Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez
Biographic Data
| ID | 806848 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez |
| GIVEN NAMES | Vernadette Vicuña |
| FAMILY NAME | Gonzalez |
| SIGNATURE | GONZALEZ V V |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Berkeley |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8405-9274 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 29 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Hospitality as Worldmaking: The Archive, Methods, and Genres of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i
This essay is an expanded and revised version of the 2024 Antipode Lecture at the American Association of Geographers conference. It takes seriously how touristic genres transform discourses about place into lived materiality, especially in sites where touristic desire is intimately woven into necropolitical structures of occupation, militarism, and settler colonialism. Taking as its point of departure the edited collection Detours: A Decolonial …
Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 30th anniversary roundtable
The here and now of Asian Journal of Women’s Studies in its 31st year—with responses
Militourism
“Hoy Get Out of the Sun!”: Filipinx Talk Story on (Anti)Blackness in Occupied Hawaiʻi
Author(s): Iglesias, Aina; Gonzalez, Vernadette; De Venecia, Bryant; Saranillio, Dean; Ignao, Lalaine; Ramos, Marie; Sabatchi, Romyn; Achacoso, Katherine; Caligtan, Grace; Rodeles, Paolo; Cachola, Ellen-Rae; Derden, Malia; Ortega, Nadezna; Saramosing, Demiliza; Ulep, Catherine ʻĪmaikalani; Ulep, Domi; Compoc, Kim
Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper
"Empire's Mistress centers the life of Isabel Rosario Cooper, a mixed race vaudeville and film actor from the Philippines, notorious for being Douglas MacArthur's one-time mistress. Tracking her story through absences and traces in the archive, Gonzalez explores empire on the scale of the intimate. Cooper's itinerant life-from Manila, to Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles-is a rich text for understanding the mobilities and opportunities available t…
Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai'i
American Imperial Pastoral: The Architecture of U.S. Colonialism in the Philippines
The fantasy of American imperialism took pastoral form in Baguio, the “summer capital” of the Philippines, at the turn of the twentieth century. Manifested through the desires of the ruling elite of the American occupation, the expanding role of the market in the governance of the islands, and the labor and dispossession of Filipinos, the building of the mountain city was meant to symbolize and consolidate American colonial power. Taking readers …
Wars of Memory at Pu'uloa / Pearl Harbor
This essay reflects on the work that Detours, a decolonial educational tours project, carries out in the militarized zone of Pu'uloa / Pearl Harbor on the island of O'ahu. The essay contrasts the itinerary and narratives that Detours offers with the experience that most tourists are invited to have at the USS Arizona Memorial / Pearl Harbor complex. Foregrounding instead Native Hawaiian history and claims to the space, the experience and purpose …
DeTours: Mapping Decolonial Genealogies in Hawai'i
Indigeneity, sovereignty, sustainability and cultural tourism: Hosts and hostages at ʻIolani Palace, Hawai'i
This article focuses on the historical events of dispossession and overthrow in Hawai'i from the mid/late nineteenth century onwards, and contemporary movements, interpretations and acts for Native Hawaiian sovereignty centered around ‘Iolani Palace on the island of O'ahu. Formerly the seat of the Hawaiian monarchy, then the capitol building of an overthrowing power and an occupying state, and now a heritage site, ‘Iolani Palace operates as a met…
Cultural Studies
Cultural Studies Vernadette Gonzalez, Chair, Tony Tiongson, and Tamara Ho Rachel Lee’s The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies (New York University Press, 2014) is a book that returns us to biology, challenging and enriching the very foundations of Asian American cultural and literary critique and its premise that the category of Asian America is a social construction. Instead of being reactionary…
Tours of Duty and Tours of Leisure
Tours of Duty and Tours of Leisure Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez (bio) and Jana K. Lipman (bio) Uneven and Linked Mobilities On January 12, 2016, a bomb exploded near two of Turkey’s most famous historical tourist attractions, Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. A suicide bomber approached a group of tourists and detonated a bomb, killing nine Germans and one Peruvian, and leaving more than a dozen other foreigners wounded. A year prior, in the same s…
Forum Introduction
Forum Introduction Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez (bio), Jana K. Lipman (bio), and Teresia Teaiwa (bio) The contributors featured in this forum reflect the productive and provocative diversity in style, approach, archive, geographies, and methodologies that have been brought to bear on thinking about how tourism and militarism operate with, alongside, and against each other. All of them contend with personal genealogies of how tourism and militarism …
Tourism Mobilities, Indigenous Claims, and the Securitization of the Beach
In this chapter, Gonzalez explores the ways in which the tropical beach operates as a symbol and space of modern tourist mobility and its accompanying necessity for securitization. In the Philippines, where a neoliberal economy is most evident in places like Boracay Islands tourist haven, tourism mobilities operate to smooth over the vast social and political asymmetries that both enable and threaten this particular iteration of paradise. On the …
Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism
Millions of laborers, from the Philippines to the Caribbean, performed the work of the United States empire. Forging a global economy connecting the tropics to the industrial center, workers harvested sugar, cleaned hotel rooms, provided sexual favors, and filled military ranks. Placing working men and women at the center of the long history of the U.S. empire, these essays offer new stories of empire that intersect with the “grand narratives” of…
Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing
Illicit Labor
This essay examines a brief affair between General Douglas MacArthur and a mixed-race Filipina vaudeville actress named Isabel Rosario Cooper. It focuses on Cooper's little-documented and underexamined life as a way to understand how the intimate politics of the bedroom overlapped with the libidinal economies of the cosmopolitan Philippine entertainment industry, American military occupation, and broader geopolitical relations of imperial desire.…
Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines
In Securing Paradise, Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez shows how tourism and militarism have functioned together in Hawaiii and the Philippines, jointly empowering the United States to assert its geostrategic and economic interests in the Pacific. She does so by interpreting fiction, closely examining colonial and military construction projects, and delving into present-day tourist practices, spaces, and narratives. For instance, in both Hawaiii and th…
Military Bases, "Royalty Trips," and Imperial Modernities: Gendered and Racialized Labor in the Postcolonial Philippines
Military Bases, "Royalty Trips," and Imperial Modernities:Gendered and Racialized Labor in the Postcolonial Philippines Vernadette V. Gonzalez (bio) The best thing you can do to beat the heat or the rain is to bring along your retractable roof and pay her after the game. Umbrella girls are a phenomenon unique to Southeast Asia where there are a lot of women in the labor force. If you feel like taking a "royalty trip" just ask for an umbrella girl…
Military Bases, "Royalty Trips," and Imperial Modernities: Gendered and Racialized Labor in the Postcolonial Philippines
Military Bases, "Royalty Trips," and Imperial Modernities:Gendered and Racialized Labor in the Postcolonial Philippines Vernadette V. Gonzalez (bio) The best thing you can do to beat the heat or the rain is to bring along your retractable roof and pay her after the game. Umbrella girls are a phenomenon unique to Southeast Asia where there are a lot of women in the labor force. If you feel like taking a "royalty trip" just ask for an umbrella girl…
Tours of Duty and Tours of Leisure
Tours of Duty and Tours of Leisure Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez (bio) and Jana K. Lipman (bio) Uneven and Linked Mobilities On January 12, 2016, a bomb exploded near two of Turkey’s most famous historical tourist attractions, Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. A suicide bomber approached a group of tourists and detonated a bomb, killing nine Germans and one Peruvian, and leaving more than a dozen other foreigners wounded. A year prior, in the same s…
Militourism
DeTours: Mapping Decolonial Genealogies in Hawai'i
American Imperial Pastoral: The Architecture of U.S. Colonialism in the Philippines
The fantasy of American imperialism took pastoral form in Baguio, the “summer capital” of the Philippines, at the turn of the twentieth century. Manifested through the desires of the ruling elite of the American occupation, the expanding role of the market in the governance of the islands, and the labor and dispossession of Filipinos, the building of the mountain city was meant to symbolize and consolidate American colonial power. Taking readers …
Wars of Memory at Pu'uloa / Pearl Harbor
This essay reflects on the work that Detours, a decolonial educational tours project, carries out in the militarized zone of Pu'uloa / Pearl Harbor on the island of O'ahu. The essay contrasts the itinerary and narratives that Detours offers with the experience that most tourists are invited to have at the USS Arizona Memorial / Pearl Harbor complex. Foregrounding instead Native Hawaiian history and claims to the space, the experience and purpose …
Forum Introduction
Forum Introduction Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez (bio), Jana K. Lipman (bio), and Teresia Teaiwa (bio) The contributors featured in this forum reflect the productive and provocative diversity in style, approach, archive, geographies, and methodologies that have been brought to bear on thinking about how tourism and militarism operate with, alongside, and against each other. All of them contend with personal genealogies of how tourism and militarism …
Illicit Labor
This essay examines a brief affair between General Douglas MacArthur and a mixed-race Filipina vaudeville actress named Isabel Rosario Cooper. It focuses on Cooper's little-documented and underexamined life as a way to understand how the intimate politics of the bedroom overlapped with the libidinal economies of the cosmopolitan Philippine entertainment industry, American military occupation, and broader geopolitical relations of imperial desire.…
Military Bases, "Royalty Trips," and Imperial Modernities: Gendered and Racialized Labor in the Postcolonial Philippines
Military Bases, "Royalty Trips," and Imperial Modernities:Gendered and Racialized Labor in the Postcolonial Philippines Vernadette V. Gonzalez (bio) The best thing you can do to beat the heat or the rain is to bring along your retractable roof and pay her after the game. Umbrella girls are a phenomenon unique to Southeast Asia where there are a lot of women in the labor force. If you feel like taking a "royalty trip" just ask for an umbrella girl…
Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines
In Securing Paradise, Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez shows how tourism and militarism have functioned together in Hawaiii and the Philippines, jointly empowering the United States to assert its geostrategic and economic interests in the Pacific. She does so by interpreting fiction, closely examining colonial and military construction projects, and delving into present-day tourist practices, spaces, and narratives. For instance, in both Hawaiii and th…
Tourism Mobilities, Indigenous Claims, and the Securitization of the Beach
In this chapter, Gonzalez explores the ways in which the tropical beach operates as a symbol and space of modern tourist mobility and its accompanying necessity for securitization. In the Philippines, where a neoliberal economy is most evident in places like Boracay Islands tourist haven, tourism mobilities operate to smooth over the vast social and political asymmetries that both enable and threaten this particular iteration of paradise. On the …
Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism
Millions of laborers, from the Philippines to the Caribbean, performed the work of the United States empire. Forging a global economy connecting the tropics to the industrial center, workers harvested sugar, cleaned hotel rooms, provided sexual favors, and filled military ranks. Placing working men and women at the center of the long history of the U.S. empire, these essays offer new stories of empire that intersect with the “grand narratives” of…
Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing
Illicit Labor
This essay examines a brief affair between General Douglas MacArthur and a mixed-race Filipina vaudeville actress named Isabel Rosario Cooper. It focuses on Cooper's little-documented and underexamined life as a way to understand how the intimate politics of the bedroom overlapped with the libidinal economies of the cosmopolitan Philippine entertainment industry, American military occupation, and broader geopolitical relations of imperial desire.…
Indigeneity, sovereignty, sustainability and cultural tourism: Hosts and hostages at ʻIolani Palace, Hawai'i
This article focuses on the historical events of dispossession and overthrow in Hawai'i from the mid/late nineteenth century onwards, and contemporary movements, interpretations and acts for Native Hawaiian sovereignty centered around ‘Iolani Palace on the island of O'ahu. Formerly the seat of the Hawaiian monarchy, then the capitol building of an overthrowing power and an occupying state, and now a heritage site, ‘Iolani Palace operates as a met…
Cultural Studies
Cultural Studies Vernadette Gonzalez, Chair, Tony Tiongson, and Tamara Ho Rachel Lee’s The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies (New York University Press, 2014) is a book that returns us to biology, challenging and enriching the very foundations of Asian American cultural and literary critique and its premise that the category of Asian America is a social construction. Instead of being reactionary…
Tours of Duty and Tours of Leisure
Tours of Duty and Tours of Leisure Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez (bio) and Jana K. Lipman (bio) Uneven and Linked Mobilities On January 12, 2016, a bomb exploded near two of Turkey’s most famous historical tourist attractions, Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. A suicide bomber approached a group of tourists and detonated a bomb, killing nine Germans and one Peruvian, and leaving more than a dozen other foreigners wounded. A year prior, in the same s…
Forum Introduction
Forum Introduction Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez (bio), Jana K. Lipman (bio), and Teresia Teaiwa (bio) The contributors featured in this forum reflect the productive and provocative diversity in style, approach, archive, geographies, and methodologies that have been brought to bear on thinking about how tourism and militarism operate with, alongside, and against each other. All of them contend with personal genealogies of how tourism and militarism …
Wars of Memory at Pu'uloa / Pearl Harbor
This essay reflects on the work that Detours, a decolonial educational tours project, carries out in the militarized zone of Pu'uloa / Pearl Harbor on the island of O'ahu. The essay contrasts the itinerary and narratives that Detours offers with the experience that most tourists are invited to have at the USS Arizona Memorial / Pearl Harbor complex. Foregrounding instead Native Hawaiian history and claims to the space, the experience and purpose …
DeTours: Mapping Decolonial Genealogies in Hawai'i
American Imperial Pastoral: The Architecture of U.S. Colonialism in the Philippines
The fantasy of American imperialism took pastoral form in Baguio, the “summer capital” of the Philippines, at the turn of the twentieth century. Manifested through the desires of the ruling elite of the American occupation, the expanding role of the market in the governance of the islands, and the labor and dispossession of Filipinos, the building of the mountain city was meant to symbolize and consolidate American colonial power. Taking readers …
Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai'i
Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper
"Empire's Mistress centers the life of Isabel Rosario Cooper, a mixed race vaudeville and film actor from the Philippines, notorious for being Douglas MacArthur's one-time mistress. Tracking her story through absences and traces in the archive, Gonzalez explores empire on the scale of the intimate. Cooper's itinerant life-from Manila, to Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles-is a rich text for understanding the mobilities and opportunities available t…
“Hoy Get Out of the Sun!”: Filipinx Talk Story on (Anti)Blackness in Occupied Hawaiʻi
Author(s): Iglesias, Aina; Gonzalez, Vernadette; De Venecia, Bryant; Saranillio, Dean; Ignao, Lalaine; Ramos, Marie; Sabatchi, Romyn; Achacoso, Katherine; Caligtan, Grace; Rodeles, Paolo; Cachola, Ellen-Rae; Derden, Malia; Ortega, Nadezna; Saramosing, Demiliza; Ulep, Catherine ʻĪmaikalani; Ulep, Domi; Compoc, Kim
Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 30th anniversary roundtable
The here and now of Asian Journal of Women’s Studies in its 31st year—with responses
Militourism
Hospitality as Worldmaking: The Archive, Methods, and Genres of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i
This essay is an expanded and revised version of the 2024 Antipode Lecture at the American Association of Geographers conference. It takes seriously how touristic genres transform discourses about place into lived materiality, especially in sites where touristic desire is intimately woven into necropolitical structures of occupation, militarism, and settler colonialism. Taking as its point of departure the edited collection Detours: A Decolonial …
History (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Asian American and Pacific Histories (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Politics (8 works) · Law (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Gender Studies (5 works) · Tourism (5 works)