Sweating for Their Pay: Gender, Labor, and Photography across the Decolonizing Pacific

Abstract

In recent years, scholars have drawn attention to the participation of Asian and Asian diasporic laborers in American Cold War–era projects of war-making throughout Southeast Asia. However, those dimensions of wartime logistics work that were undertaken primarily by Southeast Asian women, including cooking, cleaning, and entertaining, remain understudied. In this essay, we reflect on the gendered forms of reproductive labor that sustained and also unsettled US imperial life overseas, which we suggest can be glimpsed in the personal photographic archives of American military personnel stationed in Southeast Asia during the second Vietnam War. Focusing on the photographs of Benedicto Kayampat Villaverde, a second-generation Pinoy medic from Hawai‘i, we foreground the centrality of intimacy and care work to imperial projects of war-making, as well as to the projects of survival, solidarity, and resistance that sprung up in their wake.