Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines, 1898-1941

by Genevieve Alva Clutario

Overview

Genevieve Alva Clutario traces how beauty and fashion in the Philippines shaped the intertwined projects of imperial expansion and modern nation building during the turbulent transition between Spanish, US, and Japanese empires.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478024279
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	02/13/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	24 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Genevieve Alva Clutario is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. A Queen Is Crowned  1
1. Tensions at the Seams: Petty Politics and Sartorial Battles  19
2. Queen Makers: Beauty, Power, and the Development of a Beauty Pageant Industrial Complex  63
3. Philippine Lingerie: Transnational Filipina Beauty Labor under US Empire  107
4. Beauty Regimes: Structure, Discipline, and Needlework in Colonial Industrial Schools and Prisons  139
5. “The Dream of Beauty”: The Terno and the Filipina High-Fashion System  183
Epilogue. Protectionism and Preparedness under Overlapping Empires  223
Notes  237
Bibliography  287
Index  319

What People are Saying About This

America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy - Naoko Shibusawa

“By theorizing how beauty became a contested measure of modernity in the colonial Philippines and focusing on Filipinas in the making of the modern Philippine state, Genevieve Alva Clutario brilliantly explores the role of appearance in liberal empires. This multiarchival, deeply researched, fascinating book illuminates how histories of gender and sexuality are essential to understanding colonialism, postcolonialism, and the modern-day world.”

Naoko Shibusawa’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy

“By theorizing how beauty became a contested measure of modernity in the colonial Philippines and focusing on Filipinas in the making of the modern Philippine state, Genevieve Alva Clutario brilliantly explores the role of appearance in liberal empires. This multiarchival, deeply researched, fascinating book illuminates how histories of gender and sexuality are essential to understanding colonialism, postcolonialism, and the modern-day world.”

Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina - Denise Cruz

“Genevieve Alva Clutario’s book is a smart and sophisticated rereading of the regime of beauty in the transimperial Philippines. Her examination of the beauty regime makes an incontrovertible case for the important intersections of beauty and style, power and politics, national and global, elite and laborer, individual and system. Offering a stunning and capacious analysis of these complexities, Beauty Regimes illuminates how the making of beauty in this period set the stage for contemporary representations of Filipino labor, and more broadly, labor in the global South.”

Editorial Reviews

"Beauty Regimes, with its emphasis on a specific period in Philippines history, could serve several academic purposes. The book forms an ideal historical analysis for those studying colonialism, empire, and nation-building, especially of Spain, the US, Japan, and the Philippines. Since fashion is placed in close relation to power, whether that is the struggle for diplomatic status between Filipinas and Americans or the distinction between elite Filipinas and female labourers, this book greatly contributes to historical gender studies."
 

Journal of Gender Studies - Thao Bui

"I believe Clutario’s Beauty Regimes is a book that any historian of material culture, spectacle, class, empire, or identity in both the global south and sites of resistance should not only read but keep close by for reference."

Journal of World History - Brayden Rothe

"Clutario has written a fascinating and useful book. By bringing together dress, fashion, and beauty under the framework of 'beauty production,' she provides a new way to understand the workings of global empire and colonialism. This book will be an important addition to graduate courses and of interest to historians of empire, beauty culture, and gender."

Pacific Historical Review - Sarah Steinbock-Pratt

Peering through a gendered lens, Clutario exposes the complex roles Filipinas played within empire and the fraught establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth. . . . Writing about the wives of politicians, embroiderers, beauty queens, and socialites, Clutario renders beauty as a complex weapon. In the hands of her Filipina subjects, it is deployed with both tenderness and aggression.

Rappler - Alice Sarmiento

"A unique book that delivers fresh insights into the American colonial period in the Philippines through the politics of fashion and beauty regimens."

Fashion Theory - Mina Roces

"A unique book that delivers fresh insights into the American colonial period in the Philippines through the politics of fashion and beauty regimens."

--Mina Roces "Fashion Theory" (10/18/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"Peering through a gendered lens, Clutario exposes the complex roles Filipinas played within empire and the fraught establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth. . . . Writing about the wives of politicians, embroiderers, beauty queens, and socialites, Clutario renders beauty as a complex weapon. In the hands of her Filipina subjects, it is deployed with both tenderness and aggression."--Alice Sarmiento "Rappler" (3/1/2023 12:00:00 AM)

From the Publisher