Urban spaces across Oceania are characterised by their relative newness. With few towns and cities more than a century old, and all artefacts of colonialism, they are places of rapid change and experimentation with new social and cultural arrangements. Among these areas of experimentation is how gender is being reimagined through its articulation with the obligations that can become intensified in urban life: work, education, church, sport, and other institutions. Also the infrastructures and technologies particular to city life have their own consequences for how people connect and disconnct, with certain consequences for their relationships – and therefore the gendering of those relationships. If Pacific peoples classically relate to each other by means of contingent rather than absolute categories, such as parent and child, husband and wife, brother and sister, and a whole panoply of cousins and affines, how are these categories becoming gendered in ways that are particular to the city? Crucially, is the ethnic, national, and religious mixing of different kinds of persons in Pacific cities causing gender categories to become backgrounded or flattened out, in favour of the more abstract ‘men and women’ of international gender discourses? We welcome papers that explore the gendering of the urban Pacific through ethnographic material on the ways in which gender plays out in the everyday life of the city. What are people claiming is new or invented, and what are they claiming is traditional? How is the category of ‘traditional gender norms’ even faring in the urban environment, particularly between different generations? And finally, how well do ‘urban genders’ travel or flow between the city and the rural parts of Pacific countries?
Paper submissions are closed