Tessa Winkelmann

Department of History – University of Nevada, Las Vegas

“Dangerous Intercourse: Race, Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898 – 1946”

Friday, October 18, noon

Peters Campus Life Building 100 and online (registration required for online attendance)

Co-sponsored by NIU’s Graduate Colloquium Program

In Dangerous Intercourse, Tessa Winkelmann examines interracial social and sexual contact between Americans and Filipinos in the early twentieth century via a wide range of relationships—from the casual and economic to the formal and long term. Winkelmann argues that such intercourse was foundational not only to the colonization of the Philippines but also to the longer, uneven history between the two nations. Although some relationships between Filipinos and Americans served as demonstrations of US "benevolence," too-close sexual relations also threatened social hierarchies and the so-called civilizing mission. For the Filipino, Indigenous, Moro, Chinese, and other local populations, intercourse offered opportunities to negotiate and challenge empire, though these opportunities often came at a high cost for those most vulnerable.

Drawing on a multilingual array of primary sources, Dangerous Intercourse highlights that sexual relationships enabled US authorities to police white and nonwhite bodies alike, define racial and national boundaries, and solidify colonial rule throughout the archipelago. The dangerous ideas about sexuality and Filipina women created and shaped by US imperialists of the early twentieth century remain at the core of contemporary American notions of the island nation and indeed, of Asian and Asian American women more generally.

Tessa Ong Winkelmann hails from southern California, specifically the Coachella Valley. She received her bachelor's degree at the University of California, Irvine(2005), her M.A. in Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University (2008), and her doctoral degree in History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2015).  

Her research interests are in the fields of U.S. in the world, empires and imperialism, ethnic studies, and gender and sexuality studies.  In 2011 she was a Fulbright scholar in the Philippines, where she completed research for her dissertation and book manuscript tentatively titled, “Dangerous Intercourse: Race, Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898 – 1946.” Her book project utilizes a transnational approach to examine a wide range of interracial sexual relationships -from the casual and economic to the formal and long term- between Americans and Filipinos in the overseas colony from 1898 to formal independence in 1946. 

At UNLV she teaches courses on U.S. Foreign Relations, and Women and Gender history in a global perspective.  She also hopes to offer an Asian American history course in the future.