‘Let fa’afafine shine like diamonds’: Balancing accommodation, negotiation and resistance in gender-nonconforming Samoans’ counter-hegemony

Abstract

In the Pacific Island country of Samoa, a gender-nonconforming community known as fa’afafine is said to constitute part of customary tradition and therefore enjoy cultural legitimacy. Yet fa’afafine are also confronted with a binary gender discourse that daily marginalises them within families/communities. This article explores fa’afafine’s gendered positioning in contemporary Samoa and the ways in which they have negotiated it to carve out space for oppositional agency, focusing on the strategies employed by the Samoa Fa’afafine Association. Based on semi-structured interviews with fa’afafine and other gender-nonconforming Samoans, and guided by Pacific methodology of Talanoa, the article examines fa’afafine’s collective pursuits as a case of counter-hegemonic struggle through a Gramscian theoretical lens. If their acts of resistance are covert and incremental, they are effective in aligning Samoa’s powerful cultural institutions with an alternative gender discourse to cultivate social change. The article closes with reflections on possible challenges to this counter-hegemony.

Honoring Inágofli’e’ and Alofa: Developing a Culturally Grounded Health Promotion Model for Queer and Transgender Pacific Islanders

“…Although oral, historical, and genealogical records of QTPI exist, many QTPI are heavily scrutinized by their own community members that interrogate the validity of their Indigeneity (Osorio 2020;Teves 2018;Camacho 2015). This scrutiny is rooted in the settler colonial imposition of Western values, morality, familial structures, intimacy, and gender roles into the cultural practices and values of Indigenous communities (Camacho 2015;Kanemasu and Liki 2021;Osorio 2021b;Teves 2014;Williams 2019).…”

How Do Students Critically Evaluate Outdated Language That Relates to Gender in Biology?

“…However, additional gender designations exist in human societies, both currently and in the past ( Herdt, 1994 ). Identities that exist outside of the sex and gender binaries have existed throughout history both in the western world ( DeVun, 2021 ) and worldwide, including a large variance of identities found in the indigenous tribes of the Americas ( Robinson, 2020 ), the Samoan fa’afafine ( Kanemasu and Liki, 2021 ), south Asian hijra ( Singh and Kumar, 2020 ), and many others. Thus, while physical presentation determined by sex plays a role in the gender that someone may be perceived as, gender exists well beyond the bounds of biology, and needs sociological understandings to appreciate ( Risman et al.…”