Understanding sexual and gender diversity in the Pacific Islands

According to the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, various degrees of same-sex relations remain criminalised in 72 countries across the globe and many other states fail to offer full legal protection or recognition of non-heteronormative minorities. In the Pacific Islands region, seven countries still effectively criminalise sexual relations between men under the guise of prohibition against “sodomy”, “acts against nature” or “indecency”. Traditionally, many communities in the Pacific Islands had ways of talking about and understanding sexual development and diversity that were more permissive than what one might find in the global north even today. In the contemporary Pacific, as well as elsewhere, the meanings assigned to being non-heteronormative or same-sex oriented subjects are dynamically shaped and reshaped under the conditions of globalisation and westernisation and local subjects are often redefined and reconstructed in relation to what Dennis Altman has famously labelled a “global gay identity”