Building on scholarship about intimacy, sexuality, and empire—territory mapped by Foucault and expanded by Stoler and others—Metroimperial Intimacies focuses on the particular case of United States’ governance of its Philippine colony during the long decade after the Treaty of Paris.1 For Mendoza, the apparatuses of military occupation and colonial administration operated in tandem with the management of life in the islands, producing a kind of national hallucination or fantasy that drove the colonial project. To “zero … in on the intimacies that try to give the state the slip,” Mendoza unfolds a queer-of-color critique that allows for a mode of reading and archival work that locates the emerging categories of abjection and the perverse as constituted and constitutive of, but also exceeding, the colonial order of things (11).
The challenge for projects that propose to examine the genealogies of intimacy—and specifically same-sex intimacy—is the sparseness and obliqueness of...