Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders

Transgender identities and other forms of gender and sexuality that transcend the normative pose important questions about society, culture, politics, and history. They force us to question, for example, the forces that divide humanity into two gender categories and render them necessary, inevitable, and natural. The transgender also exposes a host of dynamics that, at first glance, have little to do with gender or sex, such as processes of power and domination; the complex relationship among agency, subjectivity, and structure; and the mutual constitution of the global and the local.

Particularly intriguing is the fact that gender and sexual diversity appear to be more prevalent in some regions of the world than in others. Gender on the Edge is an exploration of the ways in which non-normative gendering and sexuality in one such region, the Pacific Islands, are implicated in a wide range of socio-cultural dynamics that are at once local and global, historical, and contemporary. The authors recognize that different social configurations, cultural contexts, and historical trajectories generate diverse ways of being transgender across the societies of the region, but they also acknowledge that these differences are overlaid with commonalities and predictabilities.

Edited by Niko Besnier and Kalissa Alexeyeff

2014 | 408 pages | 20 illustrations | 2 maps
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3882-9 | $65.00s | Cloth
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3883-6 | $35.00s | Paper

Not for sale in East and Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand