Much scholarship on international order emphasizes hierarchies imposed by Global North powers on the Global South while overlooking how postcolonial states themselves construct and sustain hierarchies in relation to one another. Drawing from the Vietnamese digital discourse that emerged from a 2025 diplomatic sexual assault allegation involving a high-ranking Vietnamese official and a South Korean officer, I argue that materially weaker actors navigate postcolonial anxiety and ontological insecurity by using gender to invert their subordinate global positions when other avenues for asserting status are inaccessible. Through implementing feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis, I demonstrate that Vietnamese netizens framed the incident as a threat to sovereign manhood, responding with defensive narratives that emasculated and feminized South Korea. By centering an under-researched site in IR, this thesis reveals how everyday digital publics construct inverse gendered hierarchies not for external validation, but as a vital, bottom-up coping mechanism to stabilize a threatened national Self.
Dan Hoang (Fri,) studied this question.