Migrating Genders

Westernisation, Migration, and Samoan Fa'afafine

Johanna Schmidt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317096511
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Migrating Genders presents a sustained description of male-to-female transgendered identities, explaining how the fa'afafine fit within the wider gender system of Samoa, and examining both the impact of Westernization on fa'afafine identities and lives, and the experiences of fa'afafine who have migrated to New Zealand. Informed by theories of sex, gender and embodiment, this book explores the manner in which the expression and understanding of non-normative gendered identities in Samoa problematizes dominant western understandings of the relationship between sex and gender. Drawing on rich empirical material, this book tells of both the diversity and the uniqueness of fa'afafine identities, aspects which fa'afafine have maintained in the face of Westernization, migration, and cultural marginalization in both Samoa and New Zealand. As such, in addition to anthropologists, it will be of interest to geographers, sociologists, and other readers with interests in gender and sexuality.

Chapter 1
Introduction

… we can do it very analytically and say that, you know, you’ve got so much of X chromosomes and so much of Y chromosomes, but to me that’s a lot of hogwash. What you need to do is ask them basically, who they feel they personally are, and most of them will say female, aha? Well that’s because that’s the influence, the greater influence upon them and there’s always the notion that, that they were born that way.¹

… because some people, they, I think they don’t really understand the kind of people that we are. Only our family, that, they know us. But some of the people, they just don’t really understand us. They think, some of them, they think that we are sick people or something like that, you know, it’s a disease, but I can tell, my view, you know, I don’t have a disease in me or anything like that. I was born like this. Right from when I was young, I was like this. When I grow up I, I just … my brain, I think my brain works as a woman’s brain, you know, not a man’s.

… if you can look at fa’afafine and their own role in their families, and then from there, you could say that’s the culture. That’s how I understand it, especially with my own upbringing.

… the myth [is] that […] fa’afafine is only the drag queens and the dancing girls and that, you know, and the ones that stands on the street, but I mean, for me, I’ve always been a fa’afafine all my life, you know, and I’ve been dressed up, but I’ve never been in drag, you know …

Well, the fa’afafines in Samoa, you know, they are not all deviant, nor are they pushed aside as they would have been in the outside world. […] They have their role carved out for them in the Samoan culture and family and they are aware about that role and so they commit themselves to it. […] They’re just human beings, accepted for what they are …

Well, I think they’re all different, wherever they are, whatever country, each fa’afafine is an individual that will have their own definition of what ‘fa’afafine’ means to them.

Well, they’re not … I guess the name is just a label really, but … they’re just people as anybody else.

The Samoan word ‘fa’afafine’ literally translates as ‘in the manner of’ or ‘like’ – ‘fa’a’ – a woman or women – ‘fafine’. Fa’afafine are biological Samoan ‘males’ whose gendered behaviours are feminine. Although this can be understood as a ‘traditional’ identity, the ways in which fa’fafine express their femininity varies in both aspect and degree, and has shifted across time and space. Fa’afafine (and other transgendered populations) are both exceptional, in that they challenge normative western understandings about relationships between sex and gender, and at the same time ordinary and unremarkable, in that they do this through the same processes everyone uses in constructing and performing gender. In this book, I illustrate the ways in which fa’afafine embody and perform gender, utilise various strategies to realise their desires and responsibilities, and experience themselves as agents enmeshed in social situations which both enable and constrain their decisions, actions and subjectivities. As I will demonstrate, these are processes that have been rendered all the more visible by the need to adapt to the changing social and cultural contexts that have resulted from globalisation and migration. This book is thus, as one level, a record of the narratives of various fa’afafine at a particular historical moment, but is also, at another level, a story of the processes by which all subjectivities are constructed, maintained and changed, while being simultaneously constrained and enabled by specific discursive contexts.

Many of the ethnographic texts about non–western transgenderism start with narratives designed to present the apparent ‘strangeness’ of those with whom the author has worked. Don Kulick opens his book with a description of watching one of the Brazilian travesti prostitutes with whom he lived styling her hair and putting on make–up in preparation for her night’s work (1998: 1-5). Mark Johnson’s study of Filipino transgenderism is introduced with a detailed description of the ‘Super Gay Model (of the World)’ competition (1997: 1-11). Annick Prieur’s ethnography of a ‘group of Mexican transvestites, queens and machos’ begins with a narrative of her first night ‘in the field’, where she is not sure if the people she meets are women, men, or transsexual (1998: ix-xiii).

While these introductory narratives draw the reader into the world to be discussed, and create the aura of unfamiliarity that is so integral to ethnographic work, in my own work I attempt to avoid this trope of ‘strangeness’. One of the tensions that runs through this book stems from my attempts to explain how a population that seems so ‘other’ to western understandings is indeed unique to the Samoan cultural context, and yet simultaneously brings into relief the processes by which all gender is achieved and ascribed (Namaste 2000: 32, Phibbs 2001: 123, Shapiro 1991: 252-53). However, like many transgendered populations (and, in fact, virtually all people, whether transgendered or not), most fa’afafine experience their particular gendered identities as beyond their control (Phibbs 2001: 155), and simply wish to ‘get on with their lives’ without being constantly aware of their anomalously embodied genders (Gagné et al. 1997: 502). Thus, I chose not to open this book with a vignette that suggests how ‘incomprehensible’ fa’afafine may first appear to an outsider. Rather, I have attempted to convey, in the words of fa’afafine themselves, their desire to be seen as they understand themselves, and I have sought to realise this desire throughout this book. This has necessitated avoiding the suggestion that fa’afafine are a rhetorical device, or the instantiation of any ‘theoretical moments’ (Namaste 2000: 14-15). As Jay Prosser (1998: 49) observes in a critique of Judith Butler’s analysis of the transsexual Venus Xtravaganza (1993b: 121-40), a participant in the documentary Paris is Burning, many of the very moments of transgendered individuals’ lives which ‘say’ the most about gender are also those moments which have caused them the most pain. Prosser’s critique of Butler’s text is a timely caution that those writing in this area must be ever mindful that the lives and experiences that so readily become ‘theoretical moments’ for the researcher also belong to real people.

Yet I also draw on Butler’s observation that ‘it is the exception, the strange, that gives us the clue to how the mundane and taken–for–granted world of sexual meanings is constituted’ (1990a: 110). Rosalind Morris similarly notes that it is seemingly ambiguous genders that more readily reveal the constructed ‘nature’ of the body and the performative constitution of gender itself (1995: 570). That which is marginal exposes the ‘limits and regulatory aims’ of dominant hegemonic discourses (Butler 1990a: 17). Fa’afafine who migrate to western contexts (such as Aotearoa/New Zealand) and continue to identify as fa’afafine implicitly disrupt hegemonic western frameworks of sex/gender, choosing to adopt and adapt aspects of western cultures in their enactments of femininity, while simultaneously demanding to be understood as fa’afafine (rather than ‘men’ or ‘women’). Both the existence of the ‘traditional’ fa’afafine identity, and the manner in which fa’afafine utilise western signifiers of gender, open up the potential for questioning what it means to be ‘male’ or ‘female’, ‘man’ or ‘woman’, masculine or feminine.

Dennis Altman suggests that in contemporary non–western ‘gay’ subcultures there are two perspectives – rupture or continuity. He writes that:

for some there is a strong desire to trace a continuity between pre–colonial forms of homosexual desire and its contemporary emergence, even when the latter might draw on the language of (West) Hollywood rather than indigenous culture. […] For others, there is a perception that contemporary middle–class self–proclaimed gay men and lesbians in, say, New Delhi, Lima or Jakarta have less in common with ‘traditional’ homosexuality than they do with their counterparts in western countries (2001: 88).

While, as I will explain, the use of the term ‘homosexual’ is not (entirely) appropriate in relation to Samoan fa’afafine, Altman’s distinction between rupture and continuity in relation to non–normative, non–western genders and sexualities initially appears relevant in thinking about contemporary fa’afafine. However, rather than occupy one position or the other, I suggest that fa’afafine in both Samoa and Aotearoa/New Zealand tread a path between rupture and continuity, maintaining and enacting identities that incorporate aspects of non– Samoan cultures and discourses, while remaining distinctly Samoan. The lives of contemporary fa’afafine may thus be better understood with reference to Margaret Jolly’s suggestion that Pacific peoples are ‘accepting of both indigenous and exogenous elements as constituting their culture’ (1992: 53), rather than the ‘traditional/modern’ binary suggested by Altman’s rupture/continuity model.

Although I have attempted to avoid using fa’afafine as instantiations of theoretical paradigms, it cannot be denied that the manner in which fa’afafine identities in Samoa have been inflected by non–Samoan (and predominantly western) discursive frameworks and material culture suggests that these identities, and thus all identities, are mutable processes, rather than static entities. For the participants in this research who migrated to Aotearoa/New Zealand, their decisions regarding which aspects of their subjectivities would be enacted at any one time illustrates how identities are continually negotiated, and that different priorities and goals will impact on how gender is performed in any situation. That these individuals continued to identify as fa’afafine, and in most instances understood that this was not the same as identifying as women, as transsexuals, or as gay men, demonstrates how entrenched gender can be. Yet there were aspects of their enactment of ‘fa’afafine–ness’ that many participants experienced as available for change, in terms of embodiment, sexual orientation and gender identities. As I will suggest, this exemplifies how the genders that are learnt through socialisation are not ‘rules’ which must be (or even can be) rigidly adhered to (Nayak and Kehily 2006: 469), but are rather ‘schedules’ which guide action (Brickell 2005).

Models of Transgenderism

While fa’afafine are uniquely Samoan, discourses of western transgenderism are those which are most commonly mobilised (including by fa’afafine themselves) when discussing fa’afafine identities and experiences. In order to contextualise the following chapters, here I briefly summarise some of its key points of the rapidly expanding field of transgender research and theory.

From ‘Hermaphroditic Souls’ to ‘Gender Radicals’

Western comprehensions of those who experience their gender as other than that indicated by their biological ‘sex’ are regularly conflated with issues of sexual orientation, behaviour and desire. The interrelation between gender and sexuality dates back to the initial discursive construction of ‘the homosexual’ as a distinct category of person, when what had previously been considered discrete (albeit immoral) acts such as sodomy were taken to indicate ‘a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul’ (Foucault 1981: 43). Stefan Hirschauer traces how the surgical procedures undertaken on transsexual patients were initially developed in the 19th century, when ‘misdirected’ sexual preferences were attributed to the ‘gender deviant’ having the wrong body (1998: 14):

At the end of the 19th century this wrongness received a theoretical meaning when a biological etiology and symptomatology for so–called ‘homosexuals’ was developed. Finally, since the 1920s the wrongness took on a pragmatic meaning with the development of genital surgery. Now the body can be experienced as ‘wrong’ because it can be corrected (Hirschauer 1997).

In the 1950s, sexologists developed the concept of the transsexual – the person who was biologically one sex, but felt themselves to be the ‘opposite’ gender. In the process of diagnosing transsexuals, and in the related area of medically ‘correcting’ the intersexed, the concept of ‘gender identity’ was developed as a means of differentiating between a patient’s sense of themselves as a man or a woman, and their physiological maleness or femaleness (Bullough 2000, Germon 1998: 4, Hausman 1995: 108). After unsuccessful attempts to alleviate the ‘discomfort’ of transsexuals with psychotherapy (Bockting 1997: 49), it was (and still is) held that, once developed, gender identity is virtually unchangeable (Kessler 1990). In the words of sexologist Harry Benjamin, ‘[s]ince it is evident […] that the mind of a transsexual cannot be adjusted to the body, it is logical and justifiable to attempt the opposite, to adjust the body to the mind’ (cited in Hausman 1995: 125). Medical technologies that were developed to ‘correct’ the ambiguous genital configuration of intersexed individuals, and to ‘enhance’ the femininity of women, were utilised to change the ‘sex’ of transsexuals.² Initially, eligibility for medical intervention required that the candidate meet strict criteria. For male–to–female transsexuals, these included a high degree of femininity and the desire for sexual relations with men. More recently, the (hetero)sexist assumptions underlying these criteria have been challenged, and a male who presented requesting or requiring access to feminising medical technologies without being completely or ideally ‘feminine’ would not (necessarily) be disqualified from receiving access to these technologies (Bockting 1997: 51, Ekins and King 1999: 597, Green 2000).

The increasing fluidity of sexual and gendered identities in contemporary western contexts is marked by the emergence of new forms of incongruence between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, which are now discussed under the umbrella term of ‘transgender’. While this is a debated term, in much the same way as the terminology of ‘homosexual’, ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’ and ‘queer’ is contested (Epstein 1994), the concept of ‘transgender’ can be loosely understood to include anyone whose sense of themselves as gendered is at odds with what would be normatively expected from someone with their particularly ‘sexed’ body. While ‘transsexuals’ can be included under this term, many post–operative transsexuals themselves resist such categorisation, stating that they are now simply the sex that they always should have been (Elliot and Roen 1998: 238, Gagné et al. 1997: 502). However, others continue to call themselves ‘transsexual’, signalling the fact that they were not born with female bodies³ by referring to themselves as ‘constructed women’ or ‘transsexual women’.

While the inclusion of post–operative transsexuals under the term ‘transgender’ is thus somewhat problematic, others more readily fall into this category, individuals who might be thought of as ‘gender radicals’. Examples would include those who have altered their bodies so as to divest themselves of some of the signifiers of sex that they were born with, but have chosen not to adopt any or all of the signifiers of the ‘other’ sex. Other manifestations of transgenderism include those who would have been diagnosed intersexed at birth, and may or may not have had surgical intervention, but now allow their bodies to simultaneously hold signifiers of both ‘male’ and ‘female’ sexes. Some transgendered people shift between identification as masculine and feminine, and may or may not have bodies that physically signify this living ‘between’ or ‘across’ genders. While the individuals in western societies who could be defined as ‘transgender’ are an extremely small group, their very existence suggests that not only is the rigid binary of ‘male/man/masculine’ and ‘female/woman/feminine’ open to challenge, but that in the contemporary era, social spaces are beginning to exist in which this challenge can be made.

‘Other’ Enactments of Ambiguous Genders

The history of the categorisations and enactments of various sexualities and genders in the west is paralleled by western attempts to categorise the (apparently) alien genders and sexualities of many non–western societies according to western ‘scientific’ understandings. I trace the historical impact of dominant ideologies on interactions between western and non–western cultures in the Pacific in Chapter 2, and much of this book is an analysis of precisely such interactions in a specifically Pacific context. Here I briefly illustrate the diversity of populations who do not identify as ‘masculine men’ or ‘feminine women’ in various non–western cultural contexts.⁴

North American First Nation peoples evidenced a range of transgendered behaviours which varied considerably between tribes, and which have been generally subsumed under the term ‘berdache’ or, more recently, ‘two spirit’. Tribal differences have been almost totally lost as a result of near annihilation of First Nation cultures and the incursion of moral codes of Christianity. Many contemporary instantiations of berdache identities appear to have developed as a result of First Nation people who identified as gay understanding their ‘homosexuality’ as a continuation of indigenous practices (Brown 1997, Lang 1996, Whitehead 1981, Williams 1992/1986). In India, hijra exist as a culturally unique identity, although one that has shifted somewhat over the centuries, as all Indian genders have altered in response to social change. Ideally intersexed, most hijra are actually castrated, and occupy a social position that ambivalently encompasses religious roles and prostitution (Cohen 1995, Nanda 1990, 1995). In South–East Asia, a range of transgendered identities exist, many of which are now considerably inflected by western influence.⁵ Similarly, in South America, indigenous instantiations of transgenderism have been altered by the influx of external material cultures and conceptual discourses, although they remain specific to their own cultural context.⁶

While much of the literature in this area takes into account the impact of western influences, this is almost exclusively limited to the indigenous location. In spite of the fact that globalisation involves significant migratory flows, at the time of writing only Heather Worth (2000, 2001, 2002) has discussed transgendered migrants, focusing on Pacific transgendered sex workers in Auckland. However, as I will show, relocation to a new cultural field opens up a novel range of possibilities for Samoan–born fa’afafine, while simultaneously shutting down other potentialities, thus demonstrating the entirely situated nature of sex/gender. The lives of transgendered migrants are not, as some would suggest, ‘inauthentic’, but are rather marked by adaptability and resilience, by complexity – and by ordinariness.

Methodological Approaches

… I’m talking to you now, but there’s fa’afafine living out there in the villages who are just going through their daily chores and they don’t need to be interviewed by anyone to actually live their lives. [Fa’afafine participant in Samoa]

The Fieldwork

The fieldwork for this project started in mid–2000, with an initial three months spent in Samoa, during which I interv...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editors’ Preface Between Places and Genders
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 (Re)Defining Fa’afafine: The Discursive Construction of Samoan Trangenderism
• 3 Ideals of Gender: Men, Women and Fa’afafine in Fa’aSamoa
• 4 Paradise Lost? Social Change and Fa’afafine in Samoa
• 5 ‘You hardly see any grown men doing that sort of thing over here’: Fa’afafine Migrants’ Initial Experiences of Aotearoa/New Zealand
• 6 Reconciling Femininity with Pālagi Identities: Gay Fa’afafine Men and Passing Fa’afafine Women
• 7 Maintaining Ambiguity: (Re)Claiming Fa’afafine Identities in Aotearoa/New Zealand
• 8 Conclusion
• References
• Appendix I Glossary
• Index