Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899-1913 (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe) - Tapa dura

"Using a queer of color critique, Metroimperial Intimacies provides an innovative and much-needed study of social and sexual intimacies within the context of the early years of U.S. imperial colonialism in the Philippines." -- Genevieve Clutario * Journal of American History * "Victor Roman Mendoza demonstrates that the history of American empire in the early-twentieth century Philippines can indeed be queered through intrepid research and savvy analysis. . . . [T]he analysis ranges from pathbreaking to brilliant." -- Kristin Hoganson * Canadian Journal of History * "... Metroimperial Intimacies demonstrates the multifaceted ways in which the United States attempted to manage the chaotic categories of race and sex in the new colony. Although not the first scholar to examine political cartoons and pensionado writing, Mendoza treads new ground in his attention to how male same-sex intimacy registered in these genres, enlarging our understanding of how colonial anxieties about race and sex shaped the social, legal, and cultural spaces of U.S.-Philippine relations." -- Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez * Journal of Interdisciplinary History *

In Metroimperial Intimacies Victor Roman Mendoza combines historical, literary, and archival analysis with queer-of-color critique to show how U.S. imperial incursions into the Philippines enabled the growth of unprecedented social and sexual intimacies between native Philippine and U.S. subjects. The real and imagined intimacies-whether expressed through friendship, love, or eroticism-threatened U.S. gender and sexuality norms. To codify U.S. heteronormative behavior, the colonial government prohibited anything loosely defined as perverse, which along with popular representations of Filipinos, regulated colonial subjects and depicted them as sexually available, diseased, and degenerate. Mendoza analyzes laws, military records, the writing of Philippine students in the United States, and popular representations of Philippine colonial subjects to show how their lives, bodies, and desires became the very battleground for the consolidation of repressive legal, economic, and political institutions and practices of the U.S. colonial state. By highlighting the importance of racial and gendered violence in maintaining control at home and abroad, Mendoza demonstrates that studies of U.S. sexuality must take into account the reach and impact of U.S. imperialism.