Emergent Masculinities in the Pacific

Emergent Masculinities in the Pacific focuses on the plasticity and contingent nature of Pacific Island masculinities over the course of colonial and postcolonial histories. The several case histories concern the use of sports to recuperate but also refashion past masculinities in the name of contemporary masculine pride; the effects of market participation on younger males; how urbanisation and migration set the stage for experimenting with male gender and sexuality; the impacts of military and labour histories on local masculinities; masculinity and violence in war and gender violence; and structural violence and disruptions in male gender identity. Depicting contemporary Pacific Island societies as a space of gender invention and pluralism as indigenous gender regimes respond to the stimulations of transnational flows, the book asks a key historical question: Do emergent masculinities signal a rupture, or some continuity with, past masculinities? This book was originally published as a special double issue of The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology.

Aletta Biersack is Professor Emerita, Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon, USA. Her principal research continues to be among the Ipili speakers of the Papua New Guinea highlands. She has edited and co-edited several collections: Clio in Oceania (1991); Papuan Borderlands: Huli, Duna, and Ipili Perspectives on the Papua New Guinea Highlands (1995); Ecologies for Tomorrow: Reading Rappaport Today (1999); with J. Greenberg, Reimagining Political Ecology (2006); and with M. Jolly and M. Macintyre, Gender Violence and Human Rights: Seeking Justice in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu (2016). Her current research interests include the dynamics of gold mining, gender transformations, witchcraft, and Christianities among Ipili speakers.

Martha Macintyre is an honorary Principal Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia and Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining at the University of Queensland, Australia. She has undertaken research in Papua New Guinea, and is the co-editor, with M. Jolly, of Family and Gender in the Pacific (1989); with M. Patterson, of Managing Modernity in the Western Pacific (2011); with A. Biersack and M. Jolly, of Gender Violence and Human Rights: Seeking Justice in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu (2016); and with C. Spark, of Transformations of Gender in Melanesia (2017).