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

Speaker: Genevieve Clutario, Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of American Studies, Wellesley CollegeBeauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines, 1898–1941

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

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.