RACIAL-SEXUAL GOVERNANCE AND THE U.S. COLONIAL STATE IN THE PHILIPPINES

During the first decade or so of the U.S.'s occupation of the Philippines, colonial military officials, trying to quell the anticolonial Philippine insurrection, developed state-of-the-art surveillance, regulatory techniques, and civil reform measures to gather intelligence about and control the racially and geographically heterogeneous Philippine population. But managing sex didn't at first seem to interest colonial administrators that much. While colonial governing involved regulation of some sexual practices considered "moral evils" (such as Philippine women's sex work with U.S. soldiers), it did not often, quite remarkably, target same-sex erotic acts and gender-variant behavior. I say "remarkably" for two reasons. First, both were documented (though not always policed) in the islands during Spanish colonial rule. Second, in the U.S. metropole, there was a "revolutionary expansion" of sodomy laws, which governed over same-sex acts, between 1881 and 1921 — an expansion in terms of the varied sex acts that constituted sodomy, the number of states that prosecuted it, and the instances of prosecution. Imperial expansion into the Philippines did not, however, incorporate the revolutionary expansion of sodomy laws, or, for that matter, the proliferation of anti-cross-dressing laws occurring in the metropole during the late nineteenth century.

In the early years of the U.S. colonial state's consolidation of administrative power in the Philippines, there wasn't so much an explosion of discourse around sexuality as a slow burn. In this chapter, I reconstruct the emergence of U.S. racial-sexual governance in the Philippines during the first decade of colonial state building. As I lay out in the introduction, the U.S. metropolitan state, lacking a clear picture of the "homosexual" developing in sexological discourse, worked toward an inchoate yet capacious understanding of the "degenerate," a term that, evoking a prior evolutionary status, was articulated intimately to contemporaneous racial discourse. At the same time, the U.S. state was producing discourses and knowledges to fix the "Philippine race" on its newly acquired territory an ocean away. Thus, the turn-of-the-century U.S. imperial-colonial state came into form through the racial-sexual governance of a plurality of populations within the metropole, on one hand, and the stabilization of the legal status of the Philippines and its native people, on the other. While several scholars in Philippine and Philippine American studies have recently considered the role of the early U.S. colonial state in the Philippines in regard to continual racial formations, none has studied the state's relationship to what we migh