“Vietfuckin’- nam !”: Vietnam War Cinema and the Eroticized Imaginaries of Vietnamese Women among White Male Tourists

Within dominant Orientalist frameworks, Vietnam continues to circulate in Western cultural imaginaries largely through cinematic representations of the Vietnam War. These films have long reinforced frontier myths and racialized narratives of conflict, yet scholarly attention has focused primarily on war, trauma, and geopolitics, leaving underexplored the ways such representations shape sexualized imaginaries of Vietnam as a tourist destination. This paper addresses that gap by examining how Vietnam War films contribute to the eroticization of Vietnam and the racialized construction of Vietnamese women and Asian women more broadly as objects of desire within what has been described as the pleasure periphery of the Orient. Drawing on film analysis and critical theories of Orientalism, race, and gender, the paper explores how Vietnamese men are frequently depicted as primitive, ferocious, or incapacitated, while women are rendered as sensuous, compliant, and available. These representational patterns, the paper argues, inform the imaginaries inherited by young white male tourists, for whom Vietnam emerges simultaneously as a site of war ruins, poverty, and erotic promise. Such imaginaries sustain a broader hegemonic logic in which the trope of the white savior and the moral economy of helping the Global South are intertwined with masculine desire and mobility. By foregrounding the role of cinema in shaping sexual representation, tourism, and white male subjectivity, this paper contributes to interdisciplinary debates on Orientalism, war memory, and the production of hegemonic masculinity and femininity in postwar and postcolonial contexts.