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Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899–1913

This monograph forges an intersection of US imperial history, queer of color critique, and critical ethnic studies. In this important study, Victor Rom an Mendoza uses queer theory reading practices to offer an “insurrectional” methodological reading of US empire in the Philippines (204). Mendoza, an associate professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Michigan, assembles a seemingly discordant archive of legal records, political cartoons, an early twentiethcentury play, and pensionado writings to recover an array of queer intimate practices within and between both empire and colony. The author, however, offers much more than a mere recovery of these practices, arguing that the metropole both policed and came to apprehend queer sexual discourses through its empire in the Philippines. Mendoza’s interventions are, thus, both methodological and historiographical, prompting scholars to attend to how queer histories are both the site through which US empire projected its imperial, racial, and sexual fantasies, as well as the mode through which we might find subjects that exceeded or transgressed empire. The author’s insurrectional methodology, then, is a call for an attention to the transgressions and typologies made possible through a queer reading of US empire in the Philippines. In chapter 3, Mendoza fittingly utilizes The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons, edited by Jorge Emmanuel, Abe Ignacio, and Helen Toribio (T’Boli Publishing 2014). This work is a compilation of turn-of-the-century imperial cartoons, which have been collected by three activists with decades of experience working on Philippine and Filipino-American issues. Mendoza locates within these cartoons the numerous ways that the Philippines, by way of the “Philippine bottom,” represented a “sublime object of metroimperial governance as a penetrable but simultaneously encroaching threat” (129). In one striking example, Mendoza points to a cartoon where anti-imperial Senator George Hoar stands in as an instructor who rewards those under his tutelage, and pro-imperial Senator Albert Beveridge wields a rod of punishment for disobedient subjects. In between them, Emilio Aguinaldo, drawn as a schoolboy, is depicted as aroused at the prospect of reprimand and, therefore, desirous of imperial discipline. The author’s forceful and detailed readings of US popular culture call forth renewed orientations to imperial archives, both those richly documented and those that remain underexamined. Further, Mendoza’s choice of source material, a decades-long labor of recuperation by the collection’s editors, underscores another layer of archival recovery: the historical and ongoing effort to recover subjugated histories of both imperial management and the subversions of such management practices. The rest of the work further details how the United States came to make sense of itself as an empire but also how many within the country came to understand their own queer fantasies. In chapter 4, Mendoza reads George Ade’s The Sultan of Sulu as a way through which Ade is able to comprehend his own “bachelorhood in the imperial metropole” (163). In the conclusion, the author retraces the story of Babe Bean-Jack Garland to underscore how US imperialism and settler colonial expansion was the often-neglected terrain on which transgressive figures enacted their “gender-sexual dissidence” (209). Through George Ade and Babe Bean-Jack Garland, the author demonstrates how the imperial Philippines functioned within the metropole as a backdrop for the comprehension of unnamed fantasies and transgressions. Mendoza, therefore, calls for scholars to more fully account for the US empire’s attempts to manage intimacy, fantasy, and sexual discourse in order to better understand the deep entanglements between empire, gender, and sexuality. This work richly builds on the existent literature on US imperialism, in particular, drawing from the generative contributions on studies of queerness and sexuality in the turn-of-thetwentieth-century United States (Siobhan Somerville 2000), as well as in the Philippines in later periods (Kale Fajardo 2011, Martin Joseph Ponce 2012, and Martin Manalansan 2003). Mendoza compels scholars to bring queer theory methodologies to the imperial archive in order to attend to the ways that sexuality, in addition to gender and masculinity (Kristin Hoganson 1998), race (Paul Kramer 2006 and Vicente Rafael 2000), and surveillance (Alfred McCoy 2009) functioned as modes of imperial management that formulated multidirectional transformations in both the United States and the Philippines. For these reasons, this generative monograph should find audiences among scholars in the fields of histories of empire, US-Philippine history, queer and sexuality studies, and critical ethnic studies. For course offerings, this monograph would be appropriate for upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses.