Fa'afafine: Queens of Samoa and the elision of homosexuality

GLQ

Volumn 5, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 25-39

  Wallace, Lee ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33749639889     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-5-1-25     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. Niko Besnier, "Polynesian Gender Liminality through Time and Space," in Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, ed. Gilbert Herdt (New York: Zone, 1994), 286.
2. Besnier's "Polynesian Gender Liminality" is a masterly survey of what is at stake in both historically distant and recent European representations of gender-liminal behavior in Polynesia.
3. Niko Besnier, "Sluts and Superwomen: The Politics of Gender Liminality in Urban Tonga," Ethnos 62 (1997): 11.
4. See also Besnier, "Polynesian Gender Liminality," 304.
5. This erasure has deadly consequences in a Pacific location such as the one from which I write, Auckland, where young Polynesian men who identify themselves across gender and not as gay are the population most vulnerable to HIV infection and most beyond the reach of preventive education programs (see Needs Assessment: Pacific Islands Men Who Have Sex with Men, New Zealand AIDS Foundation Report to North Health, November 1996).
6. Not that we must, under the urgent imperative of AIDS - its discursive no less than its epidemiological effects - ride roughshod over the niceties of cultural differentiation to install "homosexuality" as a universally legible rubric. But recently the most efficacious and rigorous distinctions between homosexual identities (gay-identified men) and homosexual acts (sex between men) have been made in AIDS education and policy work. For other regionally specific instances of such work see Gary Dowsett, Men Who Have Sex with Men: National HIV/AIDS Education (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1991);
7. and Michael Bartos et al., Meanings of Sex between Men (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1993).
8. The reliance of sexuality on narrative is doubly apparent in the avowal of homosexuality that is marked by its necessarily retrospective structuration. Meditating on the gay compulsion to produce a history of one's desire, Wayne Koestenbaum writes: "When I as a gay person go backward to find or write the story of my sexuality, I am making it up, because sexuality has no absolute origin or motivation, though because sexuality is structured like a narrative, with crux, climax, and denouement, we are always hoping to unknot its beginning" (The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993], 54).
9. The term Samoanicity is modeled on Roland Barthes's coinage Italianicity, which refers to a fantasy of Italianness, a hyperrepresentation not anchored in the banal truths of geography or nationality (Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath [New York: Hill and Wang, 1977], 33). Of course, the substantial body of literature on the reification of tradition in Samoa and the Pacific might be referenced here; however, Barthes's discussion of the capacity of an image of some pasta and a few fresh vegetables to signify Italy is more in keeping with the shortened circuit of reference invoked here.
10. Paalagi is a Samoan word in relatively common use among both Samoan and white New Zealanders, particularly in social settings in which the two groups have frequent and familiar contact. G. B. Milner defines it as "non-Samoan," "Caucasian," or "European," depending on the context (Samoan Dictionary: Samoan-English, English-Samoan [Auckland: Polynesian Press, 1993]).
11. Kaja Silverman argues that the voice-over, the disembodied voice that floats free of the diegesis, marks the point of highest authority within any cinematic economy: "Insofar as the voice-over asserts its independence from the visual track, it presents itself as enunciator. It seems, in other words, to be a metafictional voice, the point of discursive origin" (The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988], 51).
12. Our most ready shorthand for that invisible technology remains "the camera" or "the gaze." Kaja Silverman's cautionary statement against too glibly polarizing the visual paradigm is worth recalling: "Since the gaze always emerges for us within the field of vision, and since we ourselves are always being watched by it as we look, all binarizations of spectator and spectacle mystify the scopic relations in which we are held" (Male Subjectivity at the Margins [New York: Routledge, 1992], 151).
13. The term I want to apply to the voice-over and its ostensibly deferential manner derives from old-fashioned literary studies. I want to say that the voice-over works in the manner of free indirect discourse; it is a depersonalized narration that is everywhere felt but nowhere seen.
14. Despite Futu's straightforward faith in quarantine, lines of distinction prove strangely permeable. If the thought of fa'afafine exiled on some island brings to mind the leper, the leper brings to mind another figure, equally wrought through tropes of infection and transmissibility, that we might call the apparitional leper or - in all the welter of not saying it, it may as well be said - the homosexual.
15. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), 121-40.
16. Pulotu-Endemann does not have this relationship to the camera or to a femininity mortgaged to visibility. As he tells us, he is fa'afafine without the need "to put on dresses."
17. This lack implies that Queens of Samoa, like Paris Is Burning, insists on the ethnographic conceit of an innocent gaze. This makes even stranger the documentary's repeated suggestion that nineteenth-century missionaries, however well intended, were implicated in circuits of projection and incitement outside which the filmmaker claims to stand.
18. With narrative film, conflating the camera with the director in this way is regularly done in the name of the auteur, whose distinctive signature is discerned everywhere. Auteurship thus underscores the imaginary status of the cinematic apparatus.
19. These engaging moments mark a lost opportunity. Who, I am left asking, are the (female) filmmakers who can get these boys to smile like that? This question asks Queens of Samoa to declare not only its relationship to power but its relationship to the pleasure it pursues. That the two are not the same is one of the many lessons provided by Michel Foucault: "The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it. The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is pursuing; and opposite it, power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, or resisting" (An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley [New York: Pantheon, 1978], 45).
20. For an introduction to the theorization of the relationship among gender, sexuality, and Samoan kinship structures see Bradd Shore, "Sexuality and Gender in Samoa: Conceptions and Misconceptions," in Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality, ed. Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 192-215.
21. Shore argues that gender inversion maintains kinship categories essential to the tracings of genealogy, a practice central to the social and political organization of Samoan life, just as the dispensations allowed fa'afafine and their sexual partners pertain to the prohibitions on the sexual conduct of young women. That is, the Samoan institution of fa'afafine has traditionally been relied on to brace a gendered politics of fertility and descent. Jeanette-Marie Mageo agrees that in the Samoan instance gender inversion needs to be understood in relation to kinship structures rather than as a privatized sphere of sexual motivation, but, in a departure from Shore, she argues that gender liminality "mitigates" otherwise unstable gender differentials between males and females. The phenomenon of fa'afafine "occurs where gender binarism is unstable and is then exploited by cultural members to maintain gender binarism," which is why, Mageo argues, male transvestism is increasingly prevalent in modern Samoan culture; it functions prophylactically, reinforcing "gender polarities when they are under siege" (610), as they have been since the "relative feminization of male roles that missionization provoked" ("Samoa, on the Wilde Side: Male Transvestism, Oscar Wilde, and Liminality in Making Gender," Ethos 24 [1996]: 610, 592).
22. For a discussion of the ironic modes of self-representation employed by fa'afafine and of their role in deflecting erotic tension away from relations between young Samoan males and unmarried girls see Jeanette-Marie Mageo, "Male Transvestism and Cultural Change in Samoa," American Ethnologist 19 (1992): 443-59.
23. Queens of Samoa's insistence on family as the interpretive framework for the gender liminality of fa'afafine takes on a different cast in light of Butler's essay on Paris Is Burning. Butler argues that it is precisely the cultural heft of "family" and its related terms that renders them liable to rearticulation in the voguing culture visited in Livingston's film: "It is in the elaboration of kinship forged through a resignification of the very terms which effect our exclusion and abjection that such a resignification creates the discursive and social space for community, that we see an appropriation of the terms of domination that turns them toward a more enabling future" (Bodies That Matter, 137).
24. Leo Bersani, however, loses patience with Butler's valorization of the house culture caught in Livingston's film and with its resignification of familial relations. Contesting Butlers conviction that "the resignification of the family . . . is not a vain or useless imitation, but the social and discursive building of community, a community that binds, cares, and teaches, that shelters and enables," Bersani argues that such resignification "is little more than a consolatory community of victims" (Homos [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995], 52). These alternative takes on the family, the one celebratory, the other depressing, are not unlike the differing versions of the Samoan aaiga that Queens of Samoa distributes between Apia and Auckland.
25. There is little evidence for Pulotu-Endemann's claim. The nineteenth-century missionary archives, preoccupied as they are with sexual conduct, are startlingly silent on the phenomenon of fa'afafine. See Mageo, "Samoa, on the Wilde Side," 588-89.
26. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 125.
27. Despite its often self-congratulatory poise, tolerance can be more heavy-handed than prejudice. Consider, for example, Jan Cameron's discussion of the reactions of Auckland netball administrators to the 1994 decision of the New Zealand Netball Federation "to sex-test players who might be transvestites without breaching privacy and human rights laws" ("For Women's Own Good: Gender Verification of Female Athletes," New Zealand Women's Studies Journal 12 [1996]: 8). Sensitive to the intensive Pacific Island involvement in the sport - and, consequently, to the likelihood of fa'afafine involvement in it - Auckland administrators urged netball teams to be self-surveilling and to enroll in mixed (men's and women's) competition if there was any doubt as to the gender identity of their members.
28. The question of who sleeps with fa'afafine is highly charged in many contexts. I do not deny that documentary makers and, increasingly, ethnographers in countries like Western Samoa are subject to government approval concerning what they can and cannot depict. Censorship, however, is the devil we know; I am more concerned with the representational mechanisms of a benign tolerance that frequently underwrites not just Queens of Samoa but many ostensibly gay-friendly portrayals of same-sex sexuality. It is the apparent transparency of the more sophisticated, less prohibitive gesture that I question.