Tryst Tropique: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities
type: CreativeWork
description: Tryst Tropique questions some of the assumptions that have been made about the heterosexual trajectory described by European desire as it has informed literary, artistic and anthropological representation of the South Pacific. It reads a series of contact encounters and Pacific residencies for their unfolding of European sexual inscription and discovers their inevitable entanglement with problematics of homosexual definition. This thesis arcs between two readings wherein the sexual conduct of Polynesian men both requires and escapes European definition. The first, which settles on the documents of Cook's third voyage, uses British indifference to Hawaiian sodomitical desire to help measure a representational space from whence the European homosexual will emerge (Chapter Two). The next reading considers the erotics of male visibility legible across a number of Marquesan contact texts including Herman Melville's Typee (Chapter Three). Chapter Four discovers that the suspicion of sodomitical misconduct which clouded the career of William Yate, an early nineteenth-century New Zealand missionary, continues to involve twentieth-century commentators in the interpretative dynamics of sexual entrapment. Chapter Five turns to Gauguin's Tahitian writings and paintings to engage with the place of ambivalence in contemporary analyses of colonial discourse. Chapter Six extends the parameters of the thesis in terms of gender and of geography, taking up the controversy generated by Derek Freeman around the early Samoan fieldwork of Margaret Mead. It argues that in the example of Mead's career, we can observe the way in which female sexuality acts as the cipher by which culture multiplies and maintains ignorances and knowledges across the discursive field of sex in both cosmopolitan and primitive locations. The final chapter, which analyses a contemporary documentary representation of Samoan fa'afafine, finds the pertinence or applicability of European sexual description to Polynesi…
abstract: Tryst Tropique questions some of the assumptions that have been made about the heterosexual trajectory described by European desire as it has informed literary, artistic and anthropological representation of the South Pacific. It reads a series of contact encounters and Pacific residencies for their unfolding of European sexual inscription and discovers their inevitable entanglement with problematics of homosexual definition. This thesis arcs between two readings wherein the sexual conduct of Polynesian men both requires and escapes European definition. The first, which settles on the documents of Cook's third voyage, uses British indifference to Hawaiian sodomitical desire to help measure a representational space from whence the European homosexual will emerge (Chapter Two). The next reading considers the erotics of male visibility legible across a number of Marquesan contact texts including Herman Melville's Typee (Chapter Three). Chapter Four discovers that the suspicion of sodomitical misconduct which clouded the career of William Yate, an early nineteenth-century New Zealand missionary, continues to involve twentieth-century commentators in the interpretative dynamics of sexual entrapment. Chapter Five turns to Gauguin's Tahitian writings and paintings to engage with the place of ambivalence in contemporary analyses of colonial discourse. Chapter Six extends the parameters of the thesis in terms of gender and of geography, taking up the controversy generated by Derek Freeman around the early Samoan fieldwork of Margaret Mead. It argues that in the example of Mead's career, we can observe the way in which female sexuality acts as the cipher by which culture multiplies and maintains ignorances and knowledges across the discursive field of sex in both cosmopolitan and primitive locations. The final chapter, which analyses a contemporary documentary representation of Samoan fa'afafine, finds the pertinence or applicability of European sexual description to Polynesi…
author: Wallace, Leonelle
language: en
license: https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htm
date published: 1996
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:03:56Z
provider: University of Auckland
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: ResearchSpace@Auckland

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/2292/2279