MAPPING THE INTIMATE: US EMPIRE AND FILIPINO AMERICAN MILITARY FAMILIES

Mapping the Intimate examines the US military's expansion of power in Asia during the Cold War through a focus on gender, intimacy, and Filipino American military families. Drawing from a wide-ranging and multi-lingual archive of US military records, political cartoons, Philippine cultural productions, and oral histories, I highlight the significance of the Philippines as a place where anxieties about the political and economic order were intertwined with the perceived threat of non-normative or illicit intimacies. I argue that the US military's fixation on managing the bodies of Filipino women, who were imagined as a sexual and diseased threat to white American families, became a central means to assert control over local spaces and regulate the migration of Filipina military brides to the US.
Subic Bay, Philippines photo taken by me
Cartoon of a Filipina leaving a jeep with an American soldier from Ilang-Ilang, April 13, 1946. Ateneo de Manila Rizal Library Microfilms. In the late 1940s, the "jeep girl" trope associated women who rode in jeeps with US servicemen with sexual immorality. The caption reads (my english translation): "How surprised I was to see you leaving a jeep ​with a soldier"

Authorizing illicit intimacies: Filipina-gi interracial relations in the postwar philippines

Published in Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, this article examines the management of intimate relations between American servicemen (GIs) and Filipino women after World War II. US servicemen remained in the Philippines after the war to assist with projects of national development and security. During their hours of "liberty" or time off-duty, US servicemen spent time in bars, clubs, and sightseeing throughout the Philippines. Many servicemen met and developed sexual and romantic relationships with Filipinas during this time. Yet these relationships were seen as a problem for both the US military and the Filipino population. 
Women who developed close relationships with GIs became associated with vice and loose morals. In this article, I analyze the multiple forces that maintained this social stigma, including the US military and local government’s interconnected forms of intimate management and Philippine cultural productions’ contradictory depictions of Filipino–American intimacies.