Queering Oceania

Queering Oceania: reflections on gender and sexuality

One of the topics that we spent quite a while discussing in my Pacific Rim class was gender and sexuality. I found these lectures interesting for a number of reasons. One of these is that I am appreciating the way it opens up the idea that both of these things are social constructs that thoroughly depend on time and place for them to have meaning. Sometimes, these meanings that belong to one culture or generation are imposed upon others, which can have negative effects. However, I don’t think that it is necessarily wrong to have certain ideas and preconceptions about gender or sexuality, but it is important to understand that they are merely ideas and preconceptions, and can be discussed and debated – not ‘facts’ in and of themselves. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a very liberal household, in London, one of the most multicultural cities on the planet. I thought before this class that I had a very open mind towards sexuality and gender, and while this is true, there are some things that I sort of accepted as being that way without considering that they were actually just norms that I picked up from my environment and cultural surroundings.

The Dvorak essay ‘Gender on the Edge’ (University of Hawaii Press: 2014) was particularly interesting I found, because I hadn’t really ever considered that there could be such an incredible variety of gender and sexual orientation, if it can even be defined in that way. As this is totally new for me, it was a conscious effort to make sense of the essay, not in terms of the language but trying to imagine what life might be like in the Marshall Islands without a strict binary of ‘man v woman’.  The culture I grew up with in the UK is seemingly quite a binary one, in that ‘men’ and ‘women’ are supposed to act and behave in a certain way and there are huge amounts of gender-related intricacies which we enact perhaps without even thinking about it. For example, just the way we stand, sit and carry ourselves is very much affected by our gender and it is immediately obvious if someone behaves slightly differently to the way we consider ‘normal’. I would like to think that it doesn’t matter at all but I cannot be sure that people are not discriminated against or not treated differently for acting a certain way. The concept of ‘jera’ was interesting for me, not because of the idea of close relations between men, but because of the fact that you there are these relationships with specific attributes which have their own category. However, I do think that while the specific attributes and the way the relationships are perceived may differ from culture to culture, I think that strong bonds between humans, regardless of their gender or sexuality exist in all generations and cultures, which can only be a positive thing. We need to be more aware that this is the case and obviously accept and understand other cultures.

It seems to me that the reason we have so many norms that steer our lives is because it is through norms that power is created. Colonialism reinforced this notion because it was through ‘othering’ that they could take over lands and people without it seeming like a bad thing to the public in colonial countries, and religion also creates norms in this way. Challenging and contradicting, as well as merely acknowledging the fact that the way we view sexuality and gender is a ‘norm’ is something I got out of our discussions over the past two weeks and the essay from Gender on the Edge. I think it would be naïve to think we can live in a world similar to today without norms of some kind, but if everyone could see that they are just ‘norms’ that we have created then I think the world could be a better place, with it being easier to understand and accept other cultures.

Judith Butler is someone whose work I have studied in the past, and am intrigued by what she says in terms of how our understandings of biology and nature are saturated by our cultural context which happens to divide gender into two strict categories. This led me to recall an article I had read about parents who had decided to raise their child without a specific gender, and it made me wonder whether this was enlightening and the way forward or a sort of experiment. At the time, I remember reading it and thinking ‘poor kid’, because I think there are enough struggles and difficulties with trying to fit in as a child without your parents adding an extra thing which makes you an outsider of the social norm. However, now that I think about it, as long as the parents were able to explain themselves to the child and support it through potentially difficult times, I think this is no different to my own parents who are from different countries raising me in a third country, causing us to be outsiders in a sense wherever we go. They managed to make me feel proud of being able to understand and call ‘home’ many different places and cultures, and so I think it is possible to do so with gender and deconstruct the boundary between male and female, starting with the way you raise a child.