The strategic failure of shaping ‘childish’ colonised men into manly colonial soldiers in Vietnam and the Philippines, 1882–1915

In the late nineteenth century, French soldiers in Vietnam and American soldiers in the Philippines trained Southeast Asian men into auxiliary soldiers. Both the French and American soldiers viewed this objective in gendered terms, considering Southeast Asian men as childish and in need of manly discipline. This perception of Southeast Asian men as childlike overlapped with other gendered descriptions of Southeast Asians within each colonial context, such as the ‘feminine’ appearance of Vietnamese men and the supposedly savage masculinity of Filipinos. However, the childlike descriptor superseded these other gendered descriptions in both locations. This article compares these two colonies and argues that childishness was a gendered category imposed on Southeast Asians by French and American soldiers. It also demonstrates how the objectives of training Southeast Asian soldiers were frustrated by the contestations of Vietnamese and Filipino soldiers and intellectuals. The article argues that even when successful by their own criteria, French and American officers could not accept that they had transformed Southeast Asian ‘children’ into ‘men’, because declaring victory would undermine the ongoing need for colonial intervention.