This intensive course explores the encounters between Oceanic and Western models, values, and embodied experiences of gender and sexuality. The course examines the debates about universalism and relativism, nature and culture, and personhood and identity, in understanding the differences between women, men, and transgendered persons. The course takes a historical and contextual approach to examine the transformations of patterns of gender and sexuality in the Pacific through the successive encounters of exploratory voyages, Christian missions, labour trade and plantation development, World War II and militarism, and mobility and the diaspora. Key thematic areas will include contemporary debates about women’s influence and participation in church and state; gendered economies, kinship and land; transnational and regional feminisms and human rights; gender violence; gender, sexuality, health and HIV; and gender and sexual identities. The course will integrate readings and performances of literature, drama, and visual media by both Oceanic and foreign authors and artists. Indigenous Pacific Islander approaches to engaging and learning about Oceania are highlighted. The course draws upon the extensive academic expertise at ANU in gender and Pacific studies and is especially suitable for students of anthropology, history, politics, gender, sexuality and culture, Pacific studies, and development studies in both CAP and CASS. It will focus on Fiji, PNG, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu but bring in comparisons across Oceania.
Learning Outcomes
Upon successful completion, students will have the knowledge and skills to:
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:1. Speak and write critically about theories, contexts, and research approaches relevant to Pacific Studies
2. Understand and use key concepts from transnational gender studies and demonstrate how these concepts engage or not with the Pacific in a critical and original way
3. Identify relevant ethnographic, historical, and theoretical literature for understanding models, values, and embodied experiences of gender and sexuality in the Pacific
4. Demonstrate advanced analytical understanding of the diversity of perspectives - indigenous, popular, policy ,and scholarly - in debates in Oceania on gender and sexuality and ability to apply to contemporary issues
5. Create coherent and original arguments through scholarly and/or creative forms
Other Information
This is a co-taught course. Any cap on enrolments in one
course applies to both courses combined.
Indicative Assessment
Participation: 10% (Learning Outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)Reflective essay (Masters 2500 words; 20% (Learning Outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
Research paper (Masters 5000 words; ): 70% (Learning Outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
In response to COVID-19: Please note that Semester 2 Class Summary information (available under the classes tab) is as up to date as possible. Changes to Class Summaries not captured by this publication will be available to enrolled students via Wattle.
The ANU uses Turnitin to enhance student citation and referencing techniques, and to assess assignment submissions as a component of the University's approach to managing Academic Integrity. While the use of Turnitin is not mandatory, the ANU highly recommends Turnitin is used by both teaching staff and students. For additional information regarding Turnitin please visit the ANU Online website.
Workload
Total workload for the course is 130 hours. This include in class time and independent study.Requisite and Incompatibility
Prescribed Texts
Readings are selected to cover the range of perspectives of course issues and themes. All assigned materials will be uploaded to the Wattle website.Katherine Lepani 2012 Islands of Love Islands of Risk, Culture and HIV in the Trobriands. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press; Margaret Jolly and Christine Stewart (with Carolyn Brewer 2012 Engendering Violence in Papua New Guinea. Canberra: ANU E-Press; Holly Wardlow 2006, Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society Berkeley University of California Press. Nicole George 2012 Situating Women: Gender Politics and Circumstance in Fiji Canberra: ANU E-Press.
Preliminary Reading
Altman, Dennis 2001. Global Sex. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Besnier, Niko 1994. Polynesian gender liminality in time and space. In Gilbert Herdt (ed.) Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. New York: Zone Books, 285-328.
—— 1997. Sluts and superwomen: The politics of gender liminality in urban Tonga. Ethnos 62(1-2):5-31.
—— 2002. Transgenderism, locality, and the Miss Galaxy beauty pageant in Tonga. American Ethnologist 29(4): 534-566.
Butler, Judith 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
—— 1995. Bodies that Matter. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Butt, Leslie and Richard Eves (eds), Making Sense of AIDS: Culture, Sexuality and Power in Melanesia, University of Hawai'i Press, 2008.
Choi, Hyaeweol and Margaret Jolly (eds) 2014. Divine Domesticities: Paradoxes of Christian Modernities in Asia and the Pacific Canberra: ANU-E Press, forthcoming July.
Clark, Jeffrey 1997. State of desire: Transformations in Huli sexuality. In L. Manderson and M. Jolly (eds) Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 191-211.
Connell, R. W. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Dvorak, Greg 'The Martial Islands': Making Marshallese Masculinities Between American and Japanese Militarism, in M. Jolly (ed), 'Re-membering Oceanic Masculinities', special issue, The Contemporary Pacific 20(1): 55-86, 2008.
Foucault, Michel 1976. The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Random House.
Gailey, Christine Ward 1987. Kinship to Kingship: Gender, Hierarchy and State Formation in the Tongan Islands: Austin, Texas: University
Grassroots Women’s NGOS of the Pacific,1995. Beneath Paradise: See Us, Hear Us Beijing ’95. Melbourne: NGO forum on Women, International Women’s Development Agency.
Godelier, Maurice 1986. The Making of Great Men: Male Domination and Power among the New Guinea Baruya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.
Herdt, Gilbert 1981. Guardians of the Flutes: Idioms of Masculinity. New York: McGraw Hill.
—— 1987. Sambia: Ritual and Gender in New Guinea. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Hereniko, Vilsoni and Teresia Teaiwa Last Virgin In Paradise.
Jolly, Margaret 1991. “To save the girls for brighter and better lives”: Presbyterian missions and women in the south of Vanuatu: 1848-1870. The Journal of Pacific History 26(1):27-48.
—— 1992. Partible persons and multiple authors (contribution to Book Review Forum on Marilyn Strathern’s The Gender of the Gift). Pacific Studies 15(1):137-149.
—— 1994. Women of the Place: Kastom, Colonialism and Gender in Vanuatu. Chur and Reading: Harwood Publishers.
—— 1996. Desire, difference and disease: Sexual and venereal exchanges on Cook’s Voyages in the Pacific. In R. Gibson (ed.) Exchanges: Cross-cultural Encounters in Australia and the Pacific. Sydney: Museum of Sydney/Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 187-217.
—— 1997. From Point Venus to Bali Ha‘i: Eroticism and exoticism in representations of the Pacific. In L. Manderson and M. Jolly (eds) Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 99-122 (incl. notes: 303-306).
—— Beyond the Horizon? Nationalisms, Feminisms, and Globalization in the Pacific. In M. Kaplan (ed.) Outside Gods: History Making in the Pacific. Ethnohistory (Special Issue) 52(1):137-66.
—— (ed) 2008. Re-membering Oceanic Masculinities. The Contemporary Pacific 20(1).
—— 2009. Looking Back? Gender, Race and Sexuality in Jane Campion’s The Piano. Australian Feminist Studies. Vol 24 (59): :99-121
—— 2009. Revisioning Gender and Sexuality on Cook’s Voyages in the Pacific. In Robert Fleck and Adrienne L. Kaeppler (eds) James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific, Bonn: Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutchsland, English version, Thames and Hudson, 98-102.
Jolly, Margaret (ed) 2008. Re-membering Oceanic Masculinities. The Contemporary Pacific 20(1).
Jolly, Margaret and Kalpana Ram (eds) 2001. Borders of Being: Citizenship, Fertility, and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
Jolly, Margaret, Serge Tcherkézoff and Darrell Tryon (eds) 2009. Oceanic Encounters: Exchange,Desire Violence. ANU E-Press.
Jolly, Margaret and Martha Macintyre (eds) 2010 [1989] Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Paperback and digital reprint.
Jordanova, Ludmilla 1989. Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Knauft, Bruce 1997. Gender identity, political economy and modernity in Melanesia and Amazonia. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3(2):233-259.
Laqueur, Thomas 1990. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lepani, Katherine 2007. Sovasova and the problem of sameness: Converging interpretive frameworks for making sense of HIV and AIDS in the Trobriand Islands. Special Issue on HIV/AIDS in Rural Papua New Guinea. Oceania, 77(1):12-28.
Lepani, Katherine 2008. Fitting Condoms on Culture: rethinking approaches to HIV prevention in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea. In Richard M Eves and Leslie Butt (eds), Making Sense of AIDS: Culture, Sexuality, and Power in Melanesia, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 246–66.
Lepani, Katherine 2008. Mobility, Violence and the Gendering of HIV in Papua New Guinea. In Jack Taylor (ed.) Changing Pacific Masculinities, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 19(2), 150–64, 2008.
Lepani, Katherine 2007. Sovasova and the problem of sameness: Converging interpretive frameworks for making sense of HIV and AIDS in the Trobriand Islands. Special Issue on HIV/AIDS in Rural Papua New Guinea. Oceania, 77(1):12-28, 2007.
Linnekin, Jocelyn 1990. Sacred Queens and Women of Consequence, Rank, Gender and Colonialism in the Hawaiian Islands. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Lockwood, Victoria 1993. Tahitian Transformation: Gender and Capitalist Development in a Rural Society. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Lukere, Vicki and Margaret Jolly (eds) 2001. Birthing in the Pacific: Beyond Tradition and Modernity? University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu..
MacKenzie, Maureen 1991. Androgynous Objects. Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers.
Macintyre, Martha 2000. ‘Hear us, women of Papua New Guinea!’: Melanesian women and human rights. In Anne-Marie Hilsdon et al (eds) Human Rights and Gender Politics: Asia-Pacific Perspectives. Routledge: London and New York, 147-171.
Manderson, Lenore and Jolly, Margaret (eds) 1997. Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Mera Molisa, Grace 1983. Black Stone. Suva: Mana Publications.
Mera Molisa, Grace 1987. Colonised People. Port Vila: Black Stone Publications.
Mera Molisa, Grace 1990. Black Stone II. Port Vila: Black Stone Publications and
Vanuatu University of the South Pacific Centre.
Mera Molisa, Grace 1991a. Raet Blong Pipol: Wea Rod?. Port Vila: Black Stone
Publications.
Mera Molisa, Grace ed. 1992. Who Will Carry the Bag? Poetry Booklet from Woman I Bildimup Vanuatu festival 1990. Port Vila: VNKW (Vanuatu National Council of Women).Mera Molisa, Grace 1983.
O’Brien, Patti 2006. The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Ram, Kalpana and Margaret Jolly (eds) 2010 [1998]. Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and Postcolonial Experiences in Asia and the Pacific, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Paperback and digital reprint.
Sexton, Lorraine 1986. Mothers of Money, Daughters of Coffee: The Wok Meri Movement. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Press.
Smith, Bernard 1985[1960]. European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850. Second Edition. Sydney: Harper and Row.
—— 1992. Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, Miegunyah Press.
Steel, Frances Women, Men and the Southern Octopus: Shipboard gender relations in the age of steam, International Journal of Maritime History XX(2): 285–306, 2008.
Stewart, Christine Men Behaving Badly: Sodomy cases in the colonial courts of Papua New Guinea, Journal of Pacific History 43(1), 77–93, 2008.
Strathern, Marilyn 1981. Culture in a netbag: The manufacture of a subdiscipline in anthropology. Man (n.s.) 16(4):665-688.
—— 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Studies in Melanesian Anthropology, No. 6. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Taimara, Marata A. 2010. From Full Dusk to Full Tusk: Reimagining the “Dusky Maiden” through the Visual Arts. The Contemporary Pacific 22(1): 1-35.
Tauoma, Lisa. 2004 “Gauguin is Dead….There is no Paradise”. Journal of Intercultural Studies 25(1): 35-46.
Taylor, John P. (ed) 2008. Changing Pacific Masculinities. The Australian Journal of Anthropology
Taylor, John P (ed.) 2008. Changing Pacific Masculinities: The "problem" of men' Special Issue, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 19(2).
Taylor, John P 2008. Changing Pacific Masculinities: The "problem" of men (Introduction), The Australian Journal of Anthropology 19(2): 125–35.Taylor, John P 2008. The Social Life of Rights: "gender antagonism", modernity and raet in Vanuatu, Australian Journal of Anthropology 19(2): 165–78, 2008.
Tcherkézoff, Serge 2003. ‘First Contacts in Polynesia: the Samoan case ((1722-1848) and comparisons, the western myths of sexual hospitality and European divinity. Christchurch: Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies
Tcherkézoff, Serge 2009. A Reconsideration of the Role of Polynesian Women in Early Encounters with Europeans: Supplement to Marshall Sahlins’ Voyage around the Islands of History. In Margaret Jolly, Serge Tcherkézoff and D. Tryon (eds), Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence, ANU E Press, Canberra, 2009, 57-111. Also available online at http://epress.anu.edu.au/oceanic_encounters_citation.html
Tcherkézoff, Serge 2003. ‘First Contacts in Polynesia: the Samoan case ((1722-1848) and comparisons, the western myths of sexual hospitality and European divinity. Christchurch: Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies.
Teaiwa, Teresia 1994. Bikinis and Other s/pacific n/oceans. The Contemporary Pacific 6 (1): 87–109.
—— 2005. Articulated Cultures: Militarism and Masculinities in Fiji during the mid-1990s. Fijian Studies: A Journal of Contemporary Fiji. 3(2):201-222.
Tengan, Ty Kavika 2008. Native Men Remade:
Trask, Haunani-Kay, 1986. Eros and Power. The Promise of Feminist Theory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvannia Press. Corvallis, Oregon: Calyx Books.
Trask, Haunani-Kay 1993. From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignity in Hawai’i. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press. Pp. 31-51, 87-125, 263-277.
Trask, Haunani-Kay 1994. Light from a Crevice Never Seen. Corvallis, Oregon: Calyx Books.
Trask, Haunani-Kay 1996. Feminism and Indigenous Hawaiian Nationalism. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 21(4):906-916.
Trask, Haunani-Kay 1999a. Writing in Captivity: Poetry in a time of Decolonization. In Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (eds) Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 17-26.
Trask, Haunani-Kay 1999b. Decolonizing Hawaiian Literature. In Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (eds) Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 176-182.
Tusitala Marsh, Selina 1998. Feminism: migrant overstayer or model citizen? In Kalpana Ram and J. Kehaulani Kauanui (eds) Migrating Feminisms: the Asia-Pacific Region. Womens Studies International Forum.
Tusitala Marsh, Selina 1999. Theory “versus” Pacific Islands Writing: Toward a Tama’ita’i Criticism in the Works of Three Pacific Islands Woman Poets. In Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (eds) Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 337-357.
Tuzin, Donald 1997. The Cassowary’s Revenge: The Life and Death of Masculinity in a New Guinea Society. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Wallace, Lee 1999. Fa’afine: Queens of Samoa and the elision of homosexuality. In GLQ 5(1):15-39.
—— 2003. Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Weiner, Annette 1976. Women of Value, Men of Renown: New Perspectives in Trobriand Exchange. Austin: University of Texas Press.
—— 1980. Stability in banana leaves: Colonization and women in Kiriwina, Trobriand Islands. In M. Etienne and E. Leacock (eds) Women and Colonization. New York: Praeger, 270-293.
—— 1987. Why cloth? Wealth, gender and power in Oceania. In Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider (eds) Cloth and Human Experience. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 33-72.
Fees
Tuition fees are for the academic year indicated at the top of the page.
If you are a domestic graduate coursework or international student you will be required to pay tuition fees. Tuition fees are indexed annually. Further information for domestic and international students about tuition and other fees can be found at Fees.
- Student Contribution Band:
- 1
- Unit value:
- 6 units
If you are an undergraduate student and have been offered a Commonwealth supported place, your fees are set by the Australian Government for each course. At ANU 1 EFTSL is 48 units (normally 8 x 6-unit courses). You can find your student contribution amount for each course at Fees. Where there is a unit range displayed for this course, not all unit options below may be available.
| Units | EFTSL |
|---|---|
| 6.00 | 0.12500 |
Course fees
- Domestic fee paying students
| Year | Fee |
|---|---|
| 2020 | $3570 |
- International fee paying students
| Year | Fee |
|---|---|
| 2020 | $5460 |
Offerings, Dates and Class Summary Links
ANU utilises MyTimetable to enable students to view the timetable for their enrolled courses, browse, then self-allocate to small teaching activities / tutorials so they can better plan their time. Find out more on the Timetable webpage.
Class summaries, if available, can be accessed by clicking on the View link for the relevant class number.
Winter Session
| Class number | Class start date | Last day to enrol | Census date | Class end date | Mode Of Delivery | Class Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6627 | 06 Jul 2020 | 06 Jul 2020 | 17 Jul 2020 | 31 Aug 2020 | Online | N/A |
