Constructing Bodies through Basketball: American and Philippine Interactions

This paper addresses basketball and how it was introduced and promoted by the American government, during its occupation of the Philippines early in the 20th century, to construct body cultures through various discursive practices.  Basketball was introduced into the girls’ physical education curriculum in 1910, but soon after, the sport became a male preserve. The body served as a site of both assertions and contestations under the American regime. The American government through its school system was engineering the Filipino body. In this case, the body politic, as evidenced in the American colonial government, was producing corporeal subjects. What were the processes at work in socially constructing the body? From a sociological and historical perspective, this paper seeks to address the varied transformations that have occurred on the body, through an analysis of American discourses on the body.  It seeks answers to questions regarding how the colonial regime imposed corporeal discipline on its colonized subjects. What were the notions of bodily normativity as introduced by the Americans? How was the corporeal body contoured by the body politic in the interest of shaping the nation-state?  This work reveals several key themes regarding basketball and the body in the Philippines. Among them, first, is the conception that the body, the corporeal, is culturally formed. How one operates within one’s body, whatever one’s gender, is heavily influenced by culture. Additionally, the body was at the center of forces approaching it, both globally and locally. The body came to be seen as a site for the contestation of normative ideals.