Capturing Conquest: 20th Century Colonial Photography in the Philippine Islands and its 21st Century Musical Legacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is a common tool of empire to use racial othering to justify conquest of both land and body. Yet in spite of achieving independence twice, once from Spain in 1898 and again in 1946 from the United States, suggesting the end of colonial discourse, the question remains: why do Filipinas remain hyper-sexualized and fetishized today? The purpose of this project is to examine the tools of empire as a means of justifying an American colonial agenda in the Philippine islands. Particular attention is paid to musical representations and colonial photography to situate the hyper-sexualization, and eventual fetishization, of Filipinas in contemporary American society and 20th century American empire. To date, somewhat limited English literature exists on the topic of 20th century American colonial photography. And yet, sexualized representations of Filipinas are not limited to photography, nor did this view of Filipina bodies, and by extension Filipinas, suddenly stop after independence; problematically suggesting that consequences of empire, including race-based and/or sexual hierarchies, no longer exist. This paper hypothesizes why this imagery remains relevant in the 21st century through an examination of contemporary musical lyrics, suggesting that the hyper-sexualization of Filipinas is rampant in contemporary American society as a product of residual colonial discourse. Then, this paper attempts to retrace the start of American presence in the Philippines at the end of the Spanish-American War of 1898 by examining representations of Filipina bodies as a tool of empire, justifying American imperialism until the mid-20th century, marking the beginning of colonial rhetoric.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".