Gender Minorities and Unequal Freedoms in Polynesia
| dc.contributor.author | Tcherkézoff, Serge | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-12-17T19:30:28Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-12-17T19:30:28Z | |
| dc.description.abstract | The notion of a minority revealed only by a count of units, as in the result of a majority vote, or in the census of populations according to origin, expanded in the Western discourse of the 1960s, when one began to speak of "sexual minorities", to designate differences from what seems a norm, without actual counting. "Minority" became synonymous with "non-heteronormative", whether it was a few people or several million. I prefer to speak of "gender minority", because the former expression creates the illusion that differences are only about sexual orientation, whereas there are gender minorities that do not define themselves, at least not on a first level of distinctions, by their sexual orientation. In the Polynesian region, this includes those declared boys at birth but who actually identify as girls at a certain age, and (but this is generally forgotten) those who are declared girls at birth but who actually identify as boys at a certain age. The common discourse then qualifies them respectively as 'like girls' (in Samoan: faa-fafine) and 'like boys' (in Samoan faa-tama or more recently faa-fa-tama). The question of 'freedom' is threefold. 1) What are the obstacles to this so-called 'trans-gender' claim? 2) Why does the transition for girl-born meet with so many more obstacles in comparison to boy-born? Paradoxically, we find a new gender inequality within gender minorities. 3) How can we understand that even in the discourse of transgender individuals, the demand for freedom to belong to a gender minority is accompanied by a refusal to claim the freedom to belong to a sexual minority (for example, the right to homosexuality, or the right to same-sex marriage)? | en |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10092/107900 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://doi.org/10.26021/15612 | |
| dc.publisher | Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies | en |
| dc.rights | CC BY 4.0 | en |
| dc.rights.uri | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | |
| dc.title | Gender Minorities and Unequal Freedoms in Polynesia | en |
| dc.type | Journal Article |
Files
Original bundle
1 - 1 of 1
Loading...
- Name:
- 05. Serge PD Vol. 8 Special Issue 2024.pdf
- Size:
- 294.02 KB
- Format:
- Adobe Portable Document Format