Description
Book SynopsisEuropean 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...
Trade ReviewFocuses on expressions of male homoerotic fantasy in the Western literature and art of South Sea exploration.
* Chronicle of Higher Education *
Sexual Encounters bursts with absorbing information about sexuality and the South Pacific.... The overall thesis of the work, however, is absolutely compelling: heterosexist assumptions have blinkered both Western fantasies about Polynesia and critiques of those fantasies.
-- Robert Deam Tobin, Whitman College * H-Net Reviews *
In Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities, Lee Wallace proposes a new understanding of the erotics and ambivalences of encounters between Euro-Americans and Polynesians.... Wallace argues that contact placed at issue not—as he has been widely assumed—degrees of heterosexual freedom, but rather the cultural permutations of male relationships. The book reveals its brilliance at the level of close reading. It proceeds through a series of beguiling exegeses that cumulatively expose some of the blind spots in recent reappraisals of Pacific encounters.... Her approach to the alternately prurient, fascinated or studiously silent documents of early contact is a mode of interstitial analysis, always necessitated in reading archives of encounters between oral and literate cultures, and acquiring an added imperative for Wallace by the absence of explicit referencing of homosexuality in her chosen texts. She theorizes the challenge to speak for her subject skillfully and directly, never resorting to the knee-jerk double-entendre of vulgar Freudianism.
-- Vanessa Smith, University of Sydney * Journal of Polynesian Society *
Table of ContentsPacific texts, modern sexualities; Sexual encounter in Hawaii on Cook's third voyage; Marquesan encounter and male visibility; Sexual difference and the expulsion of William Yate; Gauguin's Manao Tupapau and sodomitical invitation; Fa'afafine, queens of Samoa and sexual elision.
