【Filip系列01】Colonial Prostitution and Sexuality as a Dispositive of Biopower?（英語演講，不備翻譯）
共同主辦：政治大學南風四重奏計畫X燦爛時光
時間：11/27 Sun 7:00 pm
地點：燦爛時光東南亞主題書店（新北市中和區興南路一段135巷1號，MRT南勢角站4號出口右轉三分鐘）
講者：Filip Kraus
費用：100元
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This dissertation is a genealogical analysis of Vietnamese colonial sexuality reflecting some existing works on sexuality and proposing a different interpretation of the phenomenon. The work is applying Foucault’s archeological methods to map Vietnamese colonial discourse on sexuality, family, and women’s position in the society as it took place in contemporary journals, magazines, books, textbooks, maxims and practical manuals or booklets. Basing on those materials and historical records, the thesis is drawing a colonial history of sexuality peculiar to the French colonial Vietnam.
The thesis comprises colonial prostitution, subjected women, corrupted man, spoiled child and patriarchal family as other objects of colonial discourse and knowledge into the Foucault thesis. By the analysis of those objects, the colonial sexuality is conceived as a specific dispositive of biopower with more “thanatopolitics” connotations than its equivalent at the core.
The work perceived the Hanoi dispensary (the main tool policing contemporary prostitution) as a disciplinary institution with certain laps into the biopolitics that also contributed to the subjection of the women to, preferable well doing, men. The concept of corrupted man is used to explain that various forms of corruption was an integral part of the colonial system that block a smooth transformation of “modern” power/truth norms into the system in which substantial parts of society are subjugated and exploited by others.
The patriarchal and polygamous family is conceived as a deployment of alliance and described as another crucial deviation from biopolitical norms that, together with other dispositives of colonial biopower, produced various bioracial boundaries cutting the colonial population into various races and classes.
Basing on the genealogical analysis, the work is drawing up a comprehensive picture of the colonial sexuality, not only as a dispositive of biopower and an assertion of the colonial middle class, but also as a part of broader colonial system of various oppressions, exclusions, and exploitations that blocked the higher strata of Vietnamese society, usually more or less collaborating with colonial power, to unified the nation under the leadership of republican or liberal forces and paved a way for more class determined form of biopower under the banner of Vietnamese communist.
【講者簡介】
Filip Kraus is a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies at National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. At the same time, he is cooperating with Institute of International Relations Prague where he participates on various researches on Vietnamese migration and, last but not least, Filip Kraus is cooperating with Metropolitan University of Prague where he occasionally deliver speeches or wrote political analyses.
In his research interests in colonial and postcolonial studies he focuses especially on former French Indochina and the colonial legacy in contemporary Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laos societies. His contemporary research splits to four directions: international politics and problems in international relations of Southeast Asian states (border conflicts and their impact on the process of the Southeast Asian integration); Vietnamese colonial literature; nationalism and identity problems in contemporary Southeast Asia, especially in the nations of former French Indochina and the Peoples Republic of China (PRC); and last but not the least Vietnamese diasporas living abroad – particularly in the Europe and East Asia (Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and the PRC). He can be reached at kraus.filip@yahoo.com.