White gazes, brown breasts: imperial feminism and disciplining desires and bodies in colonial encounters

Abstract

This article examines the colonial encounters of gender, race and sexuality in the United States and the Philippines in the early 1900s. It traces the anxieties over US men's moral degeneracy and the representation of Filipinas as libidinal temptations, which mobilised US women's active participation in colonial biopolitics and governmentality. It contends that white women as imperial feminists asserted their principled crusade and superiority over white men and brown women by becoming bearers of racialised heteronormative traditions and feminine respectability and becoming barriers to inter‐racial sexual relations. White women focused on the white male domains of military and government and on the colonial education of brown women. Ultimately, the article supplements the Spivakian claim that “white men are saving brown women from brown men”, which has become the quintessential narrative of colonial justification and redemption, with “white women are saving white men and brown women from each other”. Drawing on government, newspaper and school documents, the article engages feminist discussions on the role of women in empire and education.