Week 4: Gender, Reproduction, and the "Science" of Imperialism

     The relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States is fundamental in Laura Briggs' Reproducing Empire.  U.S. imperialism is demonstrated through sexuality in this instance, focusing on issues of prostitution, reproduction, and overpopulation.  At the heart of which, I believe, lies the construction of the family.  However, there is this tension that Briggs demonstrates between Puerto Ricans and American families: "...at precisely the moment when family values and rejection of day care were being congealed into a fetish and symbol of white America, Chavez was condemning Puerto Ricans for embodying these ideals too strongly" (6).  In essence, there can only be one nuclear family: the white middle-class family.  Everything else is a gross imitation that can never be achieved and hence should not be attempted.  Yet, I feel like Briggs did not address the possibility that just the opposite might be true: that it is the immigrant (the colonized "other") that white Americans would look to to set an example because they may represent a better "exotic" alternative to the way whites have been handling things (in this case, family structure).  But white Americans would never admit this so they denounce the very example that they actually praise the most.
     The ideal family dynamic also comes under scrutiny when American (and foreign) soldiers are present in the occupied land.  While there may be regulations on prostitution to try and evoke racial purity, it still lingers as a threat to the nuclear family.  However, there is a way to skirt around this issue so long as a man's life was devoted to military service, much like if a man devoted himself to the Church.  But once the short-service system was in order, this changed the expectations for soldiers: "Upper-class officers were supposed to form white nuclear families.  Meanwhile, working-class English enlisted men, too, were transformed into potential heads of nuclear families through the short-service system; after their soldiering years, they were expected to settle down and form families" (25-26).  What I believe Briggs overlooked when addressing the forces of military, Church, as well as legislation is that their actions were not done out of trying to assimilate a people into their midst but rather to suppress a fear of self.  Take, for instance, the incarceration of prostitutes once Puerto Ricans were made U.S. citizens.  The female missionaries claimed upon seeing these women that they simply did not know how to work when it is possible that these missionaries actually saw prostitution as a form of labor but feared the use of their own bodies, thus suppressing their own fears of self (i.e. their bodies).  For if a woman is anything she is the body.  The debate among men and women reminded me of Barbara Kruger's art work "Your Body is a Battlefield," and it is essential to note that both men and women were fighting over it and trying to incorporate it into its manageable role in the family structure (i.e. wife, mother, and caretaker).