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RUBY C. TAPIA 4 “Just Ten Years Removed from a Bolo and a Breech-cloth” The Sexualization of the Filipino “Menace” CONTEMPLATING POWER, Andrea Dworkin asserts that it is “men [who] have the power of naming, a great and sublime power. This power of naming enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing its realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed , to control perception itself.”1 Here, I employ Dworkin’s insight to aid my own contemplation of power and naming, located at the specific point(s) of U.S. imperial contact with the Philippines, to identify the wielder of the “power to control perception itself” as a subject much more specific and more historical than the biological male. Thus appropriately complicating our notions of patriarchy and power, we can address Yen Le Espiritu’s important critique about the “failure of feminist scholarship to theorize the historically specific experiences of men of color.”2 In this essay, I attempt to do this by examining the experience of the manongs in California during the early twentieth century—specifically, the naming of their maleness, their sex, their bodies, and their work by European/American discourse.3 Through examining how the Filipino “first wave” experienced the intersection of race, class, gender, and sex within the domains—labor, laws, and love—that Espiritu discusses in her own work on Asian Americans, we can productively elaborate feminist critiques of masculinity and nation building, and the violence that these formations produce for immigrant communities of men and women alike. Affirming Lisa Lowe’s observation that “race [is] not a fixed singular essence, but the locus in which economic, gender, sex, and race contradictions converge,” I discuss moments of this (often violent) convergence in the experiences and representations of the manongs in the United States during the early twentieth century.4 I choose specific sites of this convergence—as they have been identified in previous historical accounts—and reexamine them for the “origin” of what Avery Gordon terms the “ghostly matter” of modernity.5 This matter, which takes and maintains form in racialized popular and legal discourse, in narratives of citizenship and nation, and within the cultural memory and production of “others-within,” is, I argue , what haunts much “post”-modern theory, rendering it incapable of processing power/knowledge as a white male supremacist “truth” that seems to have been before everything. My attempt to theorize the historically specific experiences of the 62 “Just ten years removed from a bolo and a breech-cloth” manongs, then, is an attempt to illumine the sites of intersection of economics, race, and gender that are the structural “joints” of the modern and postmodern nationstate . I am interested in how the imperial nation has historically constructed these joints via the labor and bodily material of oppressed racialized groups, and how these constructions have in turn produced “structures of feeling.”6 According to Honorante Mariano, images of U.S. democracy and freedom, and the belief that annexation had made these things a reality for Filipinos, beckoned the manongs of the early twentieth century “to see for [themselves] the conditions, to visit the places and to work and sojourn among the people and in the land that claimed [their] allegiance and loyalty.”7 In his own personal narrative, Carlos Bulosan wrote about similar imaginings of the United States, remembering one of the many myths transmitted by a U.S. colonial education that fed young Filipinos’ dreams: A poor boy became a president of the United States! Deep down in me something was touched, was springing out, demanding to be born, to be given a name. I was fascinated by the story of this boy who was born in a log cabin and became a president of the United States. . . . That evening I troubled Miss Strandon with questions. “Will you tell me what happened to Abraham Lincoln, ma’am?” I asked. “Well, when he became president he said that all men are created equal,” Miss Strandon said. “But some men, vicious men, who had Negro slaves, did not like what he said. So a terrible war was fought between the states of the United States, and the slaves were freed and the nation was preserved. But one night he was murdered by an assassin.” “Abraham Lincoln died for a black person?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. “He was a great man.”8 SuchlegendswereonlypartofthecolonialprojecttoconditionFilipinoservitudeto capitalist...

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