Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899–1913 by Victor Román Mendoza (review)

Making a significant contribution to US empire, Philippine, and gender and sexuality studies, Victor Román Mendoza’s Metroimperial Intimacies incisively examines the ways that US colonialism during and in the wake of the Philippine-American War (1899–1902) gave rise to an array of “social and sexual intimacies” that were shaped by and exceeded the biopolitical management, or “racial-sexual governance,” of the Philippine colonial subject (1). Mendoza tracks inter- and intraracial, homosocial and homoerotic, military and civilian, rural and transpacific intimacies across a variety of public and domestic spaces as they appear in the US colonial archive and in various forms of cultural production. The study redresses, on the one hand, histories of sexuality that fail to consider how the “U.S. imperial-colonial war in the Philippines fit[s] into the story of emergent sexual identifications” and, on the other, histories of US empire that “do not take seriously the role that sexual regulation had in the formation of colonial governance” (3). On the historical level, Mendoza’s empirical work thus demonstrates how “the racially inferior Philippine subjects were imagined at the same time as—and often in relation to—sexual degenerates” such as the invert, pervert, sodomite, fairy, and bachelor (27). On the methodological level, the book convincingly shows how a focus on fantasy and intimacy provides a means to recognize the “full range and diffusion of white supremacist imperialist violence” not only on public life but also on “forms of sexuality and interiority” (12).

The book’s self-assigned task is particularly challenging (and therefore all the more rewarding for its readers), since “records of same-sex erotic acts or gender variance in the early U.S. colonial state in the Philippines are distinctly scarce” (36). This scarcity may explain why Mendoza is the first to undertake such a scholarly endeavor, but it is nonetheless surprising, since queer-of-color critique has taught us to expect racialization to be constituted through ascriptions of gender and sexual deviance. Furthermore, Mendoza points out that although “laws regulating same-sex eroticism or gender-variant embodiment [were] emerging in urban spaces within the imperial metropole” during this time, they were not being “transmitted to the Philippines” (42). Mendoza offers several reasons for the paucity of records: vagrancy laws may have obscured apprehensions for sodomy; policing only public spaces where sexual encounters were clandestine or fleeting would have yielded scant evidence; and recognizing the prevalence of same-sex acts would have been tantamount to “admitting that colonialism engendered, imported, or facilitated unnatural relations, thereby spoiling claims to benevolent assimilation” (52). But most fascinating is his explanation that “the conspicuous scarcity of documented surveillance of specifically same-sex acts or desire in the Philippine archipelago results from the fantasmatic ascription of inherent perversion onto the primitive Philippine native body in toto” (51).

Through an eclectically assembled “strange” (1) and “minor archive” (31), Mendoza traces how this presumptive colonial fantasy of the perverse Philippine body was dramatized, reconstructed, and disavowed. Perhaps most impressive is that his historically grounded and psychoanalytically inflected readings sustain readerly interest despite the absence of canonical texts or well-known events. Chapter 2 examines the heretofore-unknown court-martial of Captain Boss Reese, who was accused and found guilty of abusing and sodomizing his Philippine subordinates and whose scandalous trial led to the military’s increased surveillance over same-sex acts. Mendoza’s discussion not only points out how the military strove to protect one of its own by contrasting Reese’s white martial masculinity and “precarious normalcy . . . against presumed Philippine racial perversion” (74) but also deploys Lyotard’s notion of the “differend” to comprehend the injustice done to the Philippine Scouts, recruits whose testimony of submitting to sexual abuse was paradoxically rendered as uncredible and as grounds for dismissal from service. Chapter 3 elucidates how...