METROIMPERIAL INTIMACIES PERVERSE MODERNITIES A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe FANTASY, RACIAL- SEXUAL GOVERNANCE, AND THE PHILIPPINES IN U.S. IMPERIALISM, 1899 –1913 Victor Román Mendoza duke university press Durham and London 2015 M E T R O I M P E R I A L I N T I M A C I E S © 2015 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Typeset in Minion Pro by Westchester Book group Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mendoza, Victor Román, [date] author. Metroimperial intimacies : fantasy, racial-sexual governance, and the Philippines in U.S. imperialism, 1899–1913 / Victor Román Mendoza. pages cm—(Perverse modernities) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8223-6019-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8223-6034-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8223-7486-2 (e-book) 1. Imperialism—Social aspects—Philippines—History— 20th century. 2. United States—Territories and possessions— History—20th century. 3. Colonial administrators—Philippines— Attitudes—History—20th century. 4. United States—Foreign relations—Philippines. 5. Philippines—Foreign relations—United States. I. Title. II. Series: Perverse modernities. E183.8.P6M46 2015 327.7305990904—dc23 2015022771 Cover art: Philippines, May 3, 1898; Everett Collection Inc. / Alamy. Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and Arts and the University of Michigan Office of Research, which provided funds toward the publication of this book. For PKB This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS ix Acknowledgments 1 INTRODUCTION 35 CHAPTER 1 Racial-Sexual Governance and the U.S. Colonial State in the Philippines 63 CHAPTER 2 Unmentionable Liberties: A Racial-Sexual Differend in the U.S. Colonial Philippines 95 CHAPTER 3 Menacing Receptivity: Philippine Insurrectos and the Sublime Object of Metroimperial Visual Culture 131 CHAPTER 4 The Sultan of Sulu ’s Epidemic of Intimacies 167 CHAPTER 5 Certain Peculiar Temptations: Little Brown Students and Racial-Sexual Governance in the Metropole 203 CONCLUSION 211 Notes 259 Bibliography 279 Index This page intentionally left blank AC KNOW LEDG MENTS As an almost pathological introvert—an off-the-charts Enneagram type 5 with a strong 4 wing—I’ve always found it difficult to let go of my writing, presum- ing to work things out by myself. But reading other scholars’ acknowledg- ments, another symptom of my introversion and expression of my 5-ness, has reminded me that it takes communities to write a book, and I’m exceedingly grateful to all those who’ve let me into theirs. As a predental (?!) undergraduate student, though, writing a book wasn’t originally in my plans. But my closest undergraduate professors, Alec Marsh, David Rosenwasser, and Jill Stephen, who first exposed me to postcolonial stud- ies in their Irish literature reading group, showed me how intellectually and creatively satisfying critical analysis could be. I thank them, and Tom Cartelli, for putting up with that fledgling feminist-theoryhead English major. Barbara Gorka, from my other major, helped consolidate my Spanish after my time in the other colonial Philippine metropole. When I started graduate school at the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign (to which I would return years later), Michael Bérubé, Tim Dean, Stephanie Foote, Janet Lyon, and Joe Valente (most of whom have since left) offered me the space to synthesize critical theory. Among my fellow gradu- ate students at Illinois, I fondly recall Sarah Blackwood, Gabriel Cervantes, Mudita Chawla, Joshua Eckhardt, Melissa Girard, Praseeda Gopinath, Scott Herring, Ed McKenna, Deepti Misri, Dahlia Porter, Rochelle Reeves, and Rychetta Watkins. Matthew Gambino, who was pursuing a doctorate in his- tory and a medical degree, was a solid interlocutor and friend and even after earning his paradox (sorry, Matt, for the awful pun) has continued to be gen- erous to me in both of his fields of expertise. At the University of California, Berkeley, Wendy Brown, Anne Cheng, x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Ian Duncan, Richard Halpern, Colleen Lye, Sharon Marcus, Franco Moretti, Chris Nealon, Michael Rubenstein, and Trinh T. Minh-ha were exemplary, brilliant models of teaching, scholarship, and mentorship. I credit Sharon Mar- cus, who assigned some five book reviews during her graduate seminar, for teaching me how to write. And Trinh Minh-ha affirmed how important it was for me to pursue a doctorate in English as a person of color—she also encour- aged me to go out on a limb creatively and theoretically. Caren Kaplan, mean- while, took a gamble in hiring me as her research assistant; she was exceedingly magnanimous in training me, caught me up to speed on transnational femi- nisms, and continues to school me from afar. Karen Tongson reached out to me upon my arrival at Cal and took me out to lunch, even as she was on her way out the door. My friends in graduate school made that place and time less dif- fuse and traumatizing: Carlo Arreglo, Kelvin Black, Sylvia Chong, Kristin Fujie, Christine Hong, Jhoanna Infante-Abbatantuono, Marissa Lopez, Ryan McDer- mott, Franklin Melendez, Slavica Naumovska, Hoang Nguyen, and Monica Soare. Josephine Park, finishing up her degree, was an aspirational mentor. Funding from the Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship and the Dean’s Normative Time Fellowship made graduate school viable. It was at Berkeley that I shifted my interests from Victorian British litera- ture to U.S. ethnic and transnational studies—specifically, Asian American history, culture, and theory. Teaching Asian American literature with Anna Leong in the Ethnic Studies Department consolidated my knowledge. Col- leen Lye’s seminar on the field was terrifying, exacting, and invaluable, and it was in that context that I wrote what would be my first publication. (That essay became the germ of this book’s implicit project to decolonize the term “queer.”) Colleen, in turn, became a terrifying, exacting, and invaluable reader of my dissertation. During my doctoral qualifying exam, Michael Omi asked me a hard question about activism, Philippine-U.S. colonial history, and bakla counter-protestors around Miss Saigon ; despite my probably elliptical answer, he agreed to serve on my committee and was incredibly careful in reading. José David Saldívar, my dissertation chair, has always had my back, intellectually and professionally. To borrow from one of his favorite writers, his mentor- ship is where the real work got done. José’s continual readership and fierce support, despite our not seeing each other in far too long, have been brilliant and exemplary. A lectureship and, later, a postdoc in Asian American studies brought me back to Urbana-Champaign, where a lot had changed. Kent Ono, who was in- tegral to the growth of Asian American studies at Illinois into the vibrant, intel- lectual force it is now, was charitable in hiring and mentoring me. New friends Lisa Cacho, Shelley Cohen, David Coyoca, Rachel Dubrofsky, Augusto Espiritu, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi Sara Clarke Kaplan, Kirstie Dorr, Mary Ellerbe, Viveka Kudaligama, Soo Ah Kwon, Shelley Lee, Marie Leger, Brian Locke, Shoshana Magnet, William Maxwell, Ryan McKean, Alex Mobley, Lisa Nakamura, Fiona Ngo, Mimi Nguyen, Pia Sengsavanh, Junaid Rana, Ricky Rodríguez, Siobhan Somer- ville, Julia Walker, and Yutian Wong were my politi cal and intellectual kin in the cornfields. Joan and Ellen McWhorter were formative in my becoming. Caroline Yang was a fierce comrade to commiserate and plot with. Jennifer Chung and Kevin Lam took horrifying road trips with and for me. Susan Koshy was an incisive reader and is a tremendous model of scholarship. To Martin Manalansan, who was my unofficial mentor during the postdoc, I owe a boundless utang ng loob for his ongoing and unrelenting guidance, critique, friendship, and advocacy. He has made so much possible. Metroimperial Intimacies wouldn’t be the book that it is without the Uni- versity of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Grants from the Rackham Graduate School helped me hire research assistants; a grant from the Office of the Vice Presi- dent of Research and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (lsa) backstopped research expenses; a publication subvention from the lsa and the Office of Research aided with production costs; and the Institute for the Research of Women and Gender both awarded seed grants and provided course relief through the Junior Faculty Scholars Program. The administra- tive staff members Donna Ainsworth, Vanessa Debus, Karen Diedo, Jatell Driver, Aimee Germain, Jane Johnson, and Shelley Shock have helped me figure out how things work. Michael Schoenfeldt, chair of the English Depart- ment, has protected my time; Elizabeth Cole and Valerie Traub, who have chaired Women’s Studies, have been overwhelmingly supportive, sage, and kind. Many thanks to my fabulous friends and colleagues who have offered me a feeling of belonging, most especially because they took time to engage with my work seriously and generatively and on the level of ideas: Evelyn Al- sultany, Naomi Andre, Michael Awkward, Sara Blair, Andre Brock, Anne Cur- zan, Maria Cotera, Deirdre de la Cruz, Manan Desai, Leela Fernandes, Sarah Fenstermaker, Roxana Galusca, Susan Go, Dena Goodman, Sandra Gunning, Hui Hui Hu, Deborah Keller-Cohen, Aliyah Khan, Anna Kirkland, Larry La Fountain-Stokes, Madhumita Lahiri, Emily Lawsin, Peggy McCracken, Josh Miller, Candace Moore, Susan Najita, Lisa Nakamura, Esther Newton, David Porter, Megan Sweeney, Ruby Tapia, Valerie Traub, Ruth Tsoffar, Robert Wyrod, and Melanie Yergeau. My formal mentors— Leela, Valerie, and Maria—were absolutely essential to my reconceptualizations of this book: thank you all for your gracious critique and scrupulous labor. Your commit- ment to my work is unparalleled, and your labor isn’t lost on me. Since we arrived, Candace has been my writing buddy, my productivity police, and my xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS a2bff. I have also been lucky to have outstanding research assistants: Amanda Healy, James Hixon, Alex Ngo, and Sara Spiller. Amanda, especially, worked with me continually and was a great reader and a super-sleuth. Polly Rosen- waike trimmed my prose. Several graduate students (“my favorites”) have made Ann Arbor feel less like perpetual winter: Cass Adair, Jennifer Alzate, Maryam Aziz, Karin Bashir, Sony Bolton, Jesse Carr, Faithe Day, Joseph Gamble, David Green, Amanda Healy, Ai Binh Ho, Dawn Kaczmar, Meryem Kamil, Mika Ken- nedy, Jenny Kwak, Joo Lee, Peggy Lee, Lillian Li, Cecilia Morales, Janee Moses, Michael Pascual, Kenny Pass, Veronica Rabelo, Gabby Sarpy, Mejdulene Shomali, Adeeba Talukder, Malcolm Tariq, Vivian Trương, and Sunhay You. I owe you each a flower. A manuscript workshop at Michigan, conducted expertly by Valerie Traub, furnished generative feedback from brilliant col- leagues Maria Cotera and Ruby Tapia and from three of my heroes from else- where: Roderick Ferguson, Joe Ponce, and Siobhan Somerville. Their careful readings and critique have been inestimable, pressing me both to underscore what knowledges the archives I consider have to bear, and, borrowing from Lisa Lowe, to remain “unfaithful to the original” vis-à- vis lgbtq studies. Despite the evidence so far, I really am an introvert, as those of my friends here in Ann Arbor not already mentioned, those who have left, and those elsewhere can attest. To the first—Maya Barzilai, Deborah Berman, Stephen Berrey, Russell Bucher, Amy Sara Carroll, Rosie Ceballo, Clare Croft, Manan Desai, Margot Finn, Senait Fisseha, Jodi Greig, Colin Gunckel, Brandi Hughes, Holly Hughes, Shazia Iftkhar, Michael Jordan, Khaled Mattawa, Sara McClel- land, Shani McLoyd, Ellen Muehlberger, Daniel Ramirez, Cody Walker, and Gillian White—I hope that by the time you read this I will have reemerged as a person again. To the second—Andrew Bell, Christine DeLisle, Vince Diaz, Maria-Paz Esguerra, Sarah Gambito, Sugi Ganeshananthan, Jason Gavilan, Francine Harris, Van Jordan, Scott Kurashige, Nadine Naber, Sri Nair, Atef Said, Thida Sam, and Sarita See—you are missed. To Julie Keenan, Shirleen Robinson, and the late Linda Underhill, who helped me keep my bearings and sanity during a shared detour through Gettysburg, I am grateful. Vanita Reddy has been my fellow brown, anti-normative, feminist anti-imperialist- in-arms, ideal intended audience, and intellectual compass. Meanwhile, many scholar friends not already listed have been exceedingly generous with their support and critical feedback at various moments in the process of writing: Anjali Arondekar, Nerissa Balce, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Denise Cruz, Robert Diaz, Kale Fajardo, Gayatri Gopinath, Jin Haritaworn, Jennifer Ho, Hsuan Hsu, Paul Kramer, Eng-Beng Lim, Anita Mannur, Karen Miller, Dylan Rodriguez, Cathy Schlund-Vials, Harrod Suarez, Anantha Sudhakar, and Chris Vials. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii Research for this book came from disparate archival sources. Thanks to staffs at the Bancroft Library (Berkeley); the Bentley Historical Library (Ann Arbor); the Special Collections Library (Ann Arbor); the Newberry Library (Chicago); the Chicago Historical Museum, especially Jill Austin and Jes- sica Herczeg-Konecny; the National Archives (Washington, DC); the Canton Lyric Opera Company, especially Joseph Rubin; and genealogists Miranda Gerholt and Michelle Centers. An East-of- California Asian American Stud- ies workshop at Penn State helped me hone a chapter; many thanks to Tina Chen, Miliann Kang, Sue Kim, and Judy Wu for their gracious feedback and mentorship. Despite my first having submitted to him what was essentially my disserta- tion, Ken Wissoker spent an hour out of his conference schedule many years ago to walk me to one of his off-site cafés so we could talk about my work. His simple, off-hand assurance then that my project, however inchoate at the time, was “a Duke book” was enough for me to keep revising it. He has since been an intellectually engaged interlocutor and attentive editor. I appreciate his thoughtfulness in picking such erudite (anonymous) readers; their sugges- tions have made the book genuinely better. Many thanks also to Jade Brooks, Susan Deeks, Sara Leone, Bonnie Perkel, and Christine (Choi) Riggio at Duke University Press for their helpfulness, responsiveness, and pleasantness, as well as Eileen Quam for the index. And it is an honor to be included in Duke’s Perverse Modernities series; I am indebted to J. Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe for their confidence. Finally, I am lucky to have a huge kinship system in many places across the metroempire: the Mendozas, the Reyeses, the Galans, the Fariñases, and the Bolinas. To Christian Reyes, Jennifer Wildermuth-Reyes, and Virgie and Manuel Galan, thanks for letting this nomad continually crash your Bay Area homes. Cousins Christian, Christina, Victor, Michelle, and Joanne, especially: I hope to visit your world again soon. Ann Hwang, Seong-Ho Shin, and Jennifer Wade have been loyal friends and are amazing humans. I gladly owe Sandie and Surinder Bolina at least half a year’s Chicago mortgage and condo dues; Jas, I’m placing a reservation at your place now. John, Jessica, and Kai Mendoza are constant reminders of where I come from and what I want to get back to. John’s musicianship humbles me; still, he doesn’t find it too demeaning to mash up a Les Miz , Bon Jovi, and Phantom medley on the piano every time we see each other. I am privileged to have such pa- tient, supportive, and caring parents (even though I didn’t become a dentist). I thank my dad, Conrad, for not letting me be embarrassed when I was a kid by how I danced in secret—and for unwittingly making me a feminist. My mom, Lumen, proofread my first ever sentence and added a semicolon to it. For her xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS love, care, and guidance, I do not have adequate expressions of gratitude; so, I hope to take her travelling abroad as a down payment. Finally, my favorite Vulcan/Cylon/Enneagram type 1, Pardip Kaur Bolina, has been a solid, sure, and patient partner. P: your commitment to social justice, your brilliance, your perspective, your resilience and your ability to make me laugh in the face of everything leave me awestruck. You have helped me in so many ways to fin- ish this book, and for that I dedicate it to you. It’s the best—and the least— I can offer. The ascendancy of U.S. empire in the Philippine archipelago at the turn of the twentieth century enabled a proliferation of unexpected and unprecedented social and sexual intimacies—some real, most imagined—between the figure of the Philippine autochthonous subject and other peoples, intimacies that threatened to exceed U.S. empire’s biopoliti cal consolidation of the normal. These intimacies emerged in various forms of largely neglected state and cultural productions, a strange archive of which Metroimperial Intimacies assembles: in laws and institutions emerging in the metropole and the archipelago that managed perversion; in a court-martial scandal concerning Filipino soldiers abused by their white superior officer; in local and major newspapers; in political cartoons about the new colonial subjects of the United States; in a hit Broadway musical comedy about the Philip- pines by a white man who had companionships with men; and in serial journals by pensionadas and pensionados , Philippine students receiv- ing government scholarships to pursue education in U.S. universities. INTRODUCTION 2 INTRODUCTION These disparate archival remains allow us alternative entries into the vicis- situdes of the racial-sexual management over a range of bodies within both the colonial archipelago and the metropole. Presenting us with intimacies imperceptible until now, this archive furnishes different routes of access to the social and the historical. Metroimperial Intimacies argues that the kinds of intimate and even perverse relations between the figure of the Philippine sub- ject and other people that emerge are not peripheral or contrary to the hetero- masculinizing, genocidal project of U.S. imperialism but constitutive of it. The various forms of state documents and cultural production about the Philippines and the Philippine colonial subject I examine in this book were adumbrated by numerous social fantasies about other figures. Drawing on contemporaneous public discourses not only about African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian migrants, but also about the vagrant, the sod- omite, the invert, the pervert, the degenerate, the fairy, the bachelor, the New Woman, the dandy, and the polygamist, the imperial and metropolitan fanta- sies swirling about this cultural production were unruly, varying sometimes to the point of incommensurability or contradiction with each other. As I lay out in the pages that follow, the Philippine subject was effeminized (even “fairyfied”) yet hypermasculine, militarily ferocious yet unmanly, physically enviable yet unfit, Oriental yet Negro, a stylish fop yet perpetually naked, stu- pid yet scheming, evolutionarily rearguard yet overly civilized, a passive bot- tom yet an encroaching sexual menace, unfit for testimony yet culpable for what they confessed to. The particular effects on identity formation that fin-de- siècle metropolitan fantasies had, moreover, may have since become so diffuse within (or so absorbed by) normative metropolitan life as to seem, by now, indiscernible—which is why this book is not concerned with questions about contemporary “identity” much at all. Still, I suggest that these fantasies about the Philippine colonial subject saturated turn-of-the-century U.S. metroim- perial discourses that were anxiously attempting to organize human differ- ence. In supporting the management of intimacy both within the metropole and its colony, they were a crucial linchpin in the biopolitics of empire. If, as John D’Emilio has argued, the rise of capitalism in the United States during the nineteenth century led to the formation of “lesbian and gay iden- tity,” and if, as Vladimir Lenin posited, imperialism is the “highest stage of capitalism,” then how does U.S. imperial-colonial war in the Philippines fit into the story of emergent sexual identifications? 1 Although Metroimperial Intima- cies does not deploy so conventionally materialist a critique as these citations suggest, this question remains at the heart of my inquiry about racial-sexual governance. As many scholars working at the intersections of critical race stud- INTRODUCTION 3 ies, gender studies, and sexuality studies have argued, racial, gendered, and sexual categories are not fixed and transhistorical. Rather, they prove unstable and conditional, contingent on changing historical, cultural, spatial, legal, and temporal contexts. Their modes of emergence, moreover, transform those contexts in turn. A few historians and literary scholars (Kristin Hogan- son, Gail Bederman, Amy Kaplan) have cogently discussed the shifting inter- sections of race and gender around the Philippine-American War (1899 to its official end in 1902). Yet the imperial-colonial presence of the United States in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century—which would persist for almost ninety years in the form of military and settler occupation during that century, and endure in the forms of transnational surplus labor, tour- ism, strategic geopolitical positioning and counterterrorist securitization (as embodied by the Philippines-U.S. Visiting Forces Agreement of 1999), during this one—has been largely overlooked by scholars as an event that would have affected the vicissitudes of the mutual formations of race, gender, and sexual- ity in the United States. 2 To put it more strongly, no scholarly works tracing the histories of sexuality in the United States, including those few that take into account the messi- ness of racial formations at the fin de siècle, examine how the early years of U.S. imperial colonialism in the Philippines affects such histories. Nor has any book-length study in Philippine American, Asian American, ethnic, or critical race studies—including the many that consider these fields as they intersect with gender and sexuality—considered how the emerging control over sexuality in the U.S. metropole also appeared in the early period of Phil- ippine colonial governance, when colonial administrators “were prolific pro- ducers of social categories,” and within the knowledge-making discourses in the metropole around the native Philippine subject. 3 The first gap might be explained by the historical disavowal in the United States of empire in the Philippines more generally, one that endures in lgbtq and sexuality stud- ies; as M. Jacqui Alexander has thrown down, contemporary queer theory in particular “eviscerates histories of colonialism and racial formation.” 4 The second speaks not only to a scarcity of documents in the U.S. colonial archive that concern questions of sexuality in any capacity but also to the fact that so- cial categories of sexuality did not look at the turn of the twentieth century as they do now. I don’t intend merely to fill these areas of oversight but to claim that any history of sexuality in the United States remains incomplete without a consideration of imperial colonialism abroad and that studies of U.S. em- pire miss a lot when they do not take seriously the role that sexual regulation had in the formation of colonial governance. Metroimperial Intimacies fleshes 4 INTRODUCTION out the ways in which, as Kandice Chuh has provocatively argued, “the his- tory of the formation of ‘Filipino’ and ‘Filipino American’ identity forma- tions, from a U.S. perspective, is also a history of sexuality.” 5 In her influential book Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality (2000), Siobhan Somerville claims that “it was not merely a historical coincidence that the classification of bodies as either ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosexual’ emerged at the same time that the United States was aggressively constructing and policing the boundary between ‘black’ and ‘white’ bodies.” 6 Following Somerville’s critical lead, Metroimperial Intimacies seeks to further “queer” the color line that marks off racial oppression by examining how U.S. imperial expansion into the colonial archipelago affected the nascent clas- sification of bodies—not just “black” and “white” or, for that matter, “hetero- sexual” and “homosexual”—within the colonial metropole. When W. E. B. Du Bois famously inveighed against the “color line” as the “problem of the Twenti- eth Century,” he identified not only African Americans suffering the injustices of segregation and state-sanctioned white supremacy but also the people of the newly acquired Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and Hawai’i—the “twenty millions of brown and black people under the protection of the Ameri- can flag.” 7 In the face of what he called “the new imperial policy,” Du Bois lo- cated the opportunity for cross-racial solidarities, the opportunity for varied “dark men and women” to vex the very drawing of the “line.” Addressing fellow African Americans, he asked, “What is to be our attitude toward these new lands and . . . the masses of dark men and women who inhabit them? Mani- festly it must be an attitude of deepest sympathy and strongest alliance. We must stand ready to guard and guide them with our vote and our earnings. Negro and Filipino, Indian and Porto Rican, Cuban and Hawaiian, all must stand united under the stars and stripes for an America that knows no color line in the freedom of its opportunities.” 8 Despite Du Bois’s cautioning to an emergent black middle class against U.S. imperialism and his pleas of “sym- pathy” for the United States’ new colonial subjects, the color line continued well into the twentieth century to do a lot of work in consolidating not only white supremacist hegemony but also the specious binary (between black and white) of U.S. racial difference that cannot account for bodies that re- main outside of it. More, Du Bois’s rallying cry demonstrates that the United States’ “new imperial policy” left one having to imagine (to conceive of an “attitude toward”) racial others somewhere out there, off the U.S. metropoli- tan grid. For most of the U.S. public, the island inhabitants of the Philippines were out of sight, and despite U.S. colonialism’s increasingly effective policing strategies in the colonial archipelago, the Philippine “dark men and women” remained in the imperial imagination just as amorphous as Du Bois’s word INTRODUCTION 5 “masses” implies. As I show in the pages that follow, such ambiguity was em- bedded in a variety of discourses, including the visual and the legal. To get at these far-off and dark masses, Metroimperial Intimacies takes the varied modes of state and cultural production concerned specifically with the Philippine- American War as the site of imperialism’s varied fantasies. Impe- rialism’s cultural fantasies, as paradoxical as it might seem, offered the U.S. public a kind of reality about those far-off, vague colonial masses. While it might sound ephemeral, fantasy, like the Marxian concept of ideology—or, for that matter, like the categories of “race,” “gender,” and “sexuality”—“has a material existence.” 9 Throughout this book, my understanding of fantasy draws from a psychoanalytic conceptualization, although psychoanalysis does not always motor the book’s primary interpretive method or explicitly shape its idiom. Still, as psychoanalytical thinkers’ understanding of fantasy varies widely; as the writing of Jacques Lacan (on whose understanding of fantasy I draw most and whose jargon I will, whenever possible, limit here to end- notes) is notoriously vexing to read; and as fantasy itself is conceptually and ontologically unruly, it is perhaps useful for me to gloss how I understand the term throughout the book. My understanding might not fully jibe with how the concept of fantasy is typically rendered in popular culture—that is, as a misty, dreamlike narrative that momentarily takes one away from everyday reality and in which one meets up with one’s ideal life or, sometimes, one’s worst fear. I don’t depart far from this rendering, but I lock in on two partic- ular functions. First, fantasy protects; second, fantasy enables one to locate one’s desire. Fantasy protects. Fantasy shields one from encountering some terrible, ter- rifying, or potentially traumatic scene, thought, or condition. 10 Throughout this book, such a terrifying scene or condition often emerges in the context of the knowledge formation in and of social worlds—around the Philippines, the “Filipina/o,” the pervert, the invert, the degenerate, for example. 11 The fantasy scenario functions as a placeholder, filling out with its positive con- tents some constitutive void in one’s knowledge production, the negation—the empty, inassimilable space—inhering in both one’s ordering systems and one’s social relations. By “ordering systems” here I mean the varied and intersect- ing governing, knowledge-making schemas of state bureaucracy, biopolitics, capitalism, militarism, heteronormativity, the sex/gender system, the law, lan- guage, discourse, history, nationalism, racial hegemony, colonialism, imperial- ism, and racial-sexual governance. 12 Fantasy conceals the fact that the ordering system by which one perceives, understands, or makes intelligible one’s every- day sense of reality is built around a gap, a fundamental impossibility, an un- domesticatable something that not only resists linguistic representation