Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders ed. by Niko Besnier and Kalissa Alexeyeff (review)

Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders is coedited by Niko Besnier, a frequent writer on queer Tongan fakaleiti, and Kalissa Alexeyeff, a writer on gender and attire in the Cook Islands. Their introductory essay takes the currently prevailing academic line that gender and sexuality have normative and nonnormative categories delimited by an edge of conflict, and in that sense they are taking a Western viewpoint on Pacific Islander cultures. They also point out that their collection takes part in a cross-national and cross-disciplinary dialog, perhaps whitewashing or recreating delimitations in a Western model of the differences between and among various Pacific cultural histories, rooted in a time before current Western queer theories began. This is particularly an issue when writers define contemporary queer societies in the Pacific in relation to queer internationalism, rather than investigating these queer societies within their own historical matrix.

Such important critical contexts notwithstanding, Gender on the Edge is a welcome addition to the field of Queer Pacific studies. Despite the brief and perhaps exotic introductions of something approaching a Queer Pacific studies at academic conferences, I think that this is a field that has produced too few publications and almost none in which indigenous queer writers are engaged in the dialog in a meaningful way. This book makes some attempt to bridge that gap, but even for writers who are indigenous but not queer, the results can be occasionally problematic, if only because the dialog has not gone round the table. Further publications in Queer Pacific studies are needed before the field can be said to have the explanatory power it deserves.

One essay that made the book definitely worth the read is Greg Dvorak’s “Two Sea Turtles: Intimacy between Men in the Marshall Islands.” Several writers in this book begin by raising the question that frames their categorizations, and as Dvorak writes, “Does this discussion matter more to the community in which it is situated, or to a Western audience preoccupied with its own, often Orientalist, desire to frame and categorize gender and sexuality?” (186). From this appropriate contextualizing of a Western queering of Pacific queer cultures, in his study of same-sex intimate relations in the Marshall Islands, Dvorak examines various contemporary interpretations within the Jerā community of men who have sexual relationships with men and the Kakōl community of men who live as women. Rather than finding a niche for Marshallese Jerā culture within Western modes, his essay examines the ways in which Jerā culture operates in conflict with and despite westernization and how it shapes that westernization. In other words, his work helps to define how a Western queering of Jerā culture is still westernization and how this elides history.

As a Samoan Fa‘afafine writer and artist, I was, unfortunately, disappointed in the essays on Fa‘afafine. I saw too few references to the growing body of work by Fa‘afafine themselves or at least to works focusing on our critical viewpoints, beyond what one might term the more entertaining aspects. In her essay “Representing Fa‘afafine: Sex, Socialization, and Gender Identity in Samoa,” Penelope Schoeffel concludes, “Although many fa‘afafine are considered to do feminine work better than girls and women, and may be admired for their skill, men who conform to cultural ideals of masculinity remain the ideal sons of Samoa” (87). There is in this conclusion a reductionist view that cannot see that Fa‘afafine have agency within Samoan society and may not wish to take the place of “sons”—or even of “daughters.” The ideal for Fa‘afafine is as Fa‘afafine, in childhood, education, work, and life.

With essays covering Queer Pacific lives from Tahiti, Sāmoa, Hawai‘i, Fiji...