Abstract Book of the 3rd World Conference on Gender Equality
Year: 2025
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Lottery Music Shows: Popular Vietnamese Broadway Shows for Gender Equality
Dr. Tien Ly Quyet
ABSTRACT:
In recent years, Vietnam has witnessed the striking appearance of the local traveling theater into the local entertainment business. From the small groups who traveled in the rural areas and performed mainly for the mass to earn their living by the transgender artists at the village’s fairs and markets, they have developed into professional theaters, recognized by the Vietnamese public.
These popular shows are a kind of music shown in which the artists sing different songs, use the last word of a lyric corresponding to the numbers of a lottery game drawn at random. Poor people in the rural areas come to listen to music and play games. Accordingly, those who have the matched numbers will win the prizes, which are a cheap teddy bear, a bottle of air or a bag of soap powder. The artists sing a series of songs to entertain public and cite the lottery numbers for them to play. They stop singing when there are people who win the games and continue the shows until the end. Transgender by nature, underprivileged by status, refused by the family and despised by the society, these unluckiest artists had to travel from village to village to survive and suffer from injustice and discrimination. Their public is the poor villagers and workers in the outskirts of the big cities who share the same destiny support and love them.
Starting at the end of the 20th century and growing in tandem with the LGBT movement in Vietnam, these queer artists came out: rich in formats, diverse in contents, stunning in performance, these originally unprofessional music shows gradually appear professionally on stage in the big cities in the South of Vietnam, have touched the heart and won the sympathy of the larger public, marking the rising transgender voice, contributing to a flourishing of LGBT culture, diversifying Vietnam’s extraordinary musical treasure and revolutionizing the colors of Asian pop music in times of gender liberation. Their success affirms their identity, assure their gender right and transform the social prejudice from negative to positive.
The paper examines the background into which Vietnamese Lottery music show was born and develops sustainably: its styles, themes as well as its own particularity. The paper also studies its identity, diversity in the entertainment industry and its revolutionary role in the promotion of the welfare of the Vietnamese transgender citizens by furthering the native LGBT rights movement and highlighting the outstanding Vietnamese popular culture in Asia.
Keywords: lottery, music show, transgender, equality