Asian Diasporic Photography and the Gendered Work of Empire
Benedicto K. Villaverde, photograph, April 15 1969, Benedicto K. Villaverde Collection, Vietnam Center, VA049836. At Phu Loi Base Camp near Saigon, seven Asian women wash clothes on a raised platform in front of a truck carrying water; a white American soldier stands in the background, towel over his shoulder.
This photograph was taken in 1969 by Pinoy US army medic Benedicto Kayampat Villaverde, then stationed in Vietnam, and forms part of the personal archive of photographs my geographer brother Wesley and I discuss in our article for the June 2021 issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies. Inspired by the work of Vernadette Gonzalez, Lisa Lowe, Simeon Man, and Thy Phu (among others), as well as Wes’s own ongoing research on Asian labour and US Cold War empire-building, we wanted to think more about Villaverde’s photographs of the Southeast Asian women who washed and cleaned for US military personnel stationed in Vietnam. What can they tell us about the gendered forms of reproductive labour that sustained US imperial life overseas, including for Asian Americans? Much of the essay is concerned with the fraught gender and colonial dynamics of Villaverde’s (photographic) encounters with Southeast Asian women under conditions of war, as well as his love of food (!). But we end by reflecting on the other set of encounters also visible in photographs like the one here: between the women themselves, as workers who also organized (for reproductive and sexual autonomy among other things). Originally published June 2021 @ https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2021.0021.