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Hanoi Jane - War, Sex and Fantasies of Betrayal (Paperback)
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Hanoi Jane - War, Sex and Fantasies of Betrayal (Paperback)
Series: Culture and Politics in the Cold War and Beyond
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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From Aristophanes' Lysistrata to the notorious Mata Hari and the
legendary Tokyo Rose, stories of female betrayal during wartime
have recurred throughout human history. The myth of Hanoi Jane,
Jerry Lembcke argues, is simply the latest variation on this
enduring theme. Like most of the iconic femmes fatales who came
before, it is based on a real person, Jane Fonda. And also like its
predecessors, it combines traces of fact with heavy doses of
fiction to create a potent symbol of feminine perfidy--part erotic
warrior-woman Barbarella, part savvy anti-war activist, and part
powerful entrepreneur. Hanoi Jane, the book, deconstructs Hanoi
Jane, the myth, to locate its origins in the need of Americans to
explain defeat in Vietnam through fantasies of home-front betrayal
and the masculation of the national will-to-war. Lembcke shows that
the expression "Hanoi Jane" did not reach the eyes and ears of most
Americans until five or six years after the end of the war in
Vietnam. By then, anxieties about America's declining global status
and deteriorating economy were fuelling a populist reaction that
pointed to the loss of the war as the taproot of those problems.
Blaming the anti-war movement for undermining the military's
resolve, many found in the imaginary Hanoi Jane the personification
of their stab-in-the back theories. Ground zero of the myth was the
city of Hanoi itself, which Jane Fonda had visited as a peace
activist in July 1972. Rumours surrounding Fonda's visits with U.S.
POWs and radio broadcasts to troops combined to conjure allegations
of treason that had cost American lives. That such tales were more
imagined than real did not prevent them from insinuating themselves
into public memory, where they have continued to infect American
politics and culture. Hanoi Jane is a book about the making of
Hanoi Jane by those who saw a formidable threat in the Jane Fonda
who supported soldiers and veterans opposed to the war they fought,
in the postcolonial struggle of the Vietnamese people to make their
own future, and in the movements of women everywhere for gender
equality.
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