Islands of Love, Islands of Risk: Culture and HIV in the Trobriands

5. Youth Sexuality: Making Desires Known

101 CHAPTER 5 Youth Sexuality Making Desires Known Ulatile. That’s boys looking for pretty girls and hardworking girls, that’s what they have in mind. Kapugula, girls looking for handsome boys and hardworking boys, girls going out to other places, to other boys in other places. —Amanda, aged twenty, 17 June 2003 Kapugula. Go out. Young girls, they go free. They get it from their grandmothers and mothers that they are free to go around. —Village birth attendant, 18 December 2000 Ulatile, kapugula. Young ones go out at night to other villages. Because they are young, boys and girls are free to make their own choice, where they go out and how they attract each other and mix themselves up in a group. That’s their freedom. Different girls from different villages, different boys from different villages. Some girls go to visit far distant relatives and that’s where they pick their boyfriends. Just for the sake of visiting them, during sagali, stay for a while, find new boys. The boys will pick their ripe pawpaws [papaya]. —Middle-aged woman, 4 November 2003. Translated into English. The sexual exuberance that infuses the “Islands of Love” trope with such potency in the popular imagination is most powerfully evoked by the freedom that unmarried Trobriand youth enjoy in exploring and expressing their sexuality, unencumbered by repressive cultural ideology. The anticipated activation of sexual desire and agency during early pubescence locates Trobriand sexual culture in a unique place in relation to other parts of Papua New Guinea, and indeed many parts of the world, where social and religious norms commonly constrain or negate youth sexuality, particularly that of young females (Buchanan-Aruwafu 2007; Buchanan-Aruwafu and Maebiru 2008; Jenkins 1997, 2007; Keck 2007; Kelly et al. 2010). Perceptions of unrestrained and dangerous adolescent sexuality influence representations of HIV risk, evaluated in terms of early commencement of sexual activity, or “sexual debut,”1 premarital sex, and unplanned pregnancies. These 102 ISLANDS OF LOVE, ISLANDS OF RISK medicalized codifications of sexuality are important for reorienting HIV programs toward affirmation of young people’s sexual desires and agency and their particular sexual health needs (Moore and Rosenthal 2006); however, the ways they have been mobilized in national HIV programs have served to define youth sexuality as a problem that requires correction (see Parikh 2005:128). Inadequate attention is given to contextualizing young people’s desires in relation to cultural expectations and values regarding social reproduction (Setel 1999; Smith 2004), and to the ways youth sexuality reflects the ruptures and influences of social change and modernity , where assertions of newfound agency and expressions of love and romance are in tension with cultural norms and constrained by larger structural factors (Buchanan-Aruwafu and Maebiru 2008; Bucholtz 2002; Butt and Munro 2007; Parikh 2005; Wardlow 2006). Trobriand sexual culture, and its celebrated value of the life stage of kubu­ kwabuya in pursuing the endeavors of collective sociality, disrupts the representations of youth sexuality in HIV discourse. The sexual energy of kubukwabuya, or unmarried male and female youth, is visibly mobile in the social landscape, expressing productive capacity and reproductive potential by mapping out the broader social connections between people and places in overlapping networks of exchange. In this chapter, I further explore sexual desire as a “cultural production” (Tolman and Diamond 2001:36) by retracing the movement of kubukwabuya in their exercise of personal and collective sexual agency. I describe two distinct forms of cultural practice prominent in the sexual agency of young people. These are love magic and gift exchange. Sexual desires and intentions are realized through the use of kwaiwaga, or love magic, which secures the embodied desires of others and makes intimate relations visible in the larger social realm. Buwala, the gifts that young boys and men give their female sexual partners, signify the transactional dimension of sexual relations and the value of exchange in Trobriand society. I follow the gendered mobility of youth sexuality to its abrupt cessation in the transition to marriage and parenthood, but illustrate how this pathway is neither linear nor immutable, particularly for girls. The Mobility of Kubukwabuya Desire The Trobriand life stage of kubukwabuya embodies the autonomy to act on desire, to attract the desire of others, and to engage freely in sexual liaisons in the quest for a compatible marriage partner. The sexual freedom and mobility enjoyed by Trobriand youth are signified by the gendered terms ulatile and kapugula, the group activity of going out at night to...