Tracol-Huynh, Isabelle

Supervising Sexuality in Colonial Vietnam: Vice Squad and Regulation of Prostitution from the 1870s to the End of the 1930s - 2012.


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Colonisation is first of all an encounter and as such helps to blur the racial boundary lines that underlie the colonial order. Maintaining order and regulating prostitution therefore mean drawing new racial boundary lines and introducing systems of population separation and coexistence in every domain, even the most private. The vice squad, a tool for managing contacts between populations and races, thus participates in the broader project of maintaining the colonial order.