Speaking Tradition & Gender: Repetitions of Care across Vietnamese Generations and Diaspora

This interdisciplinary research project interrogates the repetitions of Vietnamese me, (sayings and ruses), ca dao (folk verses), and Confucian inflected tuc ngù (proverbs) across generations of Vietnamese and the diaspora as a question of knowledge production and cultural transmission of gendered discourse. It follows the communication circuit of gendered truisms and folk practices that have been passed down among generations of mothers to daughters, specifically around marriage, childbearing, postpartum, and childrearing.

With an experimental disciplinary scope, this project first expands across the history of twentieth century Vietnam to the present, drawing from archives of French colonial ethnography, modernization efforts and medicalized knowledge during American intervention, and community histories in the aftermaths of war and displacement. Second, it uncovers the intertwined construction of gender and tradition through language transmission and language learning among diaspora. Third, this critical transmedial project moves across textual, encyclopedic, colonial, and medical knowledge, into conversation with oral and community knowledge. This project builds off of my ongoing historical and digital humanities research on a visual encyclopedia of Vietnamese crafts, cultural practices, and technologies as a multivalent and plural authored archive, seeking to uncover critical reimaginings of social worlds and female labor.

As an interdisciplinary scholar of information, digital humanities, and global Vietnamese studies, “Speaking Tradition & Gender” centers humanistic experimentation and community engaged scholarship. Through mixed-media arts engagement, collaborative digital glossaries, and community listening sessions, I seek to hold space for understanding communities of care and knowledge in Vietnam and among the diaspora: why is it that holding, repeating, uttering these cures and sayings in times of uncertainty and distress are deployed? I seek to highlight how these practices showcase a female network of social care, part problem solving, part oral history, part preserving collective ancestral identity.