The language of empire and the case of Indochina: Masculine discourse in the shaping and subverting of colonial gender hierarchies

Throughout the history of European imperialism, gender served to define relationships of power, allowing the colonizer to assert and to maintain a position of domination over the colonized. Despite this binary relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, colonial gender constructs were never static. This thesis seeks to extend the historiography surrounding the gendered language of empire by revealing the complexities, ambiguities, and debates inherent within the gendered identities of colonialism, particularly within the case of French Indochina. This thesis demonstrates how the gendered and racial identities of the colonial discourse, which positioned the masculine, heroic colonizer in opposition to the feminine, passive colonized and thus legitimated European supremacy, were both confirmed and contested by various groups and in different contexts from the World War II era through the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. It illuminates differences in how distinct groups both perceived and manipulated colonial gender identities, but it also highlights continuities. Repeated masculine imagery reveals that though French colonizers in Indochina, French women writers who occupied an ambivalent position in the colonial hierarchy, and indigenous nationalists all had different and often opposing views on who should be included within the category of men, they often reaffirmed the definition of masculinity offered by the colonial discourse.;The first chapter of this thesis explores the gendered imagery of the colonial discourse and the manner in which it served to construct and subsequently legitimate colonial gendered relationships of power. The second chapter examines the travel diary of Claudie Beaucarnot and Marguerite Duras's novel The Sea Wall in order to explore the paradoxical role occupied by female colonizers in Indochina and their subsequent ambiguous perspective on colonialism and the colonized people whom they dominated. The third chapter examines The Red Earth by Tran Tu Binh and the works of Ho Chi Minh to demonstrate how indigenous nationalists in Indochina appropriated gendered language to question the legitimacy of French rule and seek recognition as men. The fourth explores the varied perspective of Frenchmen and other Westerners to decolonization in Indochina in order to argue that as the battle for power in the colony intensified, so did the debate over gendered identities. Ultimately, this thesis argues that gendered identity within the context of the French Empire in Indochina was continually contested. It also demonstrates the manner in which gendered identities could be manipulated by different groups to both legitimate and challenge imperial authority.