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Paperback Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities Book

ISBN: 080148832X

ISBN13: 9780801488320

Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities

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Book Overview

European literary, artistic, and anthropological representation has long viewed the Pacific as the site of heterosexual pleasures. The received wisdom of these accounts is based on the idea of female bodies unrestrained by civilization. In a revisionist history of the Pacific zone and some of its preeminent Western imaginists, Lee Wallace suggests that the fantasy of the male body, rather than of the free-loving female, provides the underlying libidinal structure for many of the classic "encounter" narratives from Cook to Melville. The subject of Sexual Encounters is sexual fantasy, particularly male homoerotic fantasy found in the literature and art of South Sea exploration, colonization, and settlement. Working at the boundaries of a number of disciplines such as queer theory, anthropology, postcolonial studies, and history, Wallace engages in subversive readings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Pacific voyage journals (Cook in Hawaii and a Russian expedition to the Marquesas), an argument concerning Gauguin's treatment of female figures, and a discussion of homosexuality and Samoan male-to-female transgenderism. These phenomena, Wallace asserts, demonstrate the continuity and dissonance between Western and Pacific sexual categories. She reconstructs Pacific history through the inevitable entanglement of metropolitan and indigenous sexual regimes and ultimately argues for the importance of the Pacific in defining modern sexual categories.

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A new dimension to colonisation

Lee Wallace interprets a wealth of contemporary pacific cultural and literary criticism and independent research and analysis to produce a lucid yet pithy work that employs the ground-breaking lens of sexual identity to provide a new dimension to our understanding of the colonisation of the Pacific and the associated consequences for both European and Pacific cultural institutions and traditions.
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