Oceanic Encounters: Colonial and Contemporary Transformations of Gender and Sexuality in the Pacific

From 2004-2008, several staff and students of the Gender Relations Centre and international collaborators are working on Oceanic Encounters: colonial and contemporary transformations of gender and sexuality in the Pacific. This is funded by the Australian Research Council as a Discovery Project. It combines historical and ethnographic methods in studying transformations of gender and sexuality across Oceania, traversing the conventional borders of Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia. It will offer new interpretations of gender and sexuality in cross-cultural encounters and social transformations across several epochs: from the eighteenth century voyages of both British and French through the islands of Oceania; through the changing fabric of gender in conversions to, and of, Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; to contemporary global flows, in the movement of people, things, ideas and diseases, particularly HIV/AIDS. It focuses on the fluid interaction of indigenous and introduced in changing configurations of femininities and masculinities, gender liminalities and homosexualities.