Beauty Regimes

“By theorizing how beauty became a contested measure of modernity in the colonial Philippines and focusing on Filipinas in the making of the modern Philippine state, Genevieve Alva Clutario brilliantly explores the role of appearance in liberal empires. This multiarchival, deeply researched, fascinating book illuminates how histories of gender and sexuality are essential to understanding colonialism, postcolonialism, and the modern-day world.” - Naoko Shibusawa, author of America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy

“Genevieve Alva Clutario’s book is a smart and sophisticated rereading of the regime of beauty in the transimperial Philippines. Her examination of the beauty regime makes an incontrovertible case for the important intersections of beauty and style, power and politics, national and global, elite and laborer, individual and system. Offering a stunning and capacious analysis of these complexities, Beauty Regimes illuminates how the making of beauty in this period set the stage for contemporary representations of Filipino labor, and more broadly, labor in the global South.” - Denise Cruz, author of Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina

“Peering through a gendered lens, Clutario exposes the complex roles Filipinas played within empire and the fraught establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth. . . . Writing about the wives of politicians, embroiderers, beauty queens, and socialites, Clutario renders beauty as a complex weapon. In the hands of her Filipina subjects, it is deployed with both tenderness and aggression.” - Alice Sarmiento, Rappler

"A unique book that delivers fresh insights into the American colonial period in the Philippines through the politics of fashion and beauty regimens."

"Beauty Regimes, with its emphasis on a specific period in Philippines history, could serve several academic purposes. The book forms an ideal historical analysis for those studying colonialism, empire, and nation-building, especially of Spain, the US, Japan, and the Philippines. Since fashion is placed in close relation to power, whether that is the struggle for diplomatic status between Filipinas and Americans or the distinction between elite Filipinas and female labourers, this book greatly contributes to historical gender studies."
  - Thao Bui, Journal of Gender Studies

"I believe Clutario’s Beauty Regimes is a book that any historian of material culture, spectacle, class, empire, or identity in both the global south and sites of resistance should not only read but keep close by for reference." - Brayden Rothe, Journal of World History

"Clutario has written a fascinating and useful book. By bringing together dress, fashion, and beauty under the framework of 'beauty production,' she provides a new way to understand the workings of global empire and colonialism. This book will be an important addition to graduate courses and of interest to historians of empire, beauty culture, and gender." - Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, Pacific Historical Review

“Beauty Regimes demonstrates the value of taking beauty seriously, as a tool of potential resistance and emancipation, as well as of attempted exploitation and control. . . . This book is important reading for all who seek to understand the workings of empire in everyday life.”