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

Chapter 2: Queer History and Its Discontents at Tahiti

PART I Historical Transformations 33 CHAPTER 2 QueerHistoryand Its Discontents at Tahiti The Contested Politics of Modernity and Sexual Subjectivity Deborah Elliston This chapter is motivated by questions about the uses of history in queer narratives of the present: how narratives of the past are (re)made through contemporary experiences of sexual desire and gendered belonging; how such narratives are employed in the service of projects of queer selfmaking —that is, the crafting of queer subjectivity, personhood, and identification ; and, more reflexively, how we as anthropologists grapple with our own uses and sitings of history in ethnographies of sexuality. I engage these questions by examining a contemporary contest to legitimize queer identities among people of the Society Islands of French Polynesia (referred to here as “Islanders” or “Polynesians”), an overseas territory of France in the Pacific commonly known as “Tahiti and its Islands” (referred to here as “the Islands”).1 The formulation of this contest in the Islands raises questions about intersections of the uses of history and the politics of modernity in relation to queer sexualities. Basing it on fieldwork in Papeete, Tahiti, as well as on the Society Islands of Huahine and Moorea, I examine how the queer gender subjects known locally as raerae are bidding for social acceptance in part by critiquing the social acceptance given to māhū. Raerae are male-bodied, femininity-performing, men-desiring subjects who entered the Polynesian scene of sexual/gender possibility within the past forty or so years. Māhū, in contrast, are represented as indigenous to the Islands and commonly referred to in discourses 34 Elliston of Polynesian cultural tradition. Translated by Polynesians as meaning “half-man, half woman,” māhū is primarily a gender category, yet it is one that also licenses māhū sexual desires to be directed toward either men or women, as I shall discuss later.2 As a category, māhū thus allows for samesex sexual desire and practice but does not necessarily entail or require it. Such ambiguity about māhū sexuality,in turn,enables the common practice among non-māhū Polynesians of ignoring māhū sexual practices altogether. My more specific motivation for this analysis is the emergence among raerae, within the past decade, of a distinctly critical discourse about māhū, in which raerae castigate māhū—specifically male-bodied māhū—as “cowards ” who “hide” in the ambiguities around their (homo)sexual desires.3 This discourse represents māhū as deliberately manipulating the “half-man, half-woman” designation to position their sexuality ambiguously and thus to sidestep issues of their own queer desires. In contrast to their denouncements of māhū “cowardice,” raerae characterize themselves as brave, courageous ,and the more“authentic”and“legitimate”queer gender subjects—not because of the long cultural history, culturally “authentic” status, and social acceptance possessed by māhū, but rather because they are “honest” about who and what they are: namely, male-bodied, femininity-performing subjects who sexually desire men and do not “hide” their queer desires but instead make them abundantly clear to themselves and all who see them. Two key uses of history animate this critical discourse by raerae, both of which take shape by contrasting the meanings of raerae and māhū as local categories and sites of identification. The first is the use of history in narratives of māhū and raerae origins and historicity. The second is the use of history in narratives of raerae subjectification—their life histories and stories of coming into their identifications as raerae—which are also developed in contrast to and distinct from those of māhū. Both of these uses of history, I argue, also hold lessons for specifically anthropological uses of history in the crafting of the narratives we tell, and particularly in our ethnographic representations of sexuality and desire. Māhū: “Half-Man, Half-Woman” The local translation of māhū as “half-man, half-woman” emphasizes that first and foremost māhū is a gender category, and one we may best think of as “bilateral.”This gender category describes Polynesians who draw on a combination of masculine and feminine gender signs and practices but who Queer History and Its Discontents at Tahiti 35 are represented as behaving more generally “in the manner of”their sexedbody opposite: female-bodied māhū, for example, are commonly described as behaving “in the manner of men,” while male-bodied māhū, the...