Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. vi, 378 pp. (Figures.) US$35.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8248-3883-6.
The fourteen essays in Gender on the Edge bring us into the lifeworlds of Pacific Islander “gender outlaws” (K. Bornstein, Gender Outlaw, London, Routledge, 1994), who co-editors Besnier and Alexeyeff refer to collectively as “non-heteronormative”: persons that transgress and resist the binary sex/gender model. Anthropologist Besnier established the “on the edge” metaphor in previous publications from his project, now in its second decade, on the mediation of local and global notions and practices of transgender and sexuality in the Pacific. This volume expands on his project by gathering scholars from many disciplines: anthropology, cultural and media studies, sociology, law, political sciences, gender/sexuality studies, and more. In the introductory chapter, the editors reiterate the anti-essentialist argument for a shift in attention from “‘who people are’ to ‘what people do’, to what effect, with what intentions, and according to whom” (9) and this focus on categories and identities as emerging in everyday relational practice brings to the fore the themes for the book’s three parts.
In part 1, “Historical Transformations,” Elliston explores how historical transformations in Tahiti continue to shape identity narratives of raerae (male-bodied, femininity-performing, men-desiring persons) and how this sexualized category has increasingly taken on meaning in contrast to the long-standing and sexually ambivalent gender category of māhū (“half-man, half-woman”). The other two essays in part 1 concern Samoan fa’afāfine. Dolgoy’s mostly descriptive essay brings to life personalities and urban spaces shaping a fa’afāfine social movement from the 1960s. Strangely, he never explains what fa’afafine refers to (translates as “in the way of a woman” and is used for boys by birth who are seen to act in effeminate ways and who are thereafter raised more like girls). It becomes clearer in Schoeffel’s critique of anthropological representations of fa’afafine as a social institution that functions to reinforce masculine psychosexual development, as a gender surrogate in households with a shortage of girls, or as a sexual surrogate in a society where girls should not engage in pre-marital sex. Schoeffel argues, unconvincingly and partly contradicting Dolgoy’s descriptions, that fa’afāfine “are not primarily identified by their sexuality or their roles, but by their demeanor” (86).
A more careful understanding of fa’afāfine is provided by Tcherkézoff in part 2, titled “Performing Gender.” Exploring the category in relation to “tomboys,” the Western category for girls who are viewed as acting in the way of men, his essay becomes a rich theoretical and ethnographic discussion of the socialization of gendered inequalities and sexuality in Samoa. Kuwahara’s similarly strong essay illuminates the divergent local effects of global and neocolonial forces, most notably tourism and the French military, in a comparative investigation of the different ways māhūand raerae are used and understood in Tahiti and Bora Bora, two islands in the same nation. In a rather weak analysis, Ikeda sets out to question sensationalized accounts of transgender persons and explores how her informants in Honolulu, Hawai’i, construct new forms of families underpinned by long-standing local values. Presterudstuen instead sets out to question homogenous understandings of non-heteronormative urban Fijians by highlighting the diversity of gendered self-identification among transvestites, qauri (or “queens”), and homosexuals. In one of only two essays from the non-Polynesian Pacific, Dvorak closes the section with a well-crafted personal and scholarly conversation about local and global notions of intimate and sacred male-to-male relationships in the Marshall Islands.
In part 3, “Politics of the Global,” the strongest and most original analysis emerges from Pearson’s investigation of New Zealand television comedy through the lens of Pacific gender. Teasing out mutually transformative effects of long-running Pacific-influenced comedy shows featuring transgendered personalities and the locally famous white and lesbian sketch characters the Topp Twins sisters, Pearson reverses the dominant center-to-margin approach to global influences. She shows how public indifference to transgender in New Zealand popular culture may owe a partial debt to Pacific conceptions of identity where “gendered social roles, performances, and kinship relations are foregrounded” (257), rather than sexuality. Another carefully contextualized essay is George’s outline of changing discourses underpinning gay rights advocacy in Fiji. Gaining traction alongside local women’s rights activists who drew on global human rights agendas, the narrowing of political space under the military regime has seen gay activism become more closely associated with global and local sexual health advocacy, making them easy targets for pathological stigmatizing by conservative agents. In the second essay from outside Polynesia, Stewart importantly draws attention to the glaring lack of research about non-heteronormative lives in Papua New Guinea which she explains by the challenges presented by the rich cultural diversity and the absence of clearly identified non-heteronormative categories or self-identifying communities in PNG. In a conceptually disparate essay, Good suggests that marginalized youth in the hyper-sexualized Tongan categories fakaleitī (men who dress and act similar to women) and fokisi (women who breach local moral standards of modest femininity) can claim some local social authority through work with transnational NGOs in HIV/AIDS awareness programs. Teaiwa’s essay mainly provides reflections over gaps in research on Fiji’s sexual minorities in military services, and Farran closes the book with an examination of the domestic legal status of transgendered people in Samoa and Tonga. Asking what effects global legal developments, such as same-sex marriage, could have, Farran rightly cautions against any transplants of legal reforms. Claiming some form of legal status will not necessarily improve all lives in the highly heterogeneous transgendered community, and may instead isolate some people, as well as exclude others from transnational groups with whom they share some concerns and characteristics.
Like many edited volumes, the quality of analysis and originality of arguments thus vary from one essay to the next, and the editors’ alignment in the introductory chapter with well-established, anti-essentialist theoretical stances in gender and sexuality studies is hardly “edgy” or new. Gender on the Edge nevertheless becomes an important reminder of the centrality of gender and sexuality studies in analytical developments in the human sciences, and the collection can moreover be a useful contemporary addition to the teaching of area studies.
Åse Ottosson
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
pp. 968-970