Modern dating in a postcolonial city: Desire, race and identities of cosmopolitanism in Metro Manila

The chapter discusses dating in a Global South post-colonial city. Specifically, it looks at the lives of middle- and upper-class women who date foreigners, providing insights into the ways that performances of cosmopolitanism are entwined with colonial ideas about white and non-white bodies. It focuses on the case of Metropolitan (Metro) Manila, the Philippine capital that has served as a key site for the country’s long colonial history of racial tensions between Filipinos and Westerners. Of particular interest is how these tensions have been expressed around intimate and marital relationships between Filipino women and foreign men. Scholars have long problematised the concept of the Filipino women as the post-colonial other through their studies on women participating as ‘mail-order brides’, participants in sex tourism, and in marriage migration. But in rapidly globalising Metro Manila middle- and upper-class Filipino women engage in intimate relationships with foreigners in ways that can subvert the racial and sexual stereotypes often ascribed to them. They fashion themselves as the exception, precisely because their elite education, career-orientation, worldliness and feelings of sexual empowerment allow them to participate in and perform upper-class and cosmopolitan lifestyles even while problematic dynamics and tensions around race and class differences persist.