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

Philippines Lecture Series

Speaker: Genevieve Clutario is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines ,1898 - 1941 (Duke University Press, March 2023) and is the recipient of the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University First Book Award. She published, “Pageant Politics: Tensions of Power, Empire, and Nationalism in Manila Carnival Queen Contests,” in the anthology, Gendering the Trans-Pacific World (Brill Press, 2017) and “World War II and the Promise of Normalcy: Filipina Lives Under Two Empires” in Beyond the Edge of the Nation: Transimperial Histories with a U.S. Angle (Duke University Press 2020). She co-edited with Rana Jaleel a special issue of the Amerasia Journal, entitled Rethinking Gendered Citizenship. Intimacy, Sovereignty, and Empire. Before arriving at Wellesley, Clutario was an assistant professor in History and History and Literature at Harvard University. She continues to pursue research and teaching interests focused on Asian American narratives in global perspectives; Filipino studies; comparative histories of culture and modern empire; transnational feminisms; and gender, race, and the politics of fashion and beauty.

Chair: James Robson, James C. Kralik, and Yunli Lou Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations; Harvard College Professor; Victor and William Fung Director, Asia Center, Harvard University

Presented via Zoom webinar. Register here.

Abstract: This talks 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. Drawing on English, Spanish, and Tagalog archival sources, Clutario demonstrates the way beauty shaped political debates among colonial administrators and nationalists and defined the everyday lifeworlds of working-class women, fashion designers, and elite Filipinas. Beauty operated as both regimen and regime in the Philippines, where empire became a thing of beauty. By demonstrating how beauty and fashion powerfully determined individual and cultural practices as well as national and transnational politics, Clutario offers new ways of understanding the centrality of beauty in the making of imperial and nationalist power.