Performing Memory, Articulating Identity: Feminist Language in the Photography of Hanh Thi Pham

This paper examines the work of Vietnamese American artist Hanh Thi Pham (b. 1954), whose practice combines photography, performance, and theatrical narrative to explore trauma, diaspora, and gendered identity. Leaving Vietnam in 1975 at the end of the Second Indochina War, Pham settled in Orange County, California, where she navigated both the expectations of the Vietnamese refugee community and the broader racialized narratives of the war in the United States.

Central to her work is the use of language—visual, symbolic, and performative—as a feminist tool of critique and memory. In series such as Post Obit (1983) and Along the Street of Knives (1985), Pham positions her own body at the center of staged photographic and performative sequences, creating an écriture féminine that confronts patriarchal conservatism, heteronormativity, and the silencing of diasporic voices. Her images evoke haunting, displacement, and the negotiation of multiple identities, articulating experiences of queerness, gender, and ethnicity that are often erased or stereotyped.

Pham’s work demonstrates how women artists employ language beyond the written word—through gesture, performance, and photographic composition—to assert agency and challenge social and cultural hierarchies. By foregrounding the intersections of memory, identity, and diaspora, her practice exemplifies feminist strategies of language-based critique, making it a compelling case study for this session on global feminist art. This paper situates Pham’s work within transnational and intersectional feminist frameworks, highlighting the ways in which language, in its many forms, becomes both medium and message for women artists negotiating erasure and marginalization.