10 - Oceanic Sexualities: Persistence, Change, Resistance

Summary

Writing about Oceanic sexualities involves vast travel in space and time to appreciate the striking diversities in Indigenous sexualities across Oceania and to witness how these have transformed over centuries in relation to and resistance against global influences, especially those originating in Euro-American imperialism. Focusing on three different places in the Pacific – Hawai’i, Papua New Guinea and Samoa – this chapter critically considers how Indigenous sexualities have been represented by both foreign and Indigenous scholars and how far contemporary sexualities are seen as a rupture or a persistence from the past. It explores the pervasive conversion to Christianity as part of imperial processes of dispossession and depopulation. It analyses how the valorization of a patriarchal gendered binary and monogamous heterosexuality challenged and transformed prior gender and sexual configurations. It observes the impact of sexually transmitted diseases, from the ‘venereal’, spread by early European explorers, to the twentieth century epidemic of HIV. It critiques the role of foreign observers and anthropologists like Malinowski and Mead in the ‘othering’ of Oceanic sexualities and discusses how Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists have resisted such representations and offered alternative, anti-imperial perspectives.