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Masculinity reborn: Chivalry, misogyny, potency and violence in the Philippines’ Muslim South, 1899–1913

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2013

Michael C. Hawkins
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Abstract

This article offers an examination of the gendering of the Philippines' Muslim South under American military rule (1899–1913) through discourses of violence against women. It explores the exposition and discussion of cases involving abuse, murder, enslavement, and violence in both official and unofficial reports, which revealed a critical discourse of gender construction for both coloniser and colonised in Moro Province.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , June 2013 , pp. 250 - 265
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2013

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References

1 For excellent discussions of the anxieties of the time, see Lears, T.J. Jackson, No place of grace: Antimodernism and the transformation of American culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)Google Scholar and ‘From salvation to self-realization: Advertising and the therapeutic roots of the consumer culture, 1880–1930’, in The culture of consumption: Critical essays in American history, 1880–1980, ed. Fox, Richard Wightman and Lears, T.J. Jackson (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983)Google Scholar; Blix, Goran, ‘Charting the “transitional period”: The emergence of modern time in the nineteenth century’, History and Theory, 45 (2006): 51–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hofstadter, Richard, ‘Cuba, the Philippines, and manifest destiny’, in The paranoid style in American politics, and other essays (New York: Knopf, 1965)Google Scholar.

2 Bederman, Gail, Manliness and civilization: A cultural history of gender and race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Hoganson, Kristin L., Fighting for American manhood: How gender politics provoked the Spanish–American and Philippine–American wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 14, 200Google Scholar.

4 Lyons, Paul, American pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. imagination (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 207–8Google Scholar.

5 Stoler, Ann Laura and Cooper, Frederick, ‘Between metropole and colony: Rethinking a research agenda’, in Tensions of empire: Colonial cultures in a bourgeois world, ed. Cooper, Frederick and Stoler, Ann Laura (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 1Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., p. 4. See also, Stoler, Ann Laura, ‘Rethinking colonial categories: European communities and the boundaries of rule’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31, 1 (1989): 134–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar; as well as Cooper, Frederick, Colonialism in question: Theory, knowledge, history (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Thomas, Nicholas, Colonialism's culture: Anthropology, travel and government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Kramer, Paul A., The blood of government: Race, empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006Google Scholar); Reynolds, Craig J., ‘A new look at old Southeast Asia’, Journal of Asian Studies, 54, 2 (1995): 419–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Day, Tony, Fluid iron: State formation in Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002)Google Scholar; as well as, Day, Tony and Reynolds, Craig J., ‘Cosmologies, truth regimes, and the state in Southeast Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, 34, 1 (2000): 1–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 See Mrozek, Donald J., ‘The habit of victory: The American military and the cult of manliness’, in Manliness and morality: Middle-class masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, ed. Mangan, J.A. and Walvin, James (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 220–41Google Scholar.

9 Kramer, The blood of government; Salman, Michael, The embarrassment of slavery: Controversies over bondage and nationalism in the American colonial Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

10 Affairs of the Philippine Islands, Hearings before the Committee on the Philippines of the United States Senate, 57th Congress, 1st Session, Doc. No. 331, Pt. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Press, 1902), pp. 1963.

11 Report of the Philippines Commission (hereafter cited as RPC), 1904, pt. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1905), p. 11.

12 Census of the Philippine Islands, vol. II (Washington, D.C.: United States Bureau of the Census, 1905), p. 565.

13 RPC, 1900, vol. III, p. 376.

14 RPC, 1904, pt. 1, p. 9.

15 RPC, 1901, vol. III, p. 372.

16 Census, 1903, vol. II, pp. 563–4.

17 Ibid., p. 572.

18 See Brody, David, Visualizing American empire: Orientalism and imperialism in the Philippines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anderson, Warwick, Colonial pathologies: American tropical medicine, race, and hygiene in the Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

19 See Brenner, Suzanne A., ‘Why women rule the roost: Rethinking Javanese ideologies of gender and self-control’, in Bewitching women, pious men: Gender and body politics in Southeast Asia, ed. Ong, Aihwa and Peletz, Michael G. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 19–50Google Scholar.

20 Census, 1903, vol II, p. 565.

21 Ibid., p. 569.

22 RPC, 1900, v. III, pp. 372, 375.

23 See Hawkins, Michael, ‘Managing a massacre: Savagery, civility and gender in Moro Province in the wake of Bud Dajo’, Philippine Studies, 58, 1 (2011): 81–103Google Scholar.

24 The 1903 Census, for example, took great care in describing the Moros' ‘physical characteristics’ including ‘complexion’, ‘hair’, and physical build. ‘They are somewhat taller than the average Filipino,’ recorded the Census, ‘straight and well formed, and often strong and stockily built, with well-developed calves.’ See, RPC, 1903, Pt. I, p. 81; RPC, 1901, v. III, p. 371; Census, 1903, v. I, p. 563; Scott, Hugh L., Some memories of a soldier (New York: Century Company, 1928)Google Scholar, pp. 312, 283; Col. Owen J. Sweet, ‘The Moro, the fighting-man of the Philippines’, Harper's Weekly, 9 June 1906, p. 0808d; etc.

25 Affairs of the Philippine Islands, pp. 1872.

26 Ibid., pp. 1872–3.

27 Warwick Anderson provides a wonderful examination of American fears of white degeneracy and ‘colonial breakdown’ in his piece, ‘The trespass speaks: White masculinity and colonial breakdown’, American Historical Review, 102, 5 (1997): 1343–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Affairs of the Philippine Islands, pp. 1872–3.

29 Ibid., p. 1873.

30 Rafael, Vicente L., White love and other events in Filipino history (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 55Google Scholar.

31 As early as March 1899 the Chicago Daily Tribune (CDT) and New York Times (NYT) began printing articles eagerly anticipating the declaration of ‘Another Emancipation Proclamation’ in the Philippines. William McKinley was compared to Abraham Lincoln with his ‘opportunity to be entered in history as a slave liberator’. (See, for instance, ‘Conditions in Sulu Islands’, NYT, 26 May 1901, p. 5; ‘Plans for abolishing Philippine slavery’, NYT, 21 Dec. 1901, p. 8; ‘America abrogates treaty with Moros’, NYT, 15 Mar. 1904, p. 5; ‘Slavery in the Philippines’, CDT, 5 Mar. 1899, p. 50). However, despite their righteous indignation and frequent condemnations, Americans demonstrated a kind of morbid curiosity and fascination with slavery. Colonial officials and ethnographers spent a great deal of time observing, documenting, examining, and classifying Moro servitude. The United States public was similarly entranced. Americans in St. Louis flocked in anticipation to see ‘for the first time . . . human being[s] held in slavery’ at the 1904 World's Fair (‘Slaves at St. Louis Fair’, NYT, 5 May 1904, p. 3). For a deeper discussion of the subject, see Salman, The embarrassment of slavery.

32 ‘Kidnapped’, Mindanao Herald (MH), 12 Mar. 1904, pp. 1–2.

33 ‘Kidnappers captured’, MH, 2 Apr. 1904, pp. 1–2.

34 Ibid., p. 1.

35 Ibid.; ‘Prompt justice’, MH, 23 Apr. 1904, pp. 1–2.

36 ‘Kidnappers captured’, MH, 2 Apr. 1904, p. 2.

37 ‘Prompt justice’, MH, 23 Apr. 1904, p. 1.

38 Ibid., p. 2.

39 See, Hawkins, Michael, ‘Imperial historicism and American military rule in the Philippines' Muslim South’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 39, 3 (2008): 411–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 ‘Kidnapped’, MH, 12 Mar. 1904, pp. 1–2.

41 ‘Kidnappers captured’, MH, 2 Apr. 1904, pp. 1–2.

42 ‘Murder at Davao’, MH, 6 Feb. 1904, p. 1.

43 ‘Murder and suicide in Magay’, MH, 9 Dec. 1905, p. 2.

44 ‘Triple tragedy at Caldera Bay’, MH, 13 June 1908, p. 1.

45 ‘Private Morse stopped him’, MH, 29 Apr. 1905, pp. 1–2.

46 ‘Moro attacks sentinel’, MH, 7 Oct. 1905, p. 1.

47 ‘Shooting affray in Magay’, MH, 29 Sept. 1906, pp. 1–2.

48 Ibid., p. 2.