Keyword: postcolonial

In its depiction of interracial, international marriage, the reality television show 90 Day Fiancé has become an object of morbid fascination to US and global audiences alike. Featured prevalently in the series, couples consisting of white US men and Filipina women constitute a recurring motif through which 90 Day Fiancé solidifies the institution of marriage as a locus for creating and enforcing politics of global capital, heteronormative gender, racialization, and imperialism. This article focuses on the depiction of a couple, Larry and Jenny, as one example of how the series restages the abusive colonial relation between the US and the Philippines through the marriage institution. Further, the figure of the Filipina is rendered along a spectrum of uncivilized animalism vs. nationalist caregiving—that which the US white male subject defines himself against. Following scholarship in Filipinx studies, visual culture, and postcolonial studies, I argue that 90 Day Fiancé extends occupation- and Cold War-era rhetorics of sentimentality and nationalism into the current globalized moment. Thus, I offer unsentimental decoding as a method of reading, viewing, and interpreting Western media that resists the recuperative logics of neoliberalism, (neo)colonialism, and historical erasure.