Body and Nation: The Global Realm of U.S. Body Politics in the Twentieth Century (American Encounters/Global Interactions) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822356759 ISBN 13: 9780822356752

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2014

Synopsis

Body and Nation interrogates the connections among the body, the nation, and the world in twentieth-century U.S. history. The idea that bodies and bodily characteristics are heavily freighted with values that are often linked to political and social spheres remains underdeveloped in the histories of America's relations with the rest of the world. Attentive to diverse state and nonstate actors, the contributors provide historically grounded insights into the transnational dimensions of biopolitics. Their subjects range from the regulation of prostitution in the Philippines by the U.S. Army to Cold War ideals of American feminine beauty, and from "body counts" as metrics of military success to cultural representations of Mexican migrants in the United States as public health threats. By considering bodies as complex, fluctuating, and interrelated sites of meaning, the contributors to this collection offer new insights into the workings of both soft and hard power.

Contributors. Frank Costigliola, Janet M. Davis, Shanon Fitzpatrick, Paul A. Kramer, Shirley Jennifer Lim, Mary Ting Yi Lui, Natalia Molina, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Emily S. Rosenberg, Kristina Shull, Annessa C. Stagner, Marilyn B. Young

About this title

About the Author

Emily S. Rosenberg is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 and A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory, both also published by Duke University Press, and the editor of A World Connecting, 1870–1945.

Shanon Fitzpatrick is a Faculty Lecturer in the Department of History at McGill University.
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Body and Nation

The Global Realm of U.S. Body Politics in the Twentieth Century

By Emily S. Rosenberg, Shanon Fitzpatrick

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5675-2

Contents

introduction EMILY S. ROSENBERG AND SHANON FITZPATRICK, 
one Colonial Crossings: Prostitution, Disease, and the Boundaries of Empire during the Philippine-American War PAUL A. KRAMER, 
two Moral, Purposeful, and Healthful: The World of Child's Play, Bodybuilding, and Nation-Building at the American Circus JANET M. DAVIS, 
three Making Broken Bodies Whole in a Shell-Shocked World ANNESSA C. STAGNER, 
four Physical Culture's World of Bodies: Transnational Participatory Pastiche and the Body Politics of America's Globalized Mass Culture SHANON FITZPATRICK, 
five "The Most Beautiful Chinese Girl in the World": Anna May Wong's Transnational Racial Modernity SHIRLEY JENNIFER LIM, 
six Roosevelt's Body and National Power FRANK COSTIGLIOLA, 
seven Making "Brown Babies": Race and Gender after World War II BRENDA GAYLE PLUMMER, 
eight Regulating Borders and Bodies: U.S. Immigration and Public Health Policy NATALIA MOLINA, 
nine The American Look: The Nation in the Shape of a Woman EMILY S. ROSENBERG, 
ten Sammy Lee: Narratives of Asian American Masculinity and Race in Decolonizing Asia MARY TING YI LUI, 
eleven Counting the Bodies in Vietnam MARILYN B. YOUNG, 
twelve "Nobody Wants These People": Reagan's Immigration Crisis and the Containment of Foreign Bodies KRISTINA SHULL, 
epilogue When the Body Disappears EMILY S. ROSENBERG AND SHANON FITZPATRICK, 
bibliography, 
contributors, 
index, 

CHAPTER 1

Colonial Crossings

Prostitution, Disease, and the Boundaries of Empire during the Philippine-American War

PAUL A. KRAMER

Major Owen Sweet was in trouble. The prostitutes from Japan had been both a necessary evil and a pragmatic good, he explained to his superiors; in any case, they had been dictated by unfortunate circumstance. Four months into the United States' war against the Philippine Republic, the 23rd Infantry had taken control of Jolo, in the southern islands, from Spanish forces, and his troops had quickly succumbed to what he called "the lax moral conditions incident to the Philippines and Oriental countries generally." A "personal" investigation had exposed a veritable festival of vice: gambling houses, grog shops, saloons, and "several resorts of prostitution" inhabited by Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino "immoral women." Sweet feared that a spark might fly out of this chaotic mix that could touch off a second, Muslim-American conflict that the U.S. military could not afford. By his own account, he had sought to impose order on this moral unruliness, a "system of attrition" consisting of raids and closures and the expulsion of nearly all local sex workers. But Sweet had been called to task for not going far enough. He had allowed about thirty Japanese prostitutes to remain in Jolo, where he mandated their regular, compulsory venereal inspection to protect American soldiers from disease; in the process he had given explicit government sanction to the "social evil." In Jolo, as elsewhere, it turned out that moral empire and military-hygienic empire could not easily be squared, and Sweet had chosen.

His choice had been controversial, and that controversy can illuminate both its particular moment and the cultural history of U.S. global power more broadly. At base it was about bodies: the bodies of Asian women and U.S. soldiers in the Philippines, on the one hand, and the "body" of U.S. empire, on the other. This second kind of body was strictly metaphorical. Or was it? As Americans in the metropole learned that U.S. military authorities like Sweet had been regulating commercial sex in the interest of venereal control—a policy successfully barred from the United States by "social purity" reformers to that point almost without exception—many made sense of this disclosure by linking together the two types of bodies: the meanings of colonialism for the American "body politic" could be read from the fortunes of U.S. soldiers' bodies in the Philippines. Particularly in the hands of colonialism's skeptics and critics, regulated prostitution in the Philippines came to symbolize colonialism's nefarious impact on the metropole: a medical technique aimed at preventing contagion, it would promote other, and perhaps more sinister, "contaminations."

While reformers agreed that something stank at the intersection of military occupation, commercialized sex, and its medical regulation, they tracked the smell to diverging roots. Was the problem that the U.S. military in the Philippines was sanctioning prostitution (as social purity campaigners maintained), or that its efforts were attached to and symbolic of an illegitimate invasion (as anticolonialists argued)? Was the problem racial in that it conceded to and sanitized colonial "miscegenation," or that it undermined national exceptionalist pretensions by rendering the United States more "European"? Or was the problem merely that regulated prostitution in the Philippines was visible, raising questions about America's moral image in the world?

The U.S. military-colonial regulation of prostitution threatened to sunder two related sets of imagined barriers. The first insulated the United States from Europe; for American social purity reformers, the regulation of prostitution was—along with imperialism, statism, and sexual license—closely associated with European societies. Not for nothing was it known as the "continental system." The sudden revelation that U.S. military authorities in the Philippines were, for the first time, also practicing regulation on a large scale prompted fears about the weakening of American moral exceptionalism. The second barrier shielded metropole from colony; coupled to American hopes for the stabilizing export of U.S. institutions to the new colonies were anxieties about the unanticipated and unwelcome "reflex actions" that might flow the other way, blowbacks that could include corrupting venereal disease, immoral methods for controlling it, and race-mixing. Along both axes, regulated prostitution represented a dangerous colonial crossing that broke through the protective enclosures that Americans had hoped to raise around themselves, even as they ventured out into "the world."

Approached in this way, the history of U.S. military invasion, prostitution, and venereal disease control during the Philippine-American War provides one window onto the cultural history of U.S. imperial boundaries: of how Americans marked the place where the United States ended and the rest of the world began and how they made sense of their inability to completely control the processes that flowed across that elusive line. To talk about the bodies of U.S. soldiers and the hazards that sapped their force and purity was also to talk about the "body" of U.S. empire at a moment when that body's limits, constitution, and vulnerabilities were being hotly disputed. The rhetorical presence of Filipinos' bodies as sources of threat—and absence when it came to questions of sexual violence and vulnerability to disease—also said much about that imperial body's contours and occlusions. This examination of the body politics of empire, then, illuminates a history both of U.S. military-imperial disease control in a colonial setting and of the way that gendered and racialized fears of sexual contagion expressed and gave shape to deeper anxieties about the permeability of a globalizing United States.

By the time Sweet sat down to defend himself, the coerced medical inspection of female sex workers had become a core element of municipal policy, sanitary strategy, and moral reform throughout the globe. First developed in continental Europe, its most varied projections were in the British Empire, where the Contagious Diseases Acts (CD Acts) empowered police officers in select districts to arrest prostitutes, subject them to venereal examination, and incarcerate the infected in "lock hospitals." Wherever practiced, regulated prostitution employed a double standard by not requiring the inspection and arrest of men. In its institutional imagination, women's bodies unleashed infection to which men were vulnerable but which they somehow did not transmit either to women or to each other.

As regulation spread, so too did movements aimed at its abolition, especially in the Anglo-American world. As Ian Tyrrell has shown, these efforts brought together evangelical Christians, feminists, and suffragists who assaulted the state's toleration of vice for distinct and overlapping reasons. As regulation moved on imperial channels, organizations such as the World Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WWCTU) and International Federation for the Abolition of the State Regulation of Vice mobilized an Anglo-American, and self-consciously "Anglo-Saxon," constituency to oppose it. The high point of Anglo-American cooperation along these lines was reached when two Americans played a key role in scandalizing India's CD Acts, which were abolished eleven years after their repeal in the British metropole. In this cooperation, however, the Americans did not tire of pointing out that, apart from a few notable—and fleeting—municipal experiments, as in St. Louis, the United States had managed to remain "pure" of regulated vice.

The U.S. military occupation of Manila in August 1898 permitted another, secondary occupation: what one startled commentator called a "cosmopolitan harlotry" entered the city from innumerable ports of call, chasing presumed sexual demand. The largest numbers of prostitutes from abroad were Japanese, their numbers multiplying by nearly fifteen times during the first six years of the occupation. But more shocking to U.S. military authorities were prostitutes of European descent, including Russians, Austrians, Italians, Spaniards, Australians, and Americans. The vast majority of Manila's sex workers, however, were Filipinas, many of them displaced from the countryside by rising rents, export agriculture, or Spanish repression and coerced into prostitution.

The inspection regime was instituted in the context of a perceived medical crisis. By October there were three hundred U.S. soldiers in the hospital for venereal disease, specifically syphilis and gonorrhea, and fifty operations had been conducted. Without reserve troops, and fearing that disease might leave military efforts "seriously crippled," Provost Marshall General Robert Hughes felt compelled to "jealously guard the man behind the gun." The problem was that while the military Board of Health and police had made "strenuous efforts" to keep out foreign prostitutes, it was nearly impossible to locate "native females of bad character" and "prevent communication between them and our soldiers." For a peseta, a "native" brought "the female" to "any designated locality" to meet a client, a transaction preventable only by "making prisoners of the females."

Some medical officers lamented these encounters in their own right, apart from an explicit disease context; many believed Filipinos to be inherently diseased (venereally and otherwise), making miscegenation both the sign and trigger of physical and moral "degeneration" among white American soldiers. For some, contracting venereal disease and sex with "native women" constituted related forms of bodily treason, the potential denial of one's physical constitution to the state.

In assembling their regulatory system, U.S. military-medical officers traveled a path of least resistance, continuing and modifying local practices initiated by Spain. A system had been put into effect in Manila by Spanish authorities in the late 1880s; a decade later, just prior to the collapse of Spanish rule, it enforced the mandatory registration of brothels and the inspection, incarceration, and treatment of infected women. The U.S. regime drew on this Spanish framework (including its funding by compulsory fees and penalties paid by sex workers), but there were also differences: examinations now took place weekly rather than biweekly, and U.S. inspectors were not ordered to counsel prostitutes against their trade (although some would do so on their own). In a relatively straightforward case of what I have elsewhere called transimperial borrowing, U.S. officials self-consciously inherited and adapted policies from the very empire they were deposing rather than imported policy models from neighboring empires, U.S. colonies, or the U.S. metropole. While "the regulations of Honolulu and St. Louis on prostitution" were on file, army surgeon and board member Charles Lynch noted, "no changes were deemed necessary in the methods pursued."

By November 1898, just under three months into the occupation, the Bureau of Municipal Inspection, as it was called, was well under construction. The board also established a "womans [sic] hospital" for prostitutes found to be diseased in a wing of the San Lazaro leper hospital and turned a former vaccination center into an "office of inspection," where women free of venereal disease were given certificates and from which infected women were taken to the hospital by the police. Manila's police force was tasked with visiting "every known house of prostitution" at least once a week to check certificates and, in the case of a lapse in inspection, to close it "until every inmate has been properly examined."

As elsewhere, the system's first principle was the female prostitute as the perpetual and exclusive source of contagion. In colonial contexts this assumption was often intertwined with racialized medical theories that cast colonized peoples as reservoirs of dangerous tropical disease. The U.S. Army's inspections in the Philippines were, at first, no different, with heightened concern for the health of its soldiers unaccompanied by mandatory systems to inspect them. Such inspections were thought to be (as indeed they were) intrusive, humiliating, demoralizing, and dishonoring; sex workers apparently had no such honor to lose.

Over the next two and a half years the inspection program became more systematized and intensive. It incorporated some functions formerly exercised by the police, employing a "native physician (Spanish)" to visit brothels, hiring a "lay inspector" as his assistant, and replacing weekly certificates with "inspection books." The fee for exams was set at $1 Mexican if performed at the hospital, twice that if done in brothels; fees were placed on a racial sliding scale, doubled for white women. The exams themselves cost an estimated 47 cents per woman. Between mid-1899 and early 1901 the Bureau turned an impressive 23 percent profit.

In early March 1901 the examination system was reorganized and placed under the Board of Health, a complex agency charged with numerous sanitary and health-related tasks. This reassignment may have been undertaken in response to erupting scandal. It may also have been related to broader public health concerns; when bubonic plague struck Manila in January 1900, the board had inspected all brothels, "as it was believed that plague might spread from such foci." Whatever the rationale, the new system was whiter in personnel. The board hired an American physician "who does the work of the two former native physicians," assigning him an American orderly and lay inspector, both "excellent men."

The new regime was also more forceful. Just two months into the shift, it was incarcerating 86 percent more women than previously; it had registered 115 percent more. It aspired half-heartedly to broaden its coverage to include soldiers and teamsters employed by the quartermaster, "among whom there is much venereal disease." It also enlisted the help of church women who spoke Spanish or Tagalog, and who were "not afraid of moral contamination from these prostitutes," to attempt to set the women on the true path. (For Lynch, Filipinas were especially reformable, having sunk to prostitution "through necessity" and not, as with American, European, and Japanese women, as a matter of hard-core professionalism.)

Inspectors, however, ran into myriad problems of enforcement as sex workers resisted medical inspection. In an attempt to "dissociate their minds from the idea that the hospital is a prison," the institution began to offer treatment for women's "other complaints"; while few women initially availed themselves, military hygienists remained confident that they would, "as there is no other place where they can obtain good treatment." The biggest challenges involved identification. First, how were U.S. medical authorities to recognize a brothel? The imposition of inspection fees meant that new, uninspected brothels would likely proliferate on the outskirts of surveyed districts; bribery virtually assured they would spring up inside the system itself. In May 1900 Dr. Ira Brown, president of the Board of Health, suggested that a strictly bounded red-light district be formed, in which only prostitutes could reside and to which they would be confined; such women could not be allowed to "mingle with outside society." This would help respectable Manila residents insulate themselves from vice and prospective clients clearly identify brothels. In the latter category, some men "suffering from acute alcoholism" had mistakenly "entered respectable houses located near those occupied by prostitutes."

The thorniest predicaments of identification occurred, however, when it came to individuals. While U.S. military-medical authorities tended to depict the "vicious woman" as an unchanging type, they also knew that the category of "prostitute" phased off uneasily into the general population. When faced with an insufficient number of sex workers, Brown noted with dismay, "the enterprising women send out to a neighbor and ask her to come in and help out"; this enlistee was "not regularly in the business," escaped inspection, and, it was believed, spread disease. But it was also challenging to identify even those women who were formally registered. For over a year certificates and inspection books had carried only names and identification numbers. But just as they often avoided surveillance and its costs, Manila's sex workers soon developed a vigorous trade in up-to-date, disease-free inspection documents. It is unclear exactly how the exchange functioned, but subterfuges were met with a technological response. In 1900 inspectors were ordered to photograph individual women and place one copy of their photograph on an index card for reference and another on their inspection book "so that one woman cannot substitute examination or book for another."

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822356759
• ISBN 13: 9780822356752
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344
• Editor: Rosenberg Emily S., Fitzpatrick Shanon