Looking Good: The Cultural Politics of the Island Dress for Young Women in Vanuatu

Abstract

In this article, I explore the contingent and contested boundaries of looking good for young women in Vanuatu and the ways in which they negotiate these boundaries. I use women's dress as a lens through which to focus on the relationships among gender, modernity, race, and morality, and I show the ways in which all four are condensed and embodied in the moral and aesthetic imperative for women to look good. In particular, I focus on the island dress, a dress first introduced by missionaries but taken up after independence as an emblem of national pride and as the traditional dress for women. Although wearing the island dress is the commonsense way for women to look good, the young women with whom I conducted fieldwork in 2001-2002 and again in 2008 and 2011 experienced a great deal of ambivalence about the dress. They often preferred to wear trousers and T -shirts, which frequently won them the disapproval of their elders. By focusing on the polyvalent meanings of the island dress, the realities of young people's everyday lives in the capital, and the uneven terrain of the dress-scape of Vanuatu, I show that young women's love/hate relationship with island dress reflects their frustration with their ambiguous place in the contemporary national imaginary.

Divine Domesticities: Christian Paradoxes in Asia and the Pacific

“…Korean critics had expressed deep concerns about the missionaries' influence on Korean women because they were certain that these Korean women "would be unfitted to live in the homes from which they had come." 87 They suspected mission schools to be a training ground for Western-style knowledge and practices that would bear little relevance to the Korean reality. At that time, the majority of Koreans were poor peasants and led a lifestyle that was vastly different from that of missionaries and the tiny number of Korean elites.…”

“…86 Cathleen Kopkop, born in 1966, and trained and employed as a teacher explained, "When I was in Grade 10, the big thing I was thinking about and looking forward to was would I get a good result, so that I would be able to go on and find good work or not?… I really wanted that I would be one of these financially employed women." 87 Carmelita Toahei, born in 1965, similarly was concerned to find "good work." "My thoughts had been-I must get work, and get a salary.…”

“…86 Although Tambe's argument that brothels were experienced as families is convincing, she positions actual and fictive kinship as a duality, 87 adopting the approach of many anthropological studies that conceptualise non-biological kinship as fictive kinship. Based on my research into hijras and khwajasarais, I would posit constructed kinship as a more appropriate concept for kinship-making practices that encompassed formal adoption, de facto kinship and the symbolic or discursive deployment of kinship.…”

“…Cradle Rolls and infant welfare work were deemed "a real help in winning some of these who have been so slow to hear when preached to." 87 "Graduates" of the Cradle Roll would then move into the 83 Kim Hyegyŏng, Singminji ha kŭndae kajok ŭi hyŏngsŏng kwa chendŏ (The Formation of the Modern Family and Gender during the Colonial Period), Seoul: Ch'angbi Publications, 2006, p. 152. 84 "Kangkei Station Report, June 1930," PHS, RG 140-7-1.…”

“…87 Zhonghechang was advantageous because, unlike Renshou, it was proximate to Ginling's Chengdu campus, and like Renshou, it was the site of a Canadian mission station and it received some government and foreign funding. The stations were similar in terms of stated goals, including training women leaders for social service.…”