Recognition, Political and Interpersonal: Gay Tribalism in Witi Ihimaera’s The Uncle’s Story

New Zealand Māori writer Witi Ihimaera has long used his fiction as commentary on postcolonial politics. In The Uncle's Story (2000), Ihimaera portrays a protagonist who combines an assertion of gay rights with a denunciation of white oppression. As the protagonist engages in a liberatory struggle on behalf of the Māori people and in advocacy of a gay tribe; however, he displays a patriarchal conceptualization of subjective agency that denies the mutuality of respectful intersubjective recognition. This not only causes severe contradictions in himself, but also gives rise to potential difficulties in the organization and practice of community life.