Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines

by Sony Coráñez Bolton

In Crip Colony , Sony Coráñez Bolton examines the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines. Drawing on literature, poetry, colonial records, political essays, travel narratives, and visual culture, Coráñez Bolton traces how disability politics colluded with notions of Philippine mestizaje. He demonstrates that Filipino mestizo writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used mestizaje as a racial ideology of ability that marked Indigenous inhabitants of the Philippines as lacking in civilization and in need of uplift and rehabilitation. Heteronormative, able-bodied, and able-minded mixed-race Filipinos offered a model and path for assimilation into the US empire. In this way, mestizaje allowed for supposedly superior mixed-race subjects to govern the archipelago in collusion with American imperialism. By bringing disability studies together with studies of colonialism and queer-of-color critique, Coráñez Bolton extends theorizations of mestizaje beyond the United States and Latin America while considering how Filipinx and Filipinx American thought fundamentally enhances understandings of the colonial body and the racial histories of disability.

Genres: Disability, Nonfiction, Politics, LGBT

224 pages, Paperback

First published February 17, 2023

Reviews

[Yanan Rahim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intriguing

[Xavier · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is almost entirely inaccessible to the audience it claims to discuss. Instead of meaningfully engaging with the lived experiences of disabled people, it buries them beneath dense academic jargon and abstract Marxian theory. Its unnecessary emphasis on queerness further distracts from what its title and premise led me to expect. Rather than speaking to ordinary Filipino readers, it feels written primarily for an academic audience and to advance an academic career. Skip this one.

[Savior · Rating 1 out of 5]

I understood the ideas, perspectives, contexts, and arguments, but this was too academic and detached even though the writing, overall, was an attempt to identify with the experience of their identity and place in their selfhood and native existence. The audience for this book is only meant for academia and not for a general Filipino audience and not for Filipino book clubs.

[javor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant analysis of the intersections of colonialism and disability in the Philippines. Draws from an impressive range of fields and corpora to analyze the racial, colonial, queer, patriarchal, and ableist logics that go into producing the figure of the mestizaje through discourses of benevolent rehabilitation, against the backdrop of other ‘unassimilable’ figures such as the ‘amok.’

[Natalie Cariello]

Read for a class