BEAUTY REGIMES : a history of power and modern empire in the philippines, 1898-1941

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. In Beauty Regimes 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. Clutario takes readers through vivid scenes of beautys collision with from sartorial confrontations between white women and Filipinas about beauty and power, the spectacular Manila Carnival Queen pageants, and the global industry of Philippine embroidery and lingerie to Manilas high fashion designers and the exploitation of unfree labor in colonial prisons and schools. 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. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award Recipient A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University "In Beauty Regimes, Genevieve Clutario reveals how beauty politics in the Philippines created new relationships between colonial institutions, private industries, and diverse social worlds. During the turbulent transition between Spanish, US, and Japanese empires and the anti-colonial nationalist movement in the Philippines, beauty and fashion shaped intertwined projects of imperial expansion and modern nation-building. Beauty and fashion transformed political, economic, social, and cultural power that converged in the Philippines during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Philippines became both a source and resource of beauty, though not always for Filipinos themselves. This pathbreaking book offers new ways of understanding beauty's central place in the making of imperial and nationalist power"-- Provided by publisher Contents 7 Acknowledgments 9 Introduction. A Queen Is Crowned 15 1 Tensions at the seams Petty Politics and Sartorial Battles 33 2 Queen makers Beauty, Power, and the Development of a Beauty Pageant Industrial Complex 77 3 Philippine lingerie Transnational Filipina Beauty Labor under US Empire 121 4 Beauty regimens Structure, Discipline, and Needlework in Colonial Industrial Schools and Prisons 153 5 “The dream of beauty The Terno and the Filipina High-Fashion System ” 197 Epilogue Protectionism and Preparedness under Overlapping Empires 237 Notes 251 Bibliography 301 Index 333