2021-2022 AGAS LECTURE SERIES, Decolonizing Documentary: Vietnam’s Feminine War

Speaker Name: Siona Wilson
Department: Associate Professor of Art History and Chair of the Performing and Creative Arts Department at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, and is on the doctoral faculty at the Graduate Center, CUNY
University or Organization: Performing and Creative Arts Department at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, and the Graduate Center, CUNY

The United States lost the war in Vietnam, yet it has triumphed again and again in the ongoing
image war. The images we know and the narratives we understand are about the American
experience. In this talk, Dr. Siona Wilson gives an account of the much less-familiar Vietnamese
representation of the American War. This anticolonial war looks radically different. In contrast to
the moral failure of idealized, weaponized American masculinity that we know all too well, the
official public representation in Vietnam foregrounds the role of Vietnamese women. Examining
Vietnam’s feminine war challenges established histories of war imaging, changes our
understanding of the 1960s, and suggests a new way of theorizing documentary through a
feminist and decolonizing lens.

Dr. Siona Wilson is author of the book, Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art
and Performance (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Her writing has appeared in several
edited collections, including most recently, A Companion to Feminist Art (eds. Hilary Robinson and
Maria Elena Buszek) and More than the Pain: Affect and Emotion in the Era of Black Lives Matter
(eds. Beth Hinterliter and Steve Peraza), as well as academic journals and art magazines such as
Artforum, Art History, Art Review, Feminist Review, October, Oxford Art Journal, and Third Text.
Recent curatorial projects include I can’t breathe (2016, the Art Gallery of the College of Staten
Island) and Sexing Sound: Aural Histories and Feminist Scores (2015, The James Gallery). In
collaboration with Oskar Korsár, Wilson was the writer and director of the performance, I Like
Feminism and Feminism Likes me (2020). She is associate professor of art history and chair of the
Performing and Creative Arts Department at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, and is on the
doctoral faculty at the Graduate Center, CUNY.