Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders

Chapter 1: Gender on the Edge: Identities, Politics, Transformations

1 CHAPTER 1 Genderon 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 2 Alexeyeff and Besnier 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 Gender on the Edge...