Women from the Pacific Islands are often perceived by Europeans as passive beauties dancing the hula with a flower in their hair, as docile companions of European or local men or as naïve personalities surrounded by an endangered environment. The mass media report often show the idealised picture created by Europeans as lovely “inventory” in stereotypical illustrations and the Pacific women are rarely shown as being self-confident agents. Women’s world in which they live, their daily struggles, problems and their defeats and successes remain hidden through the ostensible clichés portrayed in mass media. Many social and cultural anthropology of the Pacific have also reported on a model where gender was always explained by dividing the society in binary categories as those between nature/cultural and domestic/public. Women were said to belong to the domestic/natural sphere were production was directed towards consumption and reproduction while men performed their work in the public/cultural sphere. European missionaries in the Pacific often had the preconceived idea that local women were not free agents but chattels of the men’s sexual urges, interests and strategies and they tried to bring about a form of women’s liberation through conversion to Christianity. But far from that male Western conception of women’s status, which can be found in documentaries, motion pictures as well as travel and adventure literature, women are active and resolute agents who self-confidently shape their societies through their courageous and determined acting in public as well as in their communities. This panel on gender is aimed to provide insights into the lives of women from the Pacific Islands and show how they deal with shifting gender relations in changing Pacific societies. It is hoped that contemporary gender relations and changing gender roles in the Pacific will be studied as a backdrop to changes brought to societies in the Pacific through the processes of European colonisation, globalisation as well as economic and social influences of present day. At the same time, this panel aims to explain and understand gender inequities in the Pacific through reference to the concept of societies in transition. The papers in the session will discuss emerging masculinities and femininities in the Pacific in order to chart the development of these in their contexts. To do this, it is necessary to consider how contemporary Pacific identities are shaped not only by local contexts or tradition but are being remade in interaction with flows of global ideas, images and practices, including new forms of Christianity and structural economic transformations.
Paper submissions are closed