Filipina Carceral Labor: Beauty Work and Division H in Bilibid Prison

This paper investigates the formation of a transpacific industry of Philippine embroidery during the early twentieth century and focuses on one specific arena of the modern imperial beauty regime: Bilibid Prison. During the 1910s, American consumers increasingly demanded "Philippine Lingerie" sold in catalogues and urban department stores throughout the continental United States. Exporting Filipina-made fine needle work relied on the adoption and adaptation of racial and gendered ideologies as well as already long-established labor practices in the archipelago. Such market forces were also inextricably tied to the making of a colonial state. From the 1910s to the 1930s, prisons in the Philippines fell under the jurisdiction of the director of Public Instruction, who instituted strict regimens touted as educational and reformatory modes of uplifting Filipino women convicts. An examination of this alliance between private industry and reformatory public institutions sheds light on the contradictions of their promises of rehabilitating Filipinas. Bilibid Prison boasted that they offered a new form of convict labor not reliant on “hard labor,” but a kind of beauty work that would soften the hardened women of vice. This form of carceral discipline benefited the insular state as it accumulated money to fund its operations. At the same time, colonial officials touted Division H as an exemplar of U.S. prisons and disciplinary techniques. By focusing on Division H and the women who crafted fine needlework merchandise during their incarceration, this paper underscores the legacies of the racial and gendered logics of carceral labor, beauty production, and consumption in the making of liberal empire.