand” a new approach, but I'm interested in it a generative provocation for my own
work.