Symposia

• Rethinking Decolonization in Papua New Guinea

Working Sessions

• 2022-2032 International Decade of Indigenous Languages: Pacific Languages
• Documentation as Relation: Experiments with and Challenges to Knowledge
• Dogs and Their Humans
• Ends of Oblivion: Continuities and Discontinuities in Oceania’s Pasts
• Food Sovereignty in the Pacific
• Trust and Care in Pacific Health Systems

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​​Informal Sessions

• Archiving, Preserving and Sharing Ethnographic Research for the Future
• The After/lives of Pacific Plantations
• ​Complexities of Climate Change
• ​Misinformation, Social Media, and the Anthropocene
• Museums and Repatriation
• Pacific Biculturalities​
• Pacific Sisters at the Crossroads of Discrimination
• Possessing the Pacific City: A Comparative Dispossessions Working Group
• "The Soul and the Image": The Story of Film in the Pacific​
• Stories about Birth, Cultural Celebrations, Cultural Observations
• What Matters Now? Navigating Uncertain Futures from Climate Change to Careers

Informal Session: Pacific Sisters at the Crossroads of Discrimination in Politics, Gender, and Identification (Sex) Identities

Organizer: Serge Tcherkezoff, CREDO (AMU, CNRS, EHESS) (stcherk@pacific-credo.fr)

Co-Organizer: Melani Anae, University of Auckland (m.anae@auckland.ac.nz)

Co convened with (alphabetical order): Anae (Melani), Kruse (Line-Noue), Serge (Tcherkezoff)

This ASAO session is the continuation of previous sessions Pacific Women in Politics (2021) and Pacific Queer communities (Auckland, then Hilo 2020).

Several participants from these previous sessions approved a linkage between the question of gender imbalance in politics and imbalance in transgenderism.
 
We wish to continue to look at the situation of Women in Politics, the inequality of access to political roles (and the recent advent of a Tamaitai Palemia in Sāmoa shows by contrast how such a situation is still an exception), to traditional titles (chief-matai, etc.). We integrate the comparison with French territories to examine the issue of gender quota rules under parity law.  Recent events in Sāmoa also call for scrutiny, when the 10 percent gender quota regulation was at the same time recognised by all and became a strong point of conflict between political parties.

In the session about Queer communities in the Pacific, the unavoidable tendency to situate the discussions within the Queer, Transgender spaces there is also a need, in regard to the Queer communities in the Pacific to assess how transgender persons, as a minority, are integrated, or more exactly not really integrated, in their own society. And on that level of relativity of acceptance by the mainstream discourse, there is great imbalance, in a number of Polynesian societies, between the more-or-less integration for transgender MtF (such as the fa’afafine, leiti, mahu, etc.) and the complexity of integration for transgender FtM (such as the fa’afatama, vahine-raerae, mahukane, aiwahine, etc.).

Now we try to redirect the previous call for these two sessions into a single session to bring together the discussions on gender imbalances in domains as varied as access to contemporary political offices, to traditional offices (matai etc.), to land heritage (within collective as well as individual types of ownership), but also unequal access to the possibility of questioning gender and identification (sex) identities.