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Go Away Little Girl: Gender, Race, and Controversy in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Kim S. Theriault
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Extract

It's remarkably simple, really.

Constructed in 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, generally referred to as the “Wall,” consists of two black granite wings, each almost 250 feet long, which meet at an obtuse angle that is submerged into the landscape of the National Mall, a green space between the Lincoln and Washington Memorials and some distance behind White House, in Washington, D.C. The form of the Wall, designed by Maya Ying Lin, is minimalist in nature, not only because it includes the right angles, hard edges, shiny surface, and repeated increments of Minimalism, but because even though it is a war memorial, unlike most, its only ornament and representation is the seemingly endless list of 58,226 names of American service men and women killed in Vietnam.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 29 , October 2005 , pp. 595 - 617
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

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References

Notes

1. Maya Ying Lin herself repeated this term during an interview with Morley Safer on 60 Minutes (which aired on Sunday, October 10, 1982) after Safer raised questions about the relationship of the controversy to Lin's gender, age, and ethnicity.

2. Scruggs, Jan C. and Swerdlow, Joel L., To Heal a Nation: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 78Google Scholar.

3. Lin, Maya Ying, “An Interview with Maya Lin,” interview by Reese Williams, in Unwinding the Vietnam War, ed. Williams, Reese (Seattle: Real Comet, 1987), 271Google Scholar.

4. Ibid.

5. Menand, Louis, “The Reluctant Memorialist,” New Yorker 78, no. 18 (07 8, 2002)Google Scholar. Scruggs also relates how she complained of being treated like a little girl (Scruggs, and Swerdlow, , To Heal a Nation, 78Google Scholar).

6. Thomas, Cahart, “A Better Way to Honor Viet Vets,” Washington Post, 11 15, 1981, C5Google Scholar.

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16. Expanded discussion of the Wolfe, Brown, Saul, Colescott, and Aptekar works can be found in Lippard, Lucy's A Different War: Vietnam in Art (Seattle: Whatcom Museum of History and Art and Real Comet Press, 1990)Google Scholar. I thank John Olbrantz, the organizer of the exhibition of the same name, for directing me to the locations of a number of these images.

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18. Special Forces member Samuel S. Theriault remarked to his wife, Rose, before the escalation of the war in approximately 1965, that occasionally Vietnamese women would make the rounds of American camps, offering themselves to the soldiers. It is unclear from his statements whether these women received compensation or acted out of free will or if this was a common practice, just as it is unclear whether the women had already been defiled or forced into such an existence out of economic necessity.

19. I have already noted the lack of distinction of Lin as Chinese American.

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26. Ibid.

27. Sturken, , “The Wall,” 53Google Scholar.

28. Ibid., 171.

29. Ibid.

30. The Vietnam Women's Memorial Project is now called the Vietnam Women's Memorial Foundation, Inc., located at 1735 Connecticut Avenue NW, 3rd Floor, Washington, D.C. 20009. The foundation has requested that the author in form anyone wishing more information on the Vietnam Women's Memorial that their website is www.VietnamWomensMemorial.org.

31. Marling, Karal Ann and Wetenhall, John, “The Sexual Politics of Memory: The Vietnam Women's Memorial Project and ‘The Wall,’” Prospects 14 (1989): 357–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. Ibid., 358.

33. Ibid.

34. Scruggs, and Swerdlow, , To Heal a Nation, 133Google Scholar.

35. Brownstein, A., “24 Years Later, Two Are Finally Linked by Loss,” Washington Post, 11 12, 1992, A1, A16Google Scholar.

36. Laware, , “Welcome Home Brother!” 168Google Scholar.

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38. Sorkin, , “What Happens,” 122Google Scholar.

39. Gillis, John R., “Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. Gillis, John R. (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 19Google Scholar.

40. Ibid., 3.

41. Griswold, Charles L., “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall: Philosophical Thoughts on Political Iconography.” Critical Inquiry 12 (Summer 1986): 691CrossRefGoogle Scholar.