The Other’s Body : Vietnamese Contemporary Travel Writing by Women

Abstract

In recent years, Vietnamese literature has seen the rise of women writers in a genre traditionally dominated by men— travel writing. Phuong Mai, Huyen Chip, Dinh Hang, among others, are just a few who have introduced innovations to this genre. This paper investigates the practice of contemporary Vietnamese women travel-writers and how they differ in perception compared to their male counterparts. One of the most crucial differences is that women perform cultural embodiment, employing their bodies instead of their minds. An encounter of the woman writer with other cultures is, therefore, an encounter between the body and the very physical conditions of culture, which leads to a will to change, to transform, more than a desire to conquer, to penetrate the other. Utilizing the concept deterritorialization developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, this paper argues that despite being deemed fragile and without protection, women’s bodies are in fact fluid and able to open new possibilities of land and culture often stripped away by masculinist ideology.