UC Berkeley

From 1961 to 1971, the United States military and its allies sprayed a chemical compound, popularly known as Agent Orange, across Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos during the wars in Southeast Asia. The compound was described by the U.S. government as an herbicide crafted to defoliate dense mangrove jungles to increase military visibility for the U.S. and its allies. However, the manufacturing of Agent Orange resulted in an unintentional byproduct—a toxic dioxin whose effects on human and nonhuman bodies continues today. As both a chemical and a concept, Agent Orange has shaped perspectives on disability in Vietnam and abroad, has inspired the creation of aesthetic and cultural forms of protest, and continues to produce new forms of living after exposure.

This dissertation studies the performative effects of Agent Orange through an analysis of visual art, dance, music videos, autobiographies, and social movements that have emerged in response to the chemical compound’s transnational dispersal. Agent Orange has become a metonym for the continued presence of U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia, a term that provokes affective abjection on the part of observers and bystanders, and also a topic of political mobilization that unites U.S. veterans alongside Vietnamese nationals in their call for reparative justice. Often, the rhetorical meaning of Agent Orange exceeds its material effects. This research consequently intervenes in cultural discourses and recent academic scholarship about toxicity in three critical ways: first, by using performance studies to center disability frameworks and disabled perspectives in order to disrupt the equivocation of all disabled and nonnormative bodies in Vietnam with wartime trauma. Second, by contextualizing Agent Orange not as an isolated phenomenon, located in a single nation-state because of a single war, but rather to highlight its circulation through capital investment and legal systems in order to demonstrate how the compound continues to affect multiple populations and environments in unexpected ways. Third, by discussing Agent Orange as a biopolitical substance—that is, a chemical that performs life-giving, life-altering, as well as life-taking acts—to highlight lives still lived after exposure.