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

Building on scholarship about intimacy, sexuality, and empire—territory mapped by Foucault and expanded by Stoler and others—Metroimperial Intimacies focuses on the particular case of United States’ governance of its Philippine colony during the long decade after the Treaty of Paris.¹ For Mendoza, the apparatuses of military occupation and colonial administration operated in tandem with the management of life in the islands, producing a kind of national hallucination or fantasy that drove the colonial project. To “zero ... in on the intimacies that try to give the state the slip,” Mendoza unfolds a queer-of-color critique that allows for a mode of reading and archival work that locates the emerging categories of abjection and the perverse as constituted and constitutive of, but also exceeding, the colonial order of things (11).

The challenge for projects that propose to examine the genealogies of intimacy—and specifically same-sex intimacy—is the sparseness and obliqueness of the historical record with regard to the subject. One of Mendoza’s most notable contributions is his assemblage of a disparate set of texts that begin to constitute an archive of U.S. racial-sexual governance and Filipino counter-narratives of racial-sexual subjectivity. Ranging from handbooks on conduct, punitive legal ordinances concerning sex and race, a court-martial case, political cartoons, a musical comedy by a Midwestern American, and the writings of early Philippine pensionadas/os in the U.S. metropole, 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.

One chapter deserves special mention because of the archival treasure that Mendoza uncovers—the case of United States v. Boss Reese (1911), the court-martial trial of an Army captain accused of sexual abuse. In examining the media coverage, the legal record, and the high-level correspondence generated around the case, Mendoza illuminates the discursive and legal acrobatics that the military court and the colonial administrators performed in establishing the procedure of law around sodomy in the colony, while also starkly defining its racial limits. In this small glimpse into the rape of Filipino soldiers by their American supervisor and its legal aftermath, Mendoza reveals not only a state contending with the management of the intimate but also of colonized people perversely insisting on becoming emergent subjects.