Juan Fernandez

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