Transposing Gender in the Diaspora: Linda Lê’s Les aubes (2000) and In memoriam (2007)

Linda Lê’s is one of the most resonant voices of the Vietnamese diaspora in Francophone writing, and her works are frequently read through the lens of exile and encounter with the other. While not engaging with explicit representations of the diasporic experience, Lê’s fictional and non-fictional texts are profoundly marked by the dislocation and alienation associated with the experience. This article considers the ways in which Linda Lê’s fictional writing surpasses the author’s own particular experience of the Vietnamese diaspora to offer a literary universe in which the disruptions of diaspora are expressed through the depiction of resistant modes of being and belonging. Focusing on two recent novels, Les aubes (2000) and In memoriam (2007), this article analyses Lê’s resistant construction of femininity, arguing that it is prompted and even enabled by the necessary transitions and transpositions of the diasporic experience. Through an examination of the sisterly solidarity, gender alterity and (in)corporeality that are foregrounded in these novels, the analysis explores Lê’s intratextual disruption of inherited models of femininity and modes of participation in domestic and sexual relationships, and draws a link with Lê’s extratextual literary universe to reveal the feminist ethics that underpins her resistance to gendered hierarchies. © 2018 by the author(s).