Gender on the Edge

CHAPTER 1

Gender on the Edge

Identities, Politics, Transformations

Kalissa Alexeyeff and Niko Besnier

Gender is on the edge. Being on the edge is both a position of power and one of marginality, and it is this paradox that we address in this book. We first situate gender on the cutting edge in terms of the position it has come to occupy, in the course of the last half-century, in intellectual debates.

These debates have catapulted gender to the center of the important social, political, and cultural questions that anthropologists and other social scientists address—such as kinship, the division of labor, political institutions, religion, law, and the economy. Yet gender is also on the edge, in the different sense of often being marginalized in, for example, current theoretical concerns with globalization, colonialism, history, and other large-scale dynamics, so that feminist scholars constantly have to remind us of the fundamental role that gender plays in global and historical contexts. Gender, as well as the category to which it is yoked, sexuality, is in fact central to the way in which the intimate relates to the global and everything in between, and this role continues to call for a radical rethinking of empirical and theoretical approaches to classic social scientific topics.

In this book, gender is also on the edge in a different way. Here we are concerned with forms of gender and sexuality that question and transcend what is generally seen as a normative order that requires no explanation (though in fact it does). The practices and categories that we seek to understand have been variously referred to as “betwixt-and-between,” “liminal,” or “transgender”—here we refer to them collectively as “non-heteronormative.” Since the aim of this collection of essays is to explore the relationship between these different configurations, the term is particularly apt for our purposes (despite the negative prefix running the danger of emphasizing

marginality over embeddedness). “Heteronormative” has gained currency to refer to structures, relationships, and identities that conform to and affirm hegemonic gendering and sexuality (Warner 1991). The concept builds on Rubin’s (1975) oft-cited “sex/gender system” and Rich’s (1980) equally influential “compulsory heterosexuality.” It is vaguer than concepts like “mainstream” and “heterosexual,” which is precisely what makes it useful, particularly in cross-cultural comparison and in the negative. In contrast to other alternatives, “non-heteronormativity” leaves open the possibility that the dynamics at play may be a matter of gender, sex, sexuality, or yet other categories. The concept is particularly apt for our purposes because it exposes these power dynamics.

Non-heteronormative gender and sexual categories may be on the edge, yet we cannot understand the normative without an exploration of what falls outside it, what gives it definitional power. Around the world, these categories have long been reduced to the exceptional status of pathological and marginal subjects, but are now viewed as pivotal to important questions about the constitution of gender and sexuality, as well as to much larger issues concerning structure and agency, power and inequality, local–global tensions, and the relationship of the past to the present.

The gendered subjects whose lives we explore in this book are on the cutting edge of their own societies, and their position constitutes a third way in which we conceptualize the edginess of gender. Non-heteronormative Pacific Islanders are at once part and parcel of their societies and subversive of the social order. They are deeply enmeshed with what many think of as “tradition,” but they are also the heralds of the new, the experimental, and the exogenous. Suspended between the visible and the invisible, the local and the global, the past and the future, and what is acceptable and what is not, they call for a rethinking of morality, what “acceptance” (or “tolerance”) means, and the very relationship between agents and structures. They bring new ways of being in and thinking about the world, to the delight of some and the indignation of others. Their very existence embodies the contradictions of the contemporary social order.

We also explore gender on the edge in a fourth way, as it manifests itself in what is considered to be one of the more marginal areas of the world, the Pacific Islands. While the region has in the course of history preoccupied the imaginations of those who thought they controlled the world (as it did in late eighteenth-century Britain and France), the Pacific Islands were at other times in history what travelers merely passed through on their way to larger, richer, and more populated regions of the world. They were an afterthought of the global Western empire-building enterprise, even though they loomed large in the colonial imagination, particularly around questions of gender and sexuality. For those who inhabited them, the Pacific Islands had a different configuration that placed relationships, connections, and movements between them across vast distances at the center of their definition: they were a “sea of islands,” rather than islands lost in a vast ocean (Hau‘ofa 1994). These different positions underscore the uncanny way in which what is on the edge from one perspective is at the center from another perspective. We situate gender in the tension between these perspectives.

The chapters in this collection focus on the transgender and cognate categories in a broad range of Pacific Island societies, seeking to tease out similarities, differences, and generalizations. The contributors are trained in a variety of disciplines (anthropology, sociology, political science, cultural studies, social work, gender studies, media studies, legal studies, and of course Pacific Island studies) and national intellectual traditions (those of North America, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, Japan), but are committed to cross-disciplinary and cross-national dialogues. They have based their analyses on an intimate engagement with the materials they

analyze, an intimacy based on involvements that range from being indigenous to the societies in question, to life-historical grounding in them, to long-term ethnographic work conducted in their midsts. All contributions centralize the importance of combining robust theory with empirical material. Individually and collectively, the chapters address questions central to our social scientific understanding of gender, structure and agency, power and inequality, local–global dynamics, and the relationship of the past to the present. This book is appearing at a particularly pertinent juncture in history, as gender and sexuality are undergoing fundamental transformations in the

societies of the Pacific region—transformations that are brought about by a broad variety of factors, from the resource extraction industries to the diasporic dispersal of populations, from the turn to neoliberalism to the emergence of new religious moralities, from the commodification of bodies in the tourism and sport industries to the militarization of societies. Even though these changes are not universally welcome to everyone in Pacific Island societies, their gendering and sexualization demand analytic attention.

From Identities to Practices

The 1997 national conference of the Methodist Church of New Zealand was the stage of a bitter dispute over the ordination of lesbian and gay clergy. The dispute ended with the breakaway from the church of congregations “who could not live with the increasingly radical liberal theology

of the Methodist Church of New Zealand and acceptance of Ministers living in sexual sin” (Wesleyan Methodist Church of New Zealand 2009). The breakaway groups, made up principally of Tongan, Samoan, and Fijian members, in addition to Pākehā (White New Zealander) evangelicals, were ministered by a Tongan pastor-at-large and former president of the church,

Tavake Tupou. They eventually formed, in 2000, the Wesleyan Methodist Church of New Zealand. Similar fault lines emerged in the Australian Uniting Church Assembly, pitching Pacific Island members against mainstream congregants, although there, congregation fission did not occur (ABC Radio Australia, Pacific Beat, 2011).

How do we reconcile these situations, in which Pacific Islanders express deep hostility toward non-mainstream sexualities, with the conspicuous visibility in everyday life of non-heteronormative people in many Pacific Island societies? How can rejection and acceptance rub shoulders in such a spectacularly contradictory fashion? These seemingly incommensurable positions cannot simply be explained away as the result of Christian dogmatism interloping upon a “traditional” laissez-faire, since in many parts of the Pacific Christianity is so intricately intertwined with the sociocultural order that it is defined as tradition. In addressing these problems, the contributors to this book all take as a given that categories, identities, social practices, and moralities are by definition complex and replete with apparent contradictions.

In the West, non-heteronormative gender and sexuality exist in a number of forms. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons are defined by an (at least partial) affective affinity with and sexual attraction to people of the same gender. “Transgender” (an umbrella term for a diverse group of people for-

merly referred to by such terms as “transsexuals,” “transvestites,” “gender inverts”) refers to persons whose experiential gender is at odds with their ascribed gender. The term “transgender” has had both an enabling and a restricting effect on people’s self-understanding: “On the one hand, it validates those people who adopt transgender as a meaningful category of self-identity; but it also draws attention to how people are identified by others as being transgender even though they may not necessarily use this term in talking about themselves” (Valentine 2007, 26).1 Also conflated with these categories of sex and gender are the intersex, into which fall persons whose chromosomal structure, physiology, or hormonal function generate, for a wide diversity of reasons, ambiguities about their sex at birth and beyond. While they differ in their constitution, visibility, and politics, these various categories also exhibit similarities that are reflected in the use of various acronyms, from LGB to LGBT and LGBTQI, which have gained widespread currency over the last four decades, with both useful and problematic consequences.

In non-Western contexts, non-heteronormative gender and sexuality take the form of locally specific categories, such as South Asian hijra and koti, Thai kathoey, Indonesian waria or banci, or what is commonly referred to as “two spirit people” in Native North America. In the Pacific Islands, a variety of terms are used to refer to individuals who embody non-heteronormative identities, such as leitī in Tonga, fa‘afafine in Samoa (plural form, fa‘afāfine), ‘akava‘ine or laelae in the Cook Islands, māhū and raerae in Tahiti. This book is an exploration of the ways in which non-normative gendering and sexuality in the Pacific Islands are metonymic of a wide range of sociocultural dynamics—dynamics that are at once local and global, historical and contemporary.

In contemporary Western ideologies, sexual identity (as well as identity tout court) is understood as being a property of persons. Sexuality is an issue of “being” and only incidentally an issue of relatedness to others. One is male or female, and consequently one is a man or a woman and performs these identities socially. Gender performance is thus merely an index of one’s essence. Yet, as anthropologists have amply demonstrated, this theory of sexuality is far from universal and in fact probably operates at the level of ideology even in Western contexts. In many other societies, sex and gender are much more squarely matters of interpersonal relationships, of dispositions that enable and restrict social action. Thus it is not surprising that many chapters in this book (among others, those of Dolgoy, Ikeda, and Kuwahara) foreground the importance of family relations (including fictive families), friendships, and other forms of relatedness to understanding non-heteronormative identifications in Pacific Island societies. In such contexts, persons whose subjectivity is at odds with their sexual status emerge as a sociological puzzle rather than a psychological problem, and the mismatch tends to be managed by reassigning the person to a different social category. Needless to say, this contrast is a gross oversimplification, particularly in a world in which all boundaries are porous, and thus all fashions of being and doing are constantly informed by other ways of being and doing. Yet it does lead us to relativize the privileging of identities in social scientific research on transgender and related categories in the Pacific Islands (as well as elsewhere), which continues to be dominated by the question, “Who are these people?” Rather than focusing on categories as objects of analysis, we argue that a focus on relationships or, more broadly, social practices may provide a much more fruitful handle on the world around us.

This shift enables us to rethink in a productive manner an issue that has monopolized attention—namely, terms for categories of non-heteronormativity. Do we refer to Tongan leitī, Cook Islands ‘akava‘ine, or Fijian qauri as “transgender,” “queens,” or simply “homosexuals”? What do we gain or lose by applying these labels, and who decides? What do we do about derogatory and stigmatizing terms like “poofta” (as it is often rendered in the Pacific Islands) and “fairy,” which are nevertheless widely used? Frequently, terminological discussions conflate description and enactments, words and meanings, and fail to account for the instability of categories across time, context, and place. For example, we have all witnessed people in the Pacific Islands performing one kind of identity while living in the islands and taking on a very different persona when they migrate (Farran, Tcherkézoff, this volume). Similarly, people themselves enact gender and are gendered by others in different ways, for example, according to whether they find themselves in formal situations (where rank, kinship, and propriety are foregrounded) or in casual company; but contexts can be subject to different definitions, which may lead to conflict as easily as it can lead to experimentation (Good, Presterudstuen, Stewart, this volume).

Terms are not just descriptive but performative, and with the performative comes the political. For example, in the ethnically tense context of Aotearoa New Zealand, gay and transgender Maori people in the 1980s began calling themselves takatāpui, utilizing a term that appears in nineteenth-century Maori–English dictionaries, where it is defined as “Going about in company,

familiar, intimate” (Williams 1957, 369), although whether or not it implied anything about gender and sexuality at the time is entirely unknown.2 Since then, this term has gained traction, particularly among those who seek to claim the legitimacy of being at once indigenous and nonheterosexual on the one hand and, on the other, are keen to distance themselves from Pākehā gay and lesbian identities and remain true to Māoritanga.

Often, debates around terms are really about something quite different, namely, the specificities of local contexts and who has the power to define localness. Debates about local legitimacy are invariably based on a binary oppositional contrast: Tongans define themselves in opposition to (a highly reified version of ) the culture of the Pālangi (New Zealanders, Australians, Americans, etc.); Cook Islanders in opposition to Papa‘ā; and Maori people in opposition to Pākehā. The oppositional group may differ according to the purpose of the comparison, but the binary nature of the comparison is oddly resilient. There may be a great deal of similarity in the behaviors, self-understandings, and beings-in-the-world between groups, but all comparisons between self and other emphasize differences and obscure similarities, as Fredrik Barth’s (1969) foundational work on ethnicity as the creation of boundaries demonstrated long ago. So when Hawaiian non-heteronormative people assert themselves as māhū, thereby claiming the legitimacy of a traditional grounding based on historical continuity, they are distancing themselves from mainstream gays and lesbians of other ethnicities in Hawai‘i and the postcolonial hegemony in which they are implicated (Ikeda, this volume).3

While we are sympathetic with efforts by non-heteronormative groups to distance themselves from terms that are “imposed” on them “from the outside,” particularly in settler societies of the Pacific region (Hawai‘i and Aotearoa New Zealand), we also stress that, ultimately, words are just words. There is nothing inherently problematic with using the term “transgender” or “gender liminal,” for example, to refer to certain forms of Pacific Island non-heteronormativity, as long as one understands the cultural and political specificities of the context to which it is applied.4

Here we insist on two points. One is that comparisons are most useful when they involve more than two contrasting categories. Gender and sexual configurations in Tahiti should be understood against the background of cognate configurations in Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, and Fiji. The other point is that all categories are constructs, generated in the very process of comparison, rather than essentialized entities that antedate the act of the comparison. Thus the fact that māhū, ‘akava‘ine, and fa‘afāfine are often asserted to be completely different from transgender or gay categories in the West results from the way in which Western transgender is constructed in the very act of difference making. The categories are indeed different, but there are also important overlaps, in that Pacific Island non-normative genders and sexualities share commonalities (in their self-definition, political struggles, anxieties for the future, etc.) with those of postindustrial urban societies. In addition, people have a notable capacity to redefine who they are over the course of their lives, shifting from one category to another, sometimes at very short notice (Valentine 2007).

The terminology used to describe non-heteronormativity by both scholars and those who identify with this identity is temporally and contextually unstable. For example, in the Cook Islands in the late 1990s, the term laelae, a borrowing from Tahitian raerae (see Elliston’s and Kuwahara’s chapters), was the most commonly used term to describe both “traditional” transgender categories and individuals considered to be “gay.” The term’s connotations ranged from neutral to negative depending on who was using it and for what purpose. In the mid-2000s, transgender Cook Islanders no longer found this term acceptable, preferring instead to call themselves ‘akava‘ine, calqued on the Samoan term fa‘afafine, to which they had been exposed through diasporic networks. At the same time, the new term constitutes a local reclamation: before this time, ‘akava‘ine had referred negatively to young women who were “above themselves,” “did not know their place,” and displayed overtly individualistic and immodest behaviors (Alexeyeff 2009a, 88), similarly to Tongan fokisi (Good, this volume). Transgender Cook Islanders appropriated the term to indicate that they are indeed “in the spotlight” through their glamour and sophistication. In contrast, non-heteronormative males in Samoa, at least until recently, rejected the term by which they are known to the rest of society (and, further afield, to New Zealanders and Australians)—namely, fa‘afafine—because it foregrounds a sexual persona from which they wish to distance themselves (Tcherkézoff, this volume). Terms may thus be unstable over time, just as they are at any given moment the focus of contestation.

At the other end of the spectrum, one encounters efforts from other quarters that strive to go in the opposite direction by erasing difference and local specificity. Perhaps the most egregious example is to be found in the work of a team of Canadian evolutionary psychologists who visited Samoa repeatedly in the first decade of the new millennium and published a series of papers about Samoan fa‘afāfine, at least one of which was disseminated to the media with great fanfare (Vasey and VanderLaan 2010). Following recent trends in evolutionary models of human sexuality (Bailey 2003), the researchers shift away from working with categories like “heterosexual” and

“homosexual,” using instead the neologisms “androphilia” and “gynephilia” to refer to sexual attraction to men and women respectively regardless of the person’s gender, terms that become definers of categories of people. This categorization enables Vasey and his colleagues to lump together fa‘afāfine in Samoa with gay men in Western contexts and claim to (finally!) solve the problem that same-sex erotic attraction represents for evolutionary theory: it is an adaptation to the demands of child care, whereby the androphilic would “sacrifice” their own fertility in order to attend to their nephews and nieces. The problems with the astounding configuration of methods, assumptions, and conclusions presented in this body of work are too numerous to spell out (cf. Jordan-Young 2010, 159–167, Schoeffel, this volume).5 Suffice it to say that defining fa‘afāfine in Samoa solely in terms of the gender of the object of their sexual attraction, and then to conflate them with gay identity in the West, obliterates the enormously complex ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality are interwoven, in Samoa and elsewhere, complexities that every chapter of this book highlights.

Ultimately, ad nauseam debates about whether categories are similar or different, or assertions to the effect that a term is in and others are out, are unproductive. We argue instead that we need to shift our attention from “who people are” to “what people do,” to what effect, with what intentions, and according to whom. This theoretical position is squarely embedded in the shift that anthropological and sociological theory has undergone since the 1980s with the turn to practice theory (Bourdieu 1977).

Practice is “anything people do,” particularly acts that have “intentional and unintentional political implications” (Ortner 1984, 149). A focus on social practice allows us to understand categories as shifting and complex rather than bounded. It provides the tools to understand change but also comes to grips with the fact that who we are is the result of performativity and repetition across different structural fields, repetition that can be interrupted at any moment (Butler 1990; Stryker 2006, 10). It also necessarily politicizes categories and actions. To varying degrees, contributors to this collection address how identities and categories emerge out of practice rather than the reverse.

The authors of the contributions to this collection distance themselves from the straightjacket of identity definitions, realizing fully the futility of attempting to define identities of any kind, particularly when these attempts have the effect of isolating identities from other dynamics at play in society and culture and in the local, the state, and the global, as we discuss further in the following sections. They engage squarely with the fact that identities do things, that they are performed in daily life, that they are transformed through events and movements, that they generate history and are the product of history, that they are constrained or liberated by legal constructions, and that they are constantly negotiated alongside other forms of identity. The chapters take seriously, for example, the moving and blurred boundary between transgenderism and homosexuality, and shy

away from simplistic explanations in terms of “tradition” versus “modernity,” or “identity” versus “practice,” or “rural” versus “urban.” Through its engagement with the complexities of these questions over time and space, this collection provides a model for future endeavors that seek to embed gender and sexuality in a broad field of theoretical import.

From Practice to Politics

One central aim of this book is to understand non-heteronormative practices in terms of their social, cultural, political, and historical contexts. All too often, non-heteronormative practices and people have been isolated as a separate category to be studied independently from other dynamics in society and culture, in the same way that women in the early days of feminist scholarship were approached as a marginal category of analysis separate from forces such as politics, the economy, and religion—despite the fact that these are often deeply implicated in gender and sexuality (Brownell and Besnier 2013; di Leonardo 1991; Freeman 2001; McKinnon 2000). Here we seek an understanding of the way in which non-mainstream gen-

dered practices and identities are produced by hegemonic sociocultural dynamics, and how they in turn produce the social order through compliance, resistance, or anything in between. The social order is of course deeply political, and is so in different ways. We find politics in representations,

in actions, and in symbols. We find politics in the intimacy of the private home, and in the corridors of government buildings. And everywhere gender looms large.

This politics is historical, and the history of gender in the Pacific Islands is implicated in the history of contact between Westerners and Islanders. Historically, the Pacific Islands have occupied a privileged position in Western making of meaning about gender and sexuality, and thus the politics of gender was a global politics right from the beginning of modernity. This meaning making began in the Enlightenment and Romantic eras with European travelers’ mythologizing of the region, often based on their misunderstandings of Islanders’ actions (Cheek 2003; Manderson and Jolly

1997; Sahlins 1985; Tcherkézoff 2004, 2008). From initial contact between Europeans and Pacific Islanders, the former constructed the latter as sexualized beings—whether positively, as in Tahiti, or negatively, as in Melanesia. In turn, Islanders themselves sexualized Western colonial agents, albeit in a different way. At the same time, these dynamics operated very far from the Pacific, as in Romantic debates in Europe that utilized what Europeans thought they had seen in the Pacific Islands to reconsider their own sexuality. These observations and interpretations showcased heteronormativity; in the few instances in which non-heteronormative people and practices were even mentioned (in travelers’ or missionaries’ accounts, for example), it was to condemn them and reaffirm a very conservative morality.

A particularly puzzling fact is that the only clear accounts of such persons and practices at the time of contact with Europeans in the late eighteenth century refer to Tahiti (Oliver 1974, 369–374). Europeans who visited other Pacific Islands made no mention of non-heteronormativity, even though most were well versed in contemporary descriptions of Tahiti, and in one (albeit ambiguous) case, a commentator who spent four years in Tonga in the first decade of the nineteenth century appears to deny its existence (Martin 1817, 2: 178). Yet today, non-heteronormative persons are present in virtually all island societies of Polynesia and perhaps

Micronesia, and increasingly visible in Melanesia (Stewart, this volume). While of course we cannot know whether practices or identities existed at the time they were not mentioned in historical records, we do have ample evidence that historical contact and the ensuing colonialism are complicit in transforming the gender and sexual configuration of both island cultures

and the cultures of the colonizers (Clancy-Smith and Gouda 1998; Gouda 1996; Stoler 1995).

While much of the work that deals with these issues focuses exclusively on heteronormativity, we ask whether the historical emergence of transgender categories in the Pacific could be the product of similar dynamics of contact, power, and exchange, which are not reducible to a simple process of importation. In what Sahlins (1985) calls the “structure of the conjuncture,” dynamics that were present but not visible in society may emerge at the moment of contact. The cross-cultural encounter, particularly when it involves widely different kinds of people, is after all a performative moment, in which theatricality, artifice, and improvisation all figure prominently (Balme 2007; Dening 1980; Herbert 1980; Wallace 2003).

In a more recent historical context, Tahitian transgender categories were fundamentally transformed by the neocolonial presence of French military personnel in the 1960s (Elliston, this volume), which suggests that comparable transformations may have taken place in earlier times about which we have little solid information (a hypothesis that Mageo [1992, 1996] develops for Samoa, albeit in a speculative way). It is no coincidence, we surmise, that we find that performativity is so central to some of the non-heteronormative categories that we analyze in this book (see, e.g., Pearson, Presterudstuen, Tcherkézoff, and Ikeda, this volume).

From the early twentieth century, anthropologists jumped into the fray with psychosocial analyses of sexuality in Pacific Island societies that grappled with the theoretical debates of their times. Here we think of Margaret Mead (1928), Bronislaw Malinowski (1929), and Ralph Linton (1939),

with Mead’s famous depiction of “sexual freedom” among Samoan adolescents and Malinowski’s equally famous account of equally liberal sexuality in the Trobriand Islands standing out as particularly salient for the times. Mead claimed that Samoans were permissive of same-sex play among adolescents. She relates encountering one “deviant,” a twenty-year-old who made “continual sexual advances to other boys”; girls regarded him as “an amusing freak,” but men looked upon him with “mingled annoyance and contempt” (1928, 148). Malinowski, in contrast, reported that Trobrianders considered same-sex relations contemptible and makes no mention of gender crossing. With the exception of a handful of popular accounts of “sexuality in the islands” (Beaglehole 1944; Marshall 1971; Suggs 1966), early anthropological works make either only passing mention or no mention of non-heteronormative persons and practices. Nevertheless, these works established youth as an important subject for anthropological investigation. Issues associated with this life stage such as sexual intrigue, sexual experimentation, and courtship, as well as the societal acceptance of these practices during this period, laid the ground for later generations of scholars working on young people in the Pacific (e.g., Lepani 2012; Lepowsky 1998; Elliston, this volume). The first sustained account of transgender Pacific Islanders is arguably a brief but consequential article (1971) by psychiatrist-turned-anthropologist Robert Levy, which he incorporated into his 1973 book, Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands, a groundbreaking work in psychological anthropology at the time. Levy developed a functionalist argument to the effect that Tahitian society needed a transgender figure to resolve the potential anxieties surrounding the differentiation of genders. The māhū was supposed to demonstrate to Tahitian men how not to be a man. Levy supported this argument by claiming that every village in Tahiti had only one māhū, because that was all that was needed, and this myth has been repeated over and over again in popular accounts. Levy’s understanding of the place of māhū in Tahitian society has been subjected to critical deconstruction (e.g., Besnier 1994; Elliston, Schoeffel, this volume) for, among many other things, robbing the category of any kind of agency.

Besnier’s 1994 chapter, “Polynesian Gender Liminality through Time and Space,” marked a distinct shift in the study of non-normative gender and sexuality in the Pacific Islands. While more programmatic than ethnographically grounded (since at the time few ethnographic accounts of non-heteronormativity were available), it engaged with broader theoretical and cross-cultural analysis of gender and sexual politics. Anticipating the critique of the binary nature of comparison we developed in the previous section, Besnier opened the framework of comparison by engaging with works on non-normative genders in societies beyond the Pacific, searching for analytic insights comparatively. At the time, the notion of “third gender” was in fashion in the social sciences and in the popular imagination. Thirdness is perhaps most useful if one interprets it as referring to “other-ness” (as in “the Third World” or the Lacanian symbolic), as cultural theorist Marjorie Garber argues in her classic Vested Interests (991, 11–13); but the problem is the persistence of the term’s numerical meaning, the illusion that transcending the strictures of binary gender is just a matter of adding one more category without thinking through the implications of such a move. Ultimately, thirdness fails to capture the complex interaction among gender, sexuality, and the social, economic, and political contexts in which they operate.

Ironically, while Besnier’s chapter appeared in an edited book entitled Third Sex, Third Gender, he argues against giving the notion too much analytic weight. A more productive line of thinking engages with the way in which gender and sexuality are implicated in structures of inequality (be

they of rank, social class, ethnicity, indigeneity, etc.) and of unequal access to material or symbolic resources. This approach then enables us to understand non-heteronormativity in all its complexity: as highly variable in its manifestations from one person to another, from one context to another, and from one society to another; as shifting over time, whether in the course of history or the course of a lifetime; and as porous and unstable, as people take on gender and sexual attributes according to their own needs and aspirations or those of other people around them. We thus find, for example, a recurrent association between non-heteronormative practices and identifications with the liminality of adolescence, either in the form of persons crossing gender lines during their youthful years (before marrying and “settling down”) or in the form of adolescents’ sexual relations with a transgender person (Elliston, this chapter). Focusing on these complexities

amounts to engaging with the way in which subjectivities and structures are intertwined with one another.

Some of these complexities come to the fore in the works of a number of transgender and gay Pacific Islanders and Maori people in recent years (e.g., Hutchings and Aspin 2007; Pulotu-Endemann and Peteru 2001). Some of the most sophisticated works in this vein have utilized modes of communication beyond print media and have creatively transcended the

boundary between seriousness and humor, between aesthetics and politics, and between the identity politics and other forms of political action. Samoan artist Dan Taulapapa McMullin’s hilarious three-minute 2001 video (McMullin 2007) draws on traditional Samoan forms of comedy or fale aitu (see Pearson, Schoeffel, and Tcherkézoff, this volume) to draw a trenchant critique of both neocolonialism and the complex configurations of the local through the eyes of a fa‘afafine named Sinalela (Samoan for “Cinderella”).

Questions of morality constitute a key puzzle for contributors to this book, although they do not necessarily couch the problems in these terms. People in all societies have a propensity to live by often seemingly contradictory moral standards. For example, in the Cook Islands, “straight”

women and men can be heard vilifying ‘akava‘ine’s alleged sexual immorality while at the same time relishing the company of their ‘akava‘ine friends, engaging in very overt sexual banter with them if they are men and laughing with abandon at their lewd stories if they are women. Similarly, in Tonga, leitī are valued congregation members in most established churches because of their dedication to the activities of the church; yet bringing up the presence of leitī with church officials invariably elicits serious condemnation, complete with biblical quotations. These apparent contradictions cannot simply be explained away as matters of “context appropriateness” or

“hypocrisy,” even though there is a polarization of moral stances according to the degree of visibility of practices. Tcherkézoff (this volume) analyzes sexual relations as always confined to an “invisible” world outside the realm of society and culture, and since Samoans consider non-heteronormative relations as always sexual, they cannot be part of society.

Still, we contend that morality is by definition based on multiple frames of reference, which allow for the coexistence of seemingly contradictory moral stances. These do not necessarily map onto differences in context in any straightforward manner. In fact, arguing that different contexts elicit

different moral judgments of the same action or person simply shifts the burden of analysis to the task of explaining how contexts can coexist while being defined by incompatible moralities. The situation is even more complex in many of the societies that we focus on in this book, many of which are diasporic or multicultural, and all of which have undergone tremendous moral transformations in the relatively recent past through missionization, colonialism, postcolonialism, and globalization. For example, debates about the religious ordination of lesbians and gay men in industrial countries of the Pacific Basin, as illustrated above, or the move to extend the right to marry to same-sex unions can have complex transformative effects on societies that are both island-based and diasporic (Farran, this volume). Through their strong connections to New Zealand and other countries, Tongans have become increasingly aware of the concept of “child molestation,” casting an entirely new light on casual sexual encounters between leitī and adolescents. Moralities are thus potentially informed by multiple overlapping cultural frames. This is where attention to social practice becomes useful and important, in that it forces us to see action and context as mutually constitutive. This is also why terms like “acceptance” and “rejection” are not useful analytic tools to characterize the relationship among categories, actions, and moral judgments—they also imply that people have a pre-social identity that they present to the rest of society for moral evaluation.

Most popular accounts of non-heteronormativity in Pacific societies maintain that “traditional” forms of transgender were more “authentic” and thus morally “acceptable” to mainstream society because they were defined in terms of gender rather than sexuality. But then “foreign-influenced” modernity gradually sexualized the identity and rendered it “inauthentic,” bringing about a withdrawal of societal acceptance and the emergence of moral condemnation (e.g., Croall 1999; Harker 1995; Xian and Anbe 2001). While this scenario accords with what many Pacific Islanders themselves maintain and is reproduced uncritically in some academic works (e.g., James 1994; Schmidt 2010), we find it deeply problematic for a number of reasons. First, it places the burden of morality on non-heteronormative individuals, as opposed to understanding them in the context of their relationships with other people, including those they have sex with, whether on the beaches of traditional villages or in the back alleys behind the urban nightclub. Second, this account erases sexuality from the “traditional” transgender, an erasure in which anthropologists and other commentators have been complicit, as Pearson argues (this volume; see also Wallace 2003).

Third, it is predicated on an overarching contrast between “tradition” and “modernity,” whereby the former is the historical antecedent to the latter, while we know well that both “tradition” and “modernity,” and the different moral orders with which they are alleged to be associated, are the products of active construction. This is dramatically illustrated by the different moral evaluations of two transgender categories, māhū and raerae, on Tahiti and Bora Bora, even though the two islands are only separated by 160 miles and are part of the same cultural and political entity (Kuwahara, this volume). On Tahiti, while māhū are valued as custodians of “tradition,” raerae are immoral and inauthentic because of their associations with the French colonial presence, especially the military, who are supposed to patronize raerae sex workers. On Bora Bora, in contrast, where there is no military presence, both māhū and raerae are equally valued for their labor in the luxury tourism industry and their roles in families. Here, the contrast between tradition and modernity, and the concomitant moralities, are the products of geopolitical dynamics whose effect can vary radically within the

More generally, both gender and sexuality are embroiled in the same set of sociocultural and political dynamics, and work in tandem with one another so as to produce moral hierarchies (Rubin 1975, 1984). The chapters in this book all build on these various insights, exploring the specificities of each ethnographic situation through the lens of comparison and of theoretical frameworks that extend beyond the Pacific. They investigate contradictory moralities—some religious, others secular, some local, others global—and the negotiations that these contradictions generate in people’s lives. They are attentive to the consequences of poverty and marginality in shaping the gendering of subjects as well as their sexual lives. Lack of economic and social capital can engender alienation, but it can also be the basis for the creation of new social and political formations, such as fictive kinship ties, adoption, friendships, and networks that can reach beyond the confines of the local (Dolgoy, Ikeda, and Stewart, this volume).

Local, Regional, and Global

Non-heteronormative people of all kinds define themselves in both local and non-local terms. Both the local and the nonlocal, however, operate on different scales, encompassing different geographical, social, political, and cultural frames of reference that refract one another. For example, the nonlocal may be regional or global, and “region” and “global” may be defined differently for different purposes. Similarly, the local itself may be quite complex, as people in many societies (particularly in the postcolonial world) contest among one another what is local and who is entitled to define the local (in terms of culture, morality, authenticity, or relevance). The constant awareness of different frames of reference results in a bifocality of life (Besnier 2011, 12–17), as people live and act both in the “nearsightedness” of the here and now while constantly looking over each other’s shoulders at a larger audience, which can consist of diasporic compatriots, foreigners, agents of new moralities, or providers of development aid. Some people are better versed in this bifocality than others, because they are more experienced at it or have more to gain from it, and some forms of non-heteronormativity have an uncanny tendency to place themselves right at the center of bifocal negotiations (Good, this volume).

A comparative approach such as the one we are encouraging here seeks to understand identity formations in contrast to one another, while also being attentive to the fact that they always inform one another, particularly in the context of the regional and global circulation of information, political action, legal concepts, and moral regimes. For example, transgender and gay Westerners often seek inspiration from “traditional” transgender categories, through which they develop a somewhat romantic critique of what they see as the restrictive sexual binary of Western modernity (Towle and Morgan 2002). Concurrently, some non-heteronormative people in other societies are increasingly accessing body modification procedures (e.g., sex-reassignment surgery or hormone therapy) made possible by advances in Western medical technologies, enabling the emergence of new identities. To complicate matters further, the international distribution of medical competencies in matters of sex transformations has now shifted to non-Western countries, as illustrated by Thailand having emerged as a world center of expertise and a major destination for transgender medical tourism (Aizura 2010). The global flow of people, information, technology, and other material and symbolic forms provides individuals with new forms of self-definition and self-understanding. While some Pacific Islanders undertake body-modification surgery (Kuwahara, this volume), most male-bodied non-heteronormative people in the Pacific have little desire to cover up their maleness completely so as to “pass” as women. Some view themselves as possessing the best physical attributes of both sexes, and there is a wide range of interpretations of feminine appearance depending on individual dispositions and context (Alexeyeff 2008).

One vector through which identities and practices are being transformed in the interface of the global and the local is the increased importance of nongovernmental organizations throughout the developing world ( Jolly 2010; Lind 2009). NGOs operate within a neoliberal logic characterized by the withdrawal of the state from the economic and social structure of society, a space that is being filled by other agents—from large-scale United Nations agencies and international finance institutions, to churches, grassroots organizations, and private interests (Fisher 1997). The material resources that invariably back up these organizations help them gain a foothold in local contexts, where these resources provide them legitimacy.

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of NGOs relating to gender and sexuality, relating in particular to HIV prevention efforts even in parts of the region where the predicted HIV pandemic has yet to materialize to any significant proportion, as well as to gender equality, violence, and human rights. These efforts have brought people from all corners of the Pacific region together in multiple associations, workshops, conferences and networks, through which they can identify common goals and agendas.

While the ideology of HIV prevention has been careful over the years to eschew the stigmatizing effect of identifying groups at risk, preferring instead to focus on risk practices and later risk situations, in practice on-the-ground efforts end up targeting specific groups of people. In the Pacific as elsewhere, these have invariably been the transgender, even though other social categories of people are equally, if not more, vulnerable to HIV infection. However enlightened NGO efforts may be, their translation into local contexts invariably runs the risk of highlighting certain aspects of local moralities and downplaying others. At the same time, NGOs invariably

operate with the assumption that openness about sexual practices and other morally charged matters is healthy and desirable, and can bring about significant and perhaps useful transformations in what can or cannot be said, in what can be visible or not. These transformations, however, do not operate without contestation and conflict (Good and George, this volume).

What has been called the “NGO-ization” of the world has other possible consequences. One is the efflorescence, narrowing down, and modification of local identifications. For example, the neologic acronym MSM, “men who have sex with men,” has emerged around the region, because it has immediate traction from which international aids money flows and national responses take place (Eves and Butt 2008; more generally, Boelstorff 2011; Reddy 2005). However, the local response may be mitigated: in Fiji, for example, the term elicits snickers among the mainstream (George, this volume). In contrast, non-heteronormative people in the region increasingly understand themselves in terms of categories like LGBT, particularly when this categorical shift is encouraged through the availability of trips to overseas conferences and the new networking possibilities they offer, and in the training workshops and festivities that accompany them. Through efforts like these, the pleasures of sex, traveling, and partying go hand in hand with global development discourse of sexual risk and danger ( Jolly 2010).

While NGO activity takes up the issue of sexuality narrowly as an issue of HIV and STD prevention, local non-heteronormative individuals also frame these networks to address local agendas, some of which have little to do with sexuality. For instance, the Te Tiare Association, a Cook Islands NGO founded by local ‘akava‘ine, frames its constitution in terms of a global human rights discourse (e.g., Objective 2.2: “raise public awareness of the human rights abuses suffered by aka vaine [sic] in the community”); but it is also active in relation to local priorities, for example, by organizing entertainment for fund-raising (particularly for schools) and mentoring “young queens” in their job-seeking endeavors. This group was formed after one ‘akava‘ine attended a “Love Life Fono” organized in 2007 by the New Zealand AIDS Foundation. From there she decided the Cooks should have an organization similar to transgender organizations in Samoa and Tonga. As part of Te Tiare’s launch in 2008, “sisters” representing other Pacific Nations transgender organizations were invited and attended, further underlying the pan-regional connections being forged through local, diasporic, and global networks.

Concurrently, the larger context that informs people’s lives is itself shifting in both geography and scale. NGOs can also encourage identification with a “region,” through the workings, for example, of such organizations as the Pacific Islands AIDS Foundation, with funding from New Zealand. Alternatively, the exact constitution of a “region” may be the result of expedient lumping together of numerous countries by large-scale agencies like the UN, for whom the Pacific Islands, being relatively insignificant in terms of population, are affixed to a much larger “Asia-Pacific” entity. This configuration has the advantage of potentially involving Pacific Islanders in circuits of information and resources of much greater scale. At the same time, it runs the risk of relegating the Pacific Islands to the status of an appendage, an afterthought of the global, and of obscuring the fact

that being on the edge can be a position of great productivity ( Jolly 2001; Teaiwa 2001). Intellectuals and the infrastructures in which they operate (e.g., institutions, funding agencies, publishers) can unwittingly contribute to this political marginalization by conflating very different dynamics and concerns and obliterating local specificities. While the notion of “region” is “a theoretically and politically necessary fiction” ( Johnson, Jackson, and Herdt 2000, 361), it is always problematic.

At the same time, flows of ideas about sexuality and the mediating role it plays between the person and the social context transcend regional boundaries, proverbially harnessing all local specificities to the global. This is what Altman (2001) has termed “global sex,” the hypothesis that the forces of globalization are enacting changes in local contexts that bring about both increased homogeneity and greater inequality in matters of sexuality around the world. In the context of these global transformations, identities themselves are changing, from a broad diversity of local configurations that may involve a constellation of identifications based on gender, sexual desire, kinship, religion, and labor, to a much narrower focus on sexuality as the primordial definer of who one is. For example, according to Altman, categories like banci and waria in Indonesia, bakla and bantut in the Philippines, and kathoey and tomdee in Thailand are increasingly morphing into a global gay identification produced through Western-inflected media images, consumer goods, and discourses of sexual rights, resulting inter alia in buff gay gym rats and lipstick lesbians waving rainbow flags in pride parades in all corners of the urban world. This explains why many mainstream Pacific Islanders (alongside people in many other parts of the world) often maintain categorically that “homosexuality” (a term that generally conflates categories of gender and sexuality) is a “Western scourge”—which is correct if one thinks of “homosexuality” as principal definer of who one is, as opposed to a practice that has no relevance as a marker of personal

or group identity (Schoeffel, this volume).6

Altman is careful to acknowledge that these transformations are messy, with different modes of identification coexisting and overlapping. He is also critical of the dominance of the West, and in particular of the United States, in determining the direction of these changes, and of the central role that they accord to commodification and neoliberalism. In addition, while global sex appears to enact a liberatory politics everywhere, in fact it operates within an uneven playing field. Urban middle classes, for example, benefit from the cosmopolitan freedom promised by global sex, while those outside its reach do not. Similarly, global liberatory politics also go hand in hand with the global circulation of new forms of oppression, under the guide of religious fundamentalism for example (Morris 1997), and can generate new local forms of sexual repression (a point that Massad [2002] would later controversially elaborate; contrast Farran, this volume).

The global sex hypothesis speaks to a number of issues that we raise. Like all grand narratives, it has been subjected to critical scrutiny, particularly by anthropologists concerned with the complexities of the local politics, identifications, and transformations (Alexeyeff 2009a; Besnier 2002; Jackson 2009; Reddy 2005; Rofel 2007). For us, one of its major problems is that it is reminiscent of the problematic evolution from “morally acceptable” tradition to “morally problematic” modernity that we critiqued in the previous section. Yet it does bring to the fore the impact of capitalism, principally in its neoliberal forms, on the sexed and gendered person, demanding a political economy of sexuality. But this political economy must also remain

cognizant of other politics (diasporic dispersal, nationalism, militarism, etc.) and of the fact that the global may affect the local but the global is also produced through the local. This volume seeks to understand non-heteronormative people in a local context of all social relationships, among not only other transgender affines but also non-transgender friends and relatives. Transgender individuals interact with, evaluate, and are evaluated by others around them whether of mainstream gender and sexuality or not. The local, in other words, is as complex and shifting as global and regional dynamics.

Where to Next?

The following chapters go to great lengths in exploring unchartered territory, but also leave a number of questions open, simply because they have not been subjected to empirical investigation. The first is a regional question: most contributions focus on the Polynesian region, reflecting the unexplored status of non-heteronormative sexuality throughout the Melanesian region and in many parts of Micronesia (Dvorak’s and Stewart’s chapters being the exceptions). The silence over contemporary forms of non-heteronormativity in Papua New Guinea societies is puzzling in light of the well-trodden ground occupied in anthropological theory in the 1980s and 1990s by discussions of “ritualized homosexuality” (e.g., Elliston 1995; Herdt 1984; Knauft 1985) associated with male initiation rituals that were once practiced, in varying configurations, in societies dispersed across the Highlands and along the south coast of New Guinea until they were displaced by colonial and missionary sexual regimes (Knauft 2003). Similarly, rampant sexual violence, sex work, and HIV in many parts of contemporary New Guinea have preoccupied practitioners as well as scholars (Eves and Butt 2008; Hammar 2010; Lepani 2012; Wardlow 2006). Yet gender and sexual variance is seriously understudied in that era of the region, reasons for which constitute a particularly puzzling question to which we do not have a clear answer.

One contrast that arises between the material on Papua New Guinea presented in Stewart’s chapter and that in other chapters is the hypervisibility of transgender individuals in many parts of Polynesia. Polynesian transgender people are hypervisible, both in the sense of refusing to remain

hidden or obscured, and in the fact that transgender individuals and representations turn up in expected and unexpected contexts and in the darnedest places, at times making for uncomfortable or surprising negotiations of meaning. The situation in Papua New Guinea is strikingly different, in that there non-heteronormative individuals report a strong sense of isolation from their families and from the public sphere, where they feel they can rarely be “out” for fear of violent retribution (similar issues also emerge in Ikeda’s materials about Hawai‘i). But then again, Papua New Guinea is not coterminous with “Melanesia.” Vanuatu’s first drag queen, named Masi, performed in Port Vila in 1999, apparently for the first time ever, in front of her home island community, Tanna, reputed to be the most aggressively hypermasculine island in the country, and the response from the large crowd was one of celebration, humor, and delight ( John Taylor, personal communication, May 2012). Here, the alleged contrast between Polynesia and

Melanesia evaporates, suggesting that many additional factors are at stake.

A second area of research that remains underexplored is female non-heteronormative practices and identifications, which Tcherkézoff alone addresses in this book (see also Elliston 1999 and, in more tangential fashion, Pearson, this volume). His analysis uncovers major disjunctures between the person of the Samoan tomboy and that of the fa‘afafine (or fa‘ateine, the term he prefers), disjunctures that explain the invisibility of the former in contrast to the conspicuousness of the latter in Samoa, elsewhere in the Pacific Islands, and in diasporic communities. How do the forces of the global unsettle the silence that surrounds female non-heteronormativity, and how do the resulting dynamics resemble or differ from those that reshape male non-heteronormativity? These and a host of other questions remain to be addressed seriously.

A third set of issues that demands attention is the subjectivity of men who do not identify as fa‘afafine, leitī, or ‘akava‘ine, but who engage in sexual relations with members of these social categories, occasionally in preference to heteronormative sexual relations. From the perspective of mainstream Pacific Island societies, these questions are deeply unsettling, as illustrated

by Kalissa Alexeyeff ’s (2009b, 113) anecdote about naïvely assuming that one of her straight Rarotongan interlocutors would identify as gay because he had a ‘akava‘ine partner, and nearly getting beaten up by him as a result. For mainstream society, these questions raise uncomfortable issues about the permeability of “cultural” boundaries (dislodging, for example, the assertion that “homosexuality” is not local) and about the fragility of masculinity beneath a veneer of gendered stability and power. Similarly, we know next to nothing about the emergence of gay identities among Pacific Island men, primarily in diasporic communities but not exclusively so, and their relationships to other manifestations of non-heteronormative identifications and to global forms of same-sex identification.

Finally, while (post)colonialism and its configuration through sexuality figures in many of the chapters of this book (e.g., Dvorak, Elliston, Farran, George, Ikeda, Kuwahara, Pearson, Stewart, and Teaiwa), the topic demands considerably more attention. Broadly speaking, the sexualization of colonialism has garnered much greater attention in its historical forms than in its contemporary manifestations, and this attention has been largely confined to heteronormative relations, with a few exceptions (e.g., Bleys 1996). Yet the mapping of contemporary (post)colonial relations onto sexual desire raises a host of theoretically important questions that remain to be addressed in the Pacific and elsewhere. For example, how are same-sex relations between Westerners and Islanders embedded in a historical and contemporary context of structural relations between island nations and metropolises? How do they in turn inform these relations by contributing, for example, to the racialization of postcolonial relations (cf. Constable 2003; Kelsky 2001)? Why are so many same-sex relations between Western men and Island men in diasporic communities so frequently informed by an age difference that always has the same configuration, reminiscent of the mutual attraction between older white “rice queens” and younger Asian “potato queens” in much of Asia (Ayres 1998; Jones 2000)? The complicated structuration of sexual desire, material desire, and parameters of social inequality (e.g., age, ethnicity, race) deserves considerably more analytic attention.

We have assembled this book with the aim of inspiring a new generation of researchers to engage with questions of gender and sexuality in the Pacific and beyond, so these questions progressively migrate from the edge to the center.

Acknowledgments

Over the years, Alexeyeff ’s research in the Cook Islands has received support from the Thomas and Ruth McArthur Fellowship Fund, the Australian National University, and the University of Melbourne. Besnier’s research on Tongan leitī has garnered funding from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand, and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. We thank the University of Melbourne Faculty of Arts for granting Niko a Visiting Fellowship in 2012, which enabled us to complete this book. Mahmoud abd-el-Wahed, Deborah Elliston, Sue Farran, Mary Good, Linda Ikeda, Ian Lincoln, Rachel Morgain, Benedicta Rousseau, John Taylor, and Serge Tcherkézoff provided useful comments on earlier drafts of this introduction. Two scholars reviewed the entire book manuscript anonymously for the press and offered excellent advice; one, Maria Lepowsky, provided meticulous comments on every single chapter. Finally, we thank Masako Ikeda of University of Hawai‘i Press for her enthusiastic support of this project and Barbara Folsom for her expert copyediting.