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:	9781478019640
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/03/2023
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

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.”