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co-workers and the feminist struggle that was burgeoning independently right in the midst of their struggle for freedom of speech). These viewers tend to deny, or worseto
obscure
entirelythe question of gender by constantly casting the Vietnam reality back into the binary mold of communism and anticommunism. They also seem to be preoccupied with what they militated for, eager to preserve an idealized image of a Vietnam they supported, and unwilling to look at the actual situation of postrevolutionary Vietnam. As with many libertarian movements, there are people who are genuinely fighting for change and remain sensitive to the complexities of the feminist struggle, and there are those who only work to consolidate a position of authority and feel threatened by any form of resistance other than the one they are familiar with. Right now in Vietnam, the leaders are acknowledging some of the failures of the system and are raising questions pertaining to the transformation of socialist society. But even when the people who are directly involved see the necessity for change, you have people from the outside still holding fast to a past image of Vietnam, where for example, all the women involved in the revolution are upheld as "heroines." The work of critical inquiry cannot be content with fixed anti-positions, which were, in their own time, necessary in regard to the war in Vietnam but need to be problematized in the context of contemporary histories of political migration.
The struggle will never end, and we women still have a long way to go. The more I discuss these questions, the more I realize how little is known of the historical debates within the feminist struggle, not to mention the Sisyphean efforts of women of color across nations to expose the politics of gender within revolutionary movements.
After this long detour, let me end by responding to the point that
Surname Viêt
is as much about the process of translating as it is about Vietnam. To unravel the "name" of Vietnam in the context of translation is to confront the much debated politics of identityfemale identity, ethnic identity, national identity. For translation, as I suggested earlier, implies questions of language, power, and meaning, or more precisely in this film, of women's resistance vis-à-vis the sociosymbolic contractas mothers, wives, prostitutes, nurses, doctors, state employees, official cadres, heroines of the revolution. In the politics of constructing identity and meaning, language as translation and/or film as translation is necessarily a process whereby the self loses its fixed boundariesa disturbing yet potentially empowering practice of difference. For me, it is precisely in fighting on more than one front at a time, that is, in fighting not only against forms of domination and exploitation but also against less easily locatable forms of subjection or of binarist subjectivity, that the feminist struggle and other protest movements can continue to resist falling back into the consolidation of conformism.