Abstract
This essay offers some reflections on uses of my gendered analysis of the colonial encounter in French Indochina to teach the sexual history of empire. Drawing upon previously untapped sources in Vietnam's National Library pre-1954 collection, "Sex and the Colonial City: Mapping Masculinity, Whiteness, and Desire in French Occupied Hanoi," my article in The Journal of World History engages critical theories of masculinity and whiteness to create a thick description of life in the colonial city.1 The article argues that imperialism's racial, gender, and class hierarchies combined with the French Third Republic's (1871–1940) paternalism and misogyny to give French men unprecedented power over colonial Asian subjects, especially Vietnamese women. This intersectionality of privilege created an openly predatory sexual culture during a time when French Hanoi's white community was overwhelmingly male. French men's desires for inter-racial intimacy both crossed the colonial color-line and reaffirmed white imperial supremacy.
Though this article stems from scholarly research, my analysis, methodology, and conclusions have a variety of classroom uses. This subject need not be confined to undergraduate and graduate courses on empire or sexuality. Rather, high school and college level world history surveys can integrate my argument and documents into lessons on the New Imperialism. We can use my source material, cartoons from the French colonial city, to teach the ways in which French men understood their power both in the city and throughout colonial Asia. Racial hierarchies of desire were central to colonial white supremacy. Obviously, certain care should be taken when teaching sexuality. However, in the age of #metoo it is increasingly important to critique how historically specific gender power arrangements impacted sexuality, sexual practice, and social justice.
As a case-study for teaching the New Imperialism, Hanoi allows us to expand our geographical coverage beyond traditional Anglo-centric frameworks. This French city in colonial Southeast Asia offers an example from outside of the British Empire which so heavily dominates the scholarship and teaching of imperialism. Insights from Hanoi have relevance to world historical discussions of race, gender, and empire. French occupied Hanoi was but one manifestation of global white supremacy at the turn of the 20th century.