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.
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机译：在整个欧洲帝国主义的整个历史中，性别起着定义权力关系的作用，使殖民者能够主张并维持对殖民者的统治地位。尽管殖民者与被殖民者之间存在这种二元关系，但殖民地性别结构从来都不是静止的。本论文试图通过揭示殖民主义性别认同中固有的复杂性，歧义和争论，来扩展围绕帝国性别语言的史学，特别是在法国印度支那的情况下。本论文证明了殖民话语的性别和种族身份如何被男性，英勇的殖民者与女性，被动的殖民化并因此合法的欧洲至上主义相对立，如何被世界各地的不同群体和不同背景所证实和争论。第二次世界大战时期，法国人击败了奠边府。它阐明了不同群体在感知和操纵殖民地性别身份上的差异，但同时也突出了连续性。一再的男性形象揭示了，尽管法国人在印度支那定居，法国女性作家在殖民体系中占据着矛盾的位置，而土著民族主义者对于应该将男性包括在男性中的观点却存在着不同且常常是相反的观点，但他们经常重申这一定义。本论文的第一章探讨了殖民话语的性别形象，以及它如何建构并随后使殖民地性别权力关系合法化的方式。第二章研究了克劳迪·波卡诺和玛格丽特·杜拉斯的小说《防波堤》的旅行日记，以期探索印度支那女性殖民者所扮演的悖论角色，以及他们随后对殖民主义和他们统治的殖民地人民的big昧观点。第三章考察了Tran Tu Binh撰写的《红色地球》和胡志明的作品，以展示印度支那的土著民族主义者如何利用性别语言来质疑法国统治的合法性并寻求人们的承认。第四部分探讨了法国人和其他西方人对印度支那非殖民化的不同看法，以争辩说，随着殖民地权力争夺的加剧，关于性别认同的辩论也随之加剧。最终，这篇论文认为，在印度支那的法兰西帝国背景下的性别认同一直在争论。它还表明了不同群体可以操纵性别身份以合法和挑战帝国权威的方式。
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