In The Sovereign Trickster Vicente L. Rafael offers a prismatic view of the age of Rodrigo Duterte in the contemporary Philippines. Framing Duterte as a trickster figure who boasts, jokes, terrorizes, plays the victim, and instills terror, Rafael weaves together topics ranging from the drug war, policing, and extrajudicial killings to neoliberal citizenship, intimacy, and photojournalism. He is less concerned with defining Duterte as a fascist, populist, warlord, and traditional politician than he is with examining what Duterte does: how he rules, the rhetoric of his humor, his use of obscenity to stoke fear, and his projection of masculinity and misogyny. Locating Duterte's rise within the context of counterinsurgency, neoliberalism, and the history of electoral violence, while drawing on Foucault's biopower and Mbembe's necropolitics, Rafael outlines how Duterte weaponizes death to control life. By diagnosing the symptoms of the authoritarian imaginary as it circulates in the Philippines, Rafael provides a complex account of Duterte's regime and the social conditions that allow him to enjoy continued support.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Prismatic Histories  1
1. Electoral Dystopias  6
Sketches I: The Dream of Benevolent Dictatorship  18
2. Marcos, Duterte, and the Predicaments of Neoliberal Citizenship  21
Sketches II: Motherland and the Biopolitics of Reproductive Health  36
3. Duterte's Phallus: On the Aesthetics of Authoritarian Vulgarity  42
Sketches III: Duterte's Hobbesian World  57
Duterte's Sense of Time60
4. The Sovereign Trickster  63
Sketches IV: Comparing Extrajudicial Killing  87
Death Squads  89
On Duterte's Matrix  94
Fecal Politics  98
5. Photography and the Biopolitics of Fear: Witnessing the Philippine Drug War  103
Conclusion. Intimacy and the Autoimmune Community  131
Notes 147
References  151
Index  169