WGSI Research Seminar | Genevieve Clutario

Title of talk: Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines, 1898-1941

Genevieve Clutario is Associate Professor of American Studies here at Wellesley College. She is the author of Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines,1898 - 1941 (Duke University Press, March 2023) and is the recipient of the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University First Book Award, honorable mention for the Association for Asian American Studies book prize in History. She teaches courses on Asian American labor history, popular culture, and the politics of beauty. She’s currently working on a second book that continues her research on beauty as a political force, power and glamour, focusing on the Cold War, the Marcos regime, and of course beauty queens.

In Beauty Regimes Genevieve Clutario traces how beauty and fashion in the Philippines shaped the intertwined projects of imperial expansion and modern nation building. In this talk, Clutario takes readers through vivid scenes of beauty’s collision with empire: from sartorial confrontations between white women and Filipinas about beauty and power and the spectacular Manila Carnival Queen pageants. By demonstrating how beauty and fashion powerfully determined individual and cultural practices as well as national and transnational politics, Clutario offers new ways of understanding the centrality of beauty in the making of imperial and nationalist power.

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