Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image of Vietnam 1920-1940

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Christina Firpo, Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact [email protected].

Abstract

Christina Firpo will discuss her book Beauty and the Nation, which explores the changing perspectives on Vietnamese women's beauty and women's role in society, 1920-1940. This book traces beauty culture, including beauty practices and the discourse surrounding them, through an era of high colonialism, maturing capitalism, and rapid cultural change brought about with new forms of media and transportation. The changes in beauty norms and female comportment shocked the nation. Some critics asserted the merits of neo-Confucian dictates for women’s behavior; others embraced a new Vietnamese modernity. Indeed, women's everyday clothing and makeup came to play an important role in shaping the kind of nation Vietnam would become in the modern world. Beauty practices (and the debates they triggered) became a powerful expression of how women (and onlookers) attempted to make sense of their rapidly changing world. Understood this way, beauty culture reveals anxieties about the tumultuous political, economic, social, and cultural changes transforming Vietnam during the interwar years. Women’s faces and bodies, in short, became a vigorously debated site for envisioning what it meant to be Vietnamese in a modern world.

About the Speaker

Christina Firpo is professor of Southeast Asian history at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. She is the author of The Uprooted: Race, Imperialism, and Childhood in Indochina 1890-1980 (University of Hawaii Press, 2016); Black Market Business: Selling Sex in Northern Vietnam 1920-1940 (Cornell University Press, 2020); and Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image in Interwar Vietnam (Columbia University Press, 2026).