Hoang Tan Nguyen is a video artist and film scholar whose work engages racialized sexuality, experimental film, queer of color critique, and Asian/American visual culture. His videos, including K.I.P, PIRATED!, and Forever Bottom!, have been screened at MoMA, The Getty Center, and The Pompidou Center. Hoang's writings have appeared in Porn Studies, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, Resolutions 3: Global Networks of Video, kultur & geschlecht, and Porn Archives. His book, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation, was published by Duke University Press in the Perverse Modernities series. He is Associate Professor of English and film studies at Bryn Mawr College.
Hoang Tan Nguyen
Penn Humanities Forum Regional Fellow
2015—2016 Forum on Sex
Hoang Tan Nguyen
Associate Professor of English
Bryn Mawr College
Sex, Censorship, and Aesthetics in Contemporary Queer Thai and Vietnamese Cinemas
This project examines the deployment of dissident sexualities by Thai and Vietnamese filmmakers to contest the production and regulation of proper citizenship. It considers the aesthetic strategies used by filmmakers to address and respond to government censorship policies that deem the depictions of non-normative sexualities as inimical to the interests of the nation-state. Framing censorship as a generative and collaborative process, the study suggests that Southeast Asian cultural production is not diminished by censorship but operates according to other logics than Western notions of artistic freedom. The project intervenes in the debates around trans-Asian cinema, critical regionalism, and alternative queer modernities.