White gazes, brown breasts: Imperial feminism and disciplining desires and bodies in colonial encounters

Paedagogica Historica

Volumn 48, Issue 2, 2012, Pages 243-261

  Coloma, Roland Sintos ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

Imperial feminism; Philippines; Race; Sexuality; United states

Indexed keywords

EID: 84859178232     PISSN: 00309230     EISSN: 1477674X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00309230.2010.547511     Document Type: Article

References (99)

1. Grave of White Race: Decline of Caucasians Who Live in the Tropics," Washington Post, June 24, 1900, 20.
2. The Philippines came under official United States control at the end of the Spanish-American War. Spain ceded the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam to the US for $20 million at the Treaty of Paris on 10 December 1898. Although Filipina/o revolutionary forces declared independence from Spain on 12 June 1898, they continued their struggle against Western colonial powers by waging war against the United States. The Philippine-American War lasted from 1899 to 1902, with hostilities continuing until 1913.
3. See, Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984)
4. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
5. and Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
6. For an insightful gender analysis of these wars, see, Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
7. Grave of White Race," 20.
8. The term "colonial encounters" derives from the work of Mary Louise Pratt on "contact zone" which "refer[s] to the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict It treats the relations among colonizers and colonized in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 6-7.
9. Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, "Challenging Imperial Feminism," Feminist Review 17 (1984): 3-19.
10. In her transnational study of the British empire in the mid-1800s, Catherine Hall provides an insightful distinction between the spaces of the metropole and the colony and the effects of such distinction: "England was for families, Jamaica was for sex. Illicit forms of sexuality. transgressed racial and social lines. [A]bsenteeism in Jamaica meant that, far from the 'higher orders' providing a model for a proper bourgeois life, they offered instead a model of disorder, licentious sexuality, illegitimacy, irregularity." Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 72.
11. Jane Haggis, "White Women and Colonialism: Towards a Non-recuperative History," in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (New York: Routledge, 2003), 162.
12. See, e.g., Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)
13. Gerda Lerner, Why History Matters: Life and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)
14. Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)
15. Joan W. Scott, ed., Feminism and History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)
16. and Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
17. Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1.
18. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute, 1987)
19. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)
20. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995)
21. and Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
22. For an important collection focusing on education, see Joyce Goodman and Jane Martin, eds, Gender, Colonialism and Education: The Politics of Experience (London: Frank Cass, 2002).
23. This article is also in conversation with the recent Paedagogica Historica special issue (2009) on "'Empire Overseas' and 'Empires at Home': Postcolonial and Transnational Perspectives on Social Change in the History of Education".
24. Hoganson, American Manhood
25. Rafael, White Love; Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
26. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 296-97.
27. Lila Abu-Lughod, "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?: Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and its Others," American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 783-790
28. Sunera Thobani, "White Wars: Western Feminisms and the 'War on Terror'," Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 169-85.
29. Intimacy and sexual relations have increasingly become prominent subjects of scholarly inquiry in postcolonial studies. See, e.g., Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
30. and Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds, Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008). Drawing on Foucault and Stoler, this article uses the terms "biopolitics" and "governmentality" as intertwined concepts in the context of colonial encounters. "Biopolitics" focuses on bodies and populations as objects of governmental operations and interventions "governmentality" attends to the institutions, rationalities, processes and techniques of power that control target populations for particular ends.
31. See Stoler's Race and the Education of Desire
32. Michel Foucault, "The Birth of Biopolitics," in Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 73-79
33. and Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 102-03.
34. This article focuses on the heteronormative desires and moral panic in relation to white men and brown women. It accounts neither for the sexual dynamics between white women and brown men, nor for the queer sexual desires and acts between white and brown women, and between white and brown men. I have not found any historical records of same-sex relationships or sexual encounters in the Philippines in the early 1900s. I appreciate Kari Dehli and Heather Sykes raising this issue at my OISE/UT lecture.
35. Also, see, Roland Sintos Coloma, "Putting Queer to Work: Examining Empire and Education," International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 19, no. 5 (2006): 639-57.
36. Morals in the Philippines: Women's Council Requests the Government to Investigate Alarming Reports," Washington Post (November 17, 1900), 8.
37. The National Council of Women's position on the "innate" vision and influence of women on social issues can be gleaned from one of its former presidents, May Wright Sewall, who was president of the International Council of Women in 1900. At the closing of NCW's Second Triennial on 2 March 1895, Sewall stated: "I believe too, that thus far, evolution has emphasized, not diminished, the influence of sex. I believe that civilization emphasizes, not diminishes, that influence; that culture emphasizes the same quality, and that the higher one gets in the development of the race, the more pervasive, and the more important, because the more subtle, does one find the distinctions of thought, feeling, conviction and sentiment that arise from sex; and, therefore, so far as we can foresee, our vision cannot reach beyond the time when it will be proper that women shall have avenues of their own devising, under their own control, for bringing to bear upon the life of their time, the influence proceeding from what is innate in the ever womanly."
38. See Louise Barnum Robbins, History and Minutes of the National Council of Women of the United States (Charleston, SC: Bibliobazaar, 2008), 215.
39. Morals in the Philippines," 8
40. Women's Work in the Colonies: National Council Will Send Commissions in Investigate Social Life," Washington Post, November 16, 1900, 4.
41. MacArthur Defends His Men: Reports of Drunkenness and Immorality Greatly Exaggerated," Washington Post, January 20, 1901, 6
42. Immorality in Manila: Despite Gov. Taft's Statement, Mrs. Ellis Insists that Vice is Protected," Washington Post, March 9, 1902, 11.
43. On Margaret Dye Ellis's life and activities, see Elizabeth Putnam Gordon, Women Torch-Bearers: The Story of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2005), 103-27.
44. For important studies on WCTU's national and international advocacy, see Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)
45. and Ian Tyrrell, Woman's World, Women's Empire: the Women's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1992).
46. Immorality in Manila," 11.
47. Prey of our Soldiers: Plea for Filipino Women by American Sisters," Washington Post, February 22, 1902, 2. Concerns about the moral and sexual degeneracy of white men in the colonies were not only directed to lowly military soldiers or civilian public servants. A December 1906 article indicates that an "anonymous letter" to US President Theodore
48. Roosevelt charged the then-unmarried Brigadier General John J. Pershing of immoral conduct when he was stationed in the southern area of Zamboanga, Mindanao. The letter alleged that Pershing was living with a Filipino woman "by whom he had at least two, if not three, children. He built a house for her accommodation and made his home with her." "Defend Gen. Pershing: Friends Say Jealousy Inspired Charges Against Him," Washington Post, December 21, 1906, 3.
49. Paul A. Kramer, "The Darkness that Enters the Home: The Politics of Prostitution during the Philippine-American War," in Haunted by Empire, 373, 396.
50. See, also, Andrew Jimenez Abalahin, "Prostitution Policy and the Project of Modernity: A Comparative Study of Colonial Indonesia and the Philippines, 1850-1940" (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2003). For insightful examinations of gender, race, and sexuality in Victorian culture
51. See Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women's Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996)
52. and, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
53. Roland Sintos Coloma, "'Destiny has thrown the Negro and the Filipino under the tutelage of America': Race and Curriculum in the Age of Empire," Curriculum Inquiry 39, no. 4 (2009): 515.
54. Mary Helen Fee, A Woman's Impressions of the Philippines (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co, 1910), 89.
55. Many US educators in the Philippines who had a Christian missionary zeal did not realise that the Philippines was already a Christian country, albeit of the Catholic and not the Protestant kind, due to over 300 years of Spanish colonial rule. In her study of the first large wave of US educators in the archipelago, Mary Racelis noted that "Most were imbued with a pioneering, missionary zeal that for some translated specifically into bringing Christianity to Filipinos. Not a few were surprised to discover that most people were already Christian and that in any event, the terms of their contract with the American government forbade them from proselytizing. With the fear that Americans would exploit the Filipinos came the widespread belief that the Americans planned to convert people to Protestantism. This elicited initial reactions of avoidance, apprehension, suspicion or downright animosity, much of it fanned in Catholic circles dominated by Spanish friars and elite lay organizations." Hence, the Catholic stronghold in the Philippines mediated and tempered the Protestant missionary aspect of US colonialism, unlike in Hawai'i under US rule or in New Zealand under British rule. Mary Racelis, "Bearing Benevolence in the Classroom and Community," in Bearers of Benevolence: The Thomasites and Public Education in the Philippines, ed. Mary Racelis and July Celine Ick (Pasig City, Philippines: Anvil, 2001), 4-5
56. Patricia Grimshaw, Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-century Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989)
57. and Tanya Fitzgerald, "Cartographies of Friendship: Mapping missionary women's educational networks in Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1823-1840," History of Education 32, no. 5 (2003): 513-27.
58. Dean Conant Worcester served as a member of the governing US-Philippine Commissions from 1899 to 1901 and then as Secretary of Interior from 1901 to 1913. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 22.
59. Nerissa Balce, "The Filipina's Breast: Savagery, Docility and the Erotics of the American Empire," Social Text 24, no. 2 (2006): 92-93
60. Clifton C. Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
61. th Century Philippines (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1996).
62. Anzaldúa, Borderlands.
63. This article builds upon other feminist research on the complicity of white women in empire building. See, e.g., Dolores E. Janiewski, "Engendering the Invisible Empire: Imperialism, Feminism, and US Women's History," Australian Feminist Studies 16 (2001): 279-93
64. Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)
65. Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001)
66. and Sarah A. Curtis, Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
67. For a recent examination of women's anti-imperialism, see Erin L. Murphy, "Women's Anti-imperialism, 'The White Man's Burden,' and the Philippine-American War: Theorizing Masculinist Ambivalence in Protest," Gender & Society 23, no. 2 (2009): 244-270.
68. These 509 US educators were endearingly called the Thomasites, based on the transport ship. The last Thomasite in the Philippines, Mary E. Polley, died in Pasay City in 1953, more than 50 years after her arrival in the country. Racelis, "Bearing Benevolence," 4.
69. Washington Post, April 5, 1903, D4
70. New York Times, January 30, 1902, 8.
71. Opening for American Educators in the Philippine Islands," New York Times, November 25, 1907, 2.
72. Bureau of Education, Eleventh Annual Report of the Director of Education, for the Fiscal Year July 1, 1910 to June 30, 1911 (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1911), 15.
73. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995), 136.
74. To be sure, US educators who came to the Philippines in the early 1900s had different interests and motivations for going abroad. Mary Racelis indicated that US educators "saw themselves as bringing more than just the basic literacy and numeracy skills. They were charged with inculcating democratic values and ideals into young Filipino minds, with a view to making the country a model of American-style democracy in the Far East. Those who had fiancées in the United States urged their soon-to-be brides to join them in their noble enterprise. Still others came for travel and adventure, young and fresh out of college in many instances and eager to see some of the world before settling down. They also needed jobs. More seasoned teachers were looking for greater challenges and excitement in the course of their teaching lives." Racelis, "Bearing Benevolence," 4.
75. See, also, Jonathan Zimmerman, Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), especially his chapter on "Ambivalent Imperialists". However, this article focuses on the discursive rules and practices of imperial feminism, as manifested in the beliefs and behaviours of many US women on both sides of the Pacific in the early 1900s in relation to US men and Filipino women. Coloma, "Race and Curriculum in the Age of Empire".
76. In the context of British India, A Snia Loomba suggests that "The question of female education itself became a colonial battlefield. If colonialists claimed to reform women's status by offering them education, nationalists countered by charting a parallel process of education and reform, one which would simultaneously improve the women's lot and protect them from being decultured. In nineteenth-century Bengali discourses, for instance, the over-educated woman is represented as becoming a memsahib or Englishwoman who neglects her home and husband. Too much, education, like too little, results in bad domestic practices". Ania Loomba, Colonialism/postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 2005), 183.
77. The roles and perspectives of Filipina/o teachers in the US colonial school system, especially in relation to the education of girls and young women, deserves its own separate analysis and is beyond the scope of this article. I appreciate one of the reviewers for raising this issue.
78. Bureau of Education, Primary and Intermediate Sewing: A Manual for Use in Philippine Public Schools and Normal Institutes (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1917)
79. Bureau of Education, Embroidery: A Manual for Use in Philippine Public Schools (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1919).
80. Alice M. Fuller, Housekeeping: A Textbook for Girls in the Public Intermediate Schools of the Philippines (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1914), 24, 26
81. Susie M. Butts, Housekeeping: A Textbook for Girls in the Public Intermediate Schools of the Philippines (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1919)
82. Susie M. Butts, Housekeeping: A Textbook for Girls in the Public Intermediate Schools of the Philippines (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1922)
83. Bureau of Education, Supplementary Problems for Domestic Science Classes: For Use in Grades VI and VII (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1915)
84. Bureau of Education, Food Selection and Diet and Home Nursing: A Textbook for Girls in the Seventh Grade (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1925).
85. Butts, Housekeeping, 3
86. Fuller, Housekeeping, 20
87. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).
88. Fuller, Housekeeping, 23, 25.
89. The 2000 Anti Trafficking Protocol of the United Nations focuses on the rehabilitation of human trafficking victims with specific considerations for appropriate housing, care and education.
90. Christal Morehouse, Combating Human Trafficking: Policy Gaps and Hidden Political Agendas in the USA and Germany (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2009), 46.
91. For a historical study on prostitution in Britain during the same time period, see Paula Bartley, Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860-1914 (London: Routledge, 1999).
92. Nelleke Bakker, "A Head and a Heart: Calvinism and Gendered Ideals of Parenthood in Dutch Child-rearing Literature c.1845-1920," in Gender, Colonialism and Education, 28.
93. Adeline Knapp, How to Live: A Manual of Hygiene - For Use in the Schools of the Philippine Islands (New York and Boston: Silver, Burdett and Company, 1902)
94. Bureau of Education, Civics, Hygiene, and Sanitation: For Use in Grades I to VI, Inclusive - A Manual for Teachers (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1922)
95. Bureau of Education, Good Manners and Right Conduct: For Use in Primary Grades (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1913), 20.
96. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 176.
97. Bureau of Education, Good Manners and Right Conduct, 100-101.
98. Bureau of Education, Good Manners and Right Conduct, 9, 136
99. Gertrude E. McVenn, Good Manners and Right Conduct - Fifth Grade (Boston: D.C. Heath & Co., 1918), v.