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Juan Fernandez
PhD Candidate
Overview
My work focuses on the histories of masculinity in the highlands of maritime Southeast Asia—on the Philippine Cordillera and Indonesian-Malaysian Borneo—from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. My dissertation, "Manly Encounters," examines the visual and textual documents produced by American, British, and Dutch missionaries and anthropologists throughout the course of their intimate involvement with the headhunting peoples of Southeast Asia. In their work, these missionaries and anthropologists valorized—if not outright envied—the utterly masculine body of the headhunter, and believed their (white) bodies paled in comparison to his. As such, my dissertation is a cultural history of these missionary and anthropological encounters with the headhunter, and in the process examines the construction of (an assumed superior) white masculinity with the equally masculine headhunter as its foil.
Advisor: Tamara Loos
Departments/Programs
- History
Graduate Fields
- Modern Southeast Asian History
- U.S. Empire
- Visual Culture
Affiliations
- Southeast Asia Program
Research
- The Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia
- Gender & Sexuality
- History of Photography
- History of Anthropology
Courses
Spring 2021
Publications
Cuevas Mable, Sophia Maria, Juan Fernandez Capiral, and Imelda Olvida de Guzman. “Where Peasants Are Kings: Food Sovereignty in the Tagbanua Traditional Subsistence System.” Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies 8, no. 1 (2015): 27–44.