AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities

8. Bad-Assed Honeys with a Difference: South Auckland Fa'afafine Talk about Identity

EIGHT BAD-ASSED HONEYS WITH A DIFFERENCE South Auckland Fa’afafine Talk about Identity Heather Worth Modernism’s crisis of legitimation, a crisis signaled in the term “postmodernism,” registers the faltering recognition that this complicitous kinship of gendered binary divisions cannot be accepted complacently. . . . The hesitations that now interrupt orthodox accounts of truth and subjectivity have inevitably returned us to the perplexing questions of . . . identity. —V. Kirby, Telling Flesh In the last twenty or so years, much Western theorizing has been fixated on questions of identity and its peculiar capacity for difference, ubiquity, and endurance. Identity (and difference, too) has permanence; the embodiment of sexual difference makes identity as a woman distinct from identity as a man. But the suggestion that sexual difference (that Ur-category for so many theorists over the last two decades) has a mutating existence tests our comprehension in an essential way, for it seems only natural to think of identity as fixed and discrete. What brought home this idea that identity is paradoxically fixed and also has a curious ability to diverge and metastasize was the narratives of a group of fa’afafine who were interviewed as part of a research project, Frayed at the Margins: Underclass Men Who Have Sex with Men, a study of the relationship between poverty and unsafe sex among men who have sex with men in South Auckland (New Zealand).1 This paper explores the narratives of this group of young fa’afafine:2 Fenella, Helen, Jasmine, Lionel, Louella, Pandora, 150 . H E ATH E R WORTH Penny, and Rhonda, who all think of themselves in ways that are inimical to a Western view that we must be one sex or the other, or that we must choose a stable identity for ourselves. Their ability to eschew gender and sexual identity as stable hegemonic categories, their refusal to disallow multiple genders and sexual identities at the same time and in the same body is theoretically very important because they are a powerful, empirical critique of the categories that scholars have held as central to the feminist enterprise for many years now. But at the same time, their belief in both gender and sexual identities as being central to their sense of self reflects fa’afafines’ inculcation into Western discourses of individuality, as well as in a globalized “queer” culture. Anthropologists in the Pacific have long acknowledged the slipperiness of sex and gender. For example, Niko Besnier’s work on “gender-liminality” in the Pacific has been informed by a long-ranging scholarly debate.3 For Besnier, fa’afafine are not “representatives of femaleness as a coherent and unitary category, but rather they align themselves with specific instantiations of womanhood in various contexts.” He argues, “the adoption by certain individuals of attributes associated with a gender other than their own is deeply embedded in the dynamics of Polynesian cultures and societies” (Besnier 1994, 285). Besnier wants to avoid terms such as “berdache,” “transsexual,” “gay,” or “homosexual” because, he argues, they “at best capture only one aspect of the category and at worst are completely miscontextualized” (308). He further asserts that the phenomena of fa’afafine and other modes of gender in the Pacific raise “particularly thorny categorical questions,” realizing that “the distinction between gender and sex is anything but straightforward” (286). Gender is permeable, permutable, and multifarious—with exceedingly porous boundaries, varying “in form and intensity across contexts” (319). “Whatever its nature, gender liminality is the locus of a great deal of ambiguity, conflict and contestation in Polynesian societies” (328). How do recent theoretical concerns with identity and difference fit with the experiences of a group of seven fa’afafine interviewees of South Auckland ? In order to move these thorny questions forward, I will examine the work of a number of authors who deal with identity, but in particular I will use Derrida’s essay, “The Law of Genre,” which interrogates not only literary genre but also genus (from whence we get notions such as generation) and gender.4 The law in “The Law of Genre” refers to the classification (and an enforceable principle of noncontamination and noncontradiction) of the binary opposites man/woman. But for Derrida, gender is always potentially excessive of the boundaries that bring it into being. While for Derrida binaries BA D -AS S E D HON E YS WITH A DI FFE RE NCE . 151 are not something that can be done without, the...