Papers by Deborah Elliston
Comparative Studies in Society and History, Dec 21, 2023
In this article I analyze stories about the negotiation of European racialization ideologies in t... more In this article I analyze stories about the negotiation of European racialization ideologies in the Society Islands (Tahiti and its Islands) in the late eighteenth century. My focus is the disjunctures between European understandings of their encounters at Tahiti, and what Pacific scholars have come to understand of Polynesian understandings of themselves and various foreigners in that early period. In doing so, I draw out the ways sexuality and gender mediated, enabled, and were also constituted through such racialization processes in their cultural and historical specificity. A key point of departure for this analysis is that the embodiment of race is a negotiated social process. The comparative historical case study I offer up here follows current scholarly moves in seeking out the insights to be gained by tracking racialization as a contingent process, as open rather than closed, as variegated rather than singular, and as imperfectly and only tenuously wrought through ideologies that may be profoundly unanticipated from the vantage point of modernist logics of essentialism and foundationalism. The resulting analysis aims to create space for critically revisiting the ways in which racial normativities and racialized embodiment operate, and how they work, and fail to work, to promote naturalized racist hierarchies of privilege and subordination.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2023
In this article I analyze stories about the negotiation of European racialization ideologies in t... more In this article I analyze stories about the negotiation of European racialization ideologies in the Society Islands (Tahiti and its Islands) in the late eighteenth century. My focus is the disjunctures between European understandings of their encounters at Tahiti, and what Pacific scholars have come to understand of Polynesian understandings of themselves and various foreigners in that early period. In doing so, I draw out the ways sexuality and gender mediated, enabled, and were also constituted through such racialization processes in their cultural and historical specificity. A key point of departure for this analysis is that the embodiment of race is a negotiated social process. The comparative historical case study I offer up here follows current scholarly moves in seeking out the insights to be gained by tracking racialization as a contingent process, as open rather than closed, as variegated rather than singular, and as imperfectly and only tenuously wrought through ideologies that may be profoundly unanticipated from the vantage point of modernist logics of essentialism and foundationalism. The resulting analysis aims to create space for critically revisiting the ways in which racial normativities and racialized embodiment operate, and how they work, and fail to work, to promote naturalized racist hierarchies of privilege and subordination.
Blackwell Publishing Ltd eBooks, Apr 21, 2008
University of Hawaii Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2017
American Ethnologist, 2000
Young Men in Uncertain Times
Out in theory. The emergence of lesbian and gay …, 2002
... terms). 6 They had the Tahitian-language gender terms vahine (woman), tane (man), and mahu (t... more ... terms). 6 They had the Tahitian-language gender terms vahine (woman), tane (man), and mahu (translated as" half-man, half-woman"), as well as the non-gender Tahitian-language terms raerae andpetea. ... status. Female-bodied mahu. ...
Across the Boundaries of Belief, 2018
Reviews in Anthropology 34:21-47, 2005
Over the past decade, critically reflexive approaches to sexuality have emerged as an increasingl... more Over the past decade, critically reflexive approaches to sexuality have emerged as an increasingly rich site of substantive inquiry and scholarly production, as evidenced in part by the diversity of projects to which anthropologists taking such approaches have contributed. In addition to contributions to social theory that focus on, for example, subjectivity and identity, difference and power, the self=other binary, and the production of knowledge (among others discussed below), critically reflexive approaches to sexuality have also produced significant insights into questions of research methodology (including the dynamics of fieldwork), pedagogy, and problematics in the politics of representation, ethnographic and otherwise. In addition, more reflexive approaches have produced critical insights into the relationships between sexuality and cultural politics and, not DEBORAH ELLISTON is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University= SUNY. Her research specializations include sexuality, gender and power, feminist theory, cultural politics, and nationalism, with an area focus on French Polynesia and Oceania.
American Ethnologist 31(4):606-630, 2004
In the mid-1990s, young Polynesian men emerged at the frontlines of proindependence sentiment and... more In the mid-1990s, young Polynesian men emerged at the frontlines of proindependence sentiment and mobilization in the Society Islands of France's “overseas territory,” French Polynesia. In this article, I ask why. In pursuing that question, I argue for the theoretical and empirical productivity of shifting the associations between masculinity and nationalist struggle out of the realm of common sense and into that of the sociological; that is, of moving away from the analytics of gender foundationalism and into interrogations of the very social processes through which gender differences, masculinities more specifically, are produced. Through ethnographic analysis of gendered labor practices and their mediation by and through households, I track how young men's positioning within those most local arenas of social action shaped their engagements with competing local formulations of “tradition” and “modernity” and, through those engagements, their commitments to large-scale nationalist struggle.
Cultural Anthropology 15(2):171-216, 2000
Pacific Studies 20(1):150-161, Mar 1997
American Ethnologist 22(4):848-867, 1995
In this article I critique anthropological uses of the construct of “ritualized homosexuality” in... more In this article I critique anthropological uses of the construct of “ritualized homosexuality” in Melanesia and examine related theoretical problems in the cross-cultural study of sexualities, homosexualities, and erotics. I argue that identifying as “ritualized homosexuality” the semen practices through which boys are made into men in some Melanesian societies engages and relies on Western ideas about sexuality that obscure the indigenous meanings of these practices. By comparing three Melanesian societies, I argue that age and gender hierarchies and a substance-based model for the constitution of social identities together comprise a more useful and accurate framework for understanding boys' initiatory practices in Melanesia. Exploring emerging frameworks for understanding erotics crossculturally, I seek to demonstrate the need for a more self-critical and self-aware stance as well as a more refined theoretical apparatus for the larger project of theorizing sexualities cross-culturally.
Chapters in Books by Deborah Elliston
In Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders, eds. Niko Besnier and Kalissa Alexeyeff (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press), 2014
This chapter is motivated by questions about the uses of history in queer narratives of the prese... more This chapter is motivated by questions about the uses of history in queer narratives of the present: how narratives of the past are (re)made through contemporary experiences of sexual desire and gendered belonging; how such narratives are employed in the service of projects of queer selfmaking-that is, the crafting of queer subjectivity, personhood, and identification; and, more reflexively, how we as anthropologists grapple with our own uses and sitings of history in ethnographies of sexuality.
Young Men in Uncertain Times, eds. Vered Amit and Noel Dyck (Berghahn Books, 2012), pp. 133-163, 2012
Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology, eds. Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap (Chicago: University of Illinois Press), pp. 287-315, 2002
Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices Across Cultures, eds. Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia Wieringa (Columbia University Press), pp. 232-252, 1999
Uploads
Papers by Deborah Elliston
Chapters in Books by Deborah Elliston