UC Riverside

How does LGBT media in Vietnam signify the relationship between the queer self and social belonging? How do queer individuals negotiate and reinvent this relationship through their bodily, affective, and technological practices? This thesis examines the production and spectatorship of LGBT TV shows in Vietnam to illuminate how the new politics of visibility informed by social movements and legal changes under the banner of LGBT rights redefines the conditions under which the queer self can attain a “good life.” Drawing from ethnographic work at the filming set of a major LGBT talkshow in Vietnam and 8 semi-formal interviews with the queer audiences, I argue that the technologies of LGBT media production in Vietnam reproduce the queer selfhood in a politics of respectability, which allows certain manifestations of the queer self to belong to the nation while excluding others that are considered to not contribute to the public good. Respectability produces and disciplines different embodiments of queerness through two intertwining and contradicting logics of self-governance. First, the respectable queer is imagined to be a self-motivated individual, responsible for the project of attaining success and modernity for themselves. Second, the respectable queer is demanded to align their bodily and affective expressions with the moral collective of the nation. However, my thesis also excavates alternative queer affect and relationalities among the marginalized queer subjects articulated by refusal, invisibility, and negativity, which promises new anti-assimilationist queer politics in Vietnam.