Fa'afafine

[An Onymus (imported)]

Not sure what to make of this. If the information is accurate, then this article is rather striking. None of the Samoans I have encountered, ever said anything about this element of their culture. But, then, they had all been off the rock for a number of years, or had been born in the U.S., and perhaps didn't think the fa'afafine worth mentioning. Again, if this is a description of something which is actually there in Samoa, these people show a few interesting parallels with the hijras in South Asia. As far as I can tell from the article, the fa'afafine don't undergo any surgical reassignment, so they have somewhat the same social profile as do the hijras--without having to go through the sort of surgical procedure that is performed on hijras. Some of the lifestyle elements mentioned--involvement in entertainment, for example, and doing certain types of work typical of women (though, for the hijras, this includes prostitution) seem common to both hijras and fa'afafine. One notable difference, though, is that the fa'afafine seem to be well integrated into society, rather than living in a kind of twilight world as the hijras do. And, what must be quite important, the fa'afafine are accepted by their relatives, and are apparently even encouraged in their lifestyle choice, whereas hijras are reportedly rejected by relatives in most cases.

Myself, though, I can't think of the fa'afafine as females, just as it seems strange to refer to a hijra as, "she." Beyond that, this looks to be an extreme example of society's distortion of genuine sexual differences. The fa'afafine seem to be treated as women, because their dress and grooming, and perhaps some of their behavioral details are feminine--that is to say, Samoan society apparently asserts that your sex depends on your outward appearance and the impression that it makes, and an arbitratily defined set of appearances and physical behaviors, are treated as what determines what sex you are, and how you are to express your sexuality. This is, of course, not a whole lot different than what happens in any society, although--again, if the article is accurate--what Samoan society does, appears to be rather extreme.

This was a little difficult to read in my browser, since a couple of font glyphs appear either to be displaced or missing.

http://www.laurafraser.com/fafafine.html

THE ISLANDS WHERE BOYS GROW UP TO BE GIRLS

By Laura Fraser

Marie Claire, December 2002

Not long before the plane from Hawaii to Samoa departs, the airport ladiesÕ room is crowded. A dark-haired woman in a flowered blouse checks her makeup in the mirror. SheÕs a beefy gal, with a tattooed armband and impressive biceps, which isnÕt unusualÑSamoans tend to be big-boned. But as she deftly plucks a few hairs from her cheeks, I realize that ÒsheÓ is a Òhe.Ó

Startled, I trade glances with another woman in the mirror, who smiles knowingly. The she-male catches our interaction and does a little exaggerated primping for our benefit, and all the girls at the sinks giggle.

Five hours later, arriving in Pago Pago, American Samoa, I see more transvestitesÑnot obvious drag queens, but men done up in everyday womenÕs dress. When my cousinÕs nephew, Joe, picks me up, I ask him about them. (Mycousin is married to a Samoan, which gives me a closer glimpse of Samoan extended-family life than most Òpalangi,Ó or white people, get.) Joe uneasily explains that the transvestites are called ÒfaÕafafine,Ó meaning Òin the way of a woman,Ó and are simply an accepted fact in Samoan society.

With their similar traditional dress, itÕs sometimes hard to tell Samoan men and women apartÑespecially when some women have big biceps encircled with tattooed armbands and some men have long, luxurious black hair. Samoans descend from people who were strong enough to paddle from island to island to survive, quick enough to escape rival tribes, and who fed on the starchy breadfruit and taro roots that grow everywhere on the islands. They're like tropical flowers--big, bright, and meaty, with a humid, amorphous sexuality.

Joe says that fa'afafine are treated as women and play the same roles in Samoan culture as "genetic" women--caretakers, teachers, Bible-school leaders. A long-standing myth about transvestites in the Polynesian islands has been that when families have too many boys and too few girls to do all the womenÕs work, they appoint a younger boy to "be a girl." But Joe says that isnÕt quite right, or at least not anymore: No one appoints faÕafafine, they just grow up that way. They usually arenÕt discouragedÑnor are they considered homosexual, a taboo in Samoan culture. ÒWe can have faÕafafine singing in the church choir, and the preacher will turn a~round and preach how unGodly it is to begay," Joe explains.

But how can they not be gay? Whom do they sleep with? Judging from JoeÕs expression, IÕve asked too many questions. ÒWellk, when boys are young and first experimentingÉÓ he falters, then says, ÒYou need to see Dr. Sele.Ó

We drive to a boxy, modern school, and Joe introduces me to Dr. Vena Sele, dean of student services at American Samoa Community College. Dr. Sele is an imposing woman, conservatively dressed in a flowing pantsuit, with painted fingernails and delicate gold jewelry. She is every inch a middle-aged, churchgoing lady-- except that biologically, she's a man. And so is her pretty secretary.

"Fa'afafine are ladies," she says pointedly. "We're well-educated and highly respected."

Dr. Sele is justifiably defensive of Samoa's sexual reputation: The country has been misunderstood by anthropologists ever since Margaret Mead wrote about the supposed promiscuity on the islands in 1928. The few today who have studied fa'afafine say the only way to understand them is to leave aside cultural notions of what it means to be gay or even male and female. Samoa is a community-oriented society, with more focus on extended families and villages than individuals, says Jeannette Mageo, an anthropologist at Washington State University. So a personÕs gender is based more on his or her role in the society than on actual anatomy. "As long as you're playing the female role socially, and in sex, then you are as good as a woman," she says. So, if a Samoan man has sex with a fa'afafine, it's considered a heterosexual relationship.

One of the reasons fa'afafine have flourished, Mageo says, is that they're valued as entertainers. Before Christian missionaries arrived in Samoa circa 1830, men would hold ceremonies and give speeches while women performed Polynesian dancing and comedy shows for visitors. "As the night progressed, there would be a lot of dirty dancing and sexual joking," Mageo says. Once on the scene, missionaries ordered the women to cover their breasts and drove them from the stage. Transvestites subsequently replaced the women as the main entertainers, free to make sexual jokes in the Christian atmosphere of repression.

Today fa'afafine are, like women, treated with courtly respect-- except that men are more likely to banter and make bawdy jokes with them. And, for the most part, they're accepted as long as they dress modestly. But while they aren't discriminated against for being effeminate, Dr. Sele says, they do face the same glass ceilings at work and in villages as women. Fa'afafine who want to be business executives usually have to dress as men at work. Dr. Sele is one of the few fa'afafine who has reached a high position while living as a woman, a feat she attributes to her Ph.D. "My education counters any criticism," she says. "To be a fa'afafine, you have to be educated--it's our weapon."

Sexual experimentation

The next day, I take a puddle-jumper over to Samoa--an independent country 60 miles from American Samoa, consisting of two islands. Samoa has a distinctly less American atmosphere than Pago Pago, with fewer cars and more palm-thatched huts, fishermen, and nut-brown kids playing in the waves. Here, fa'afafine gravitate toward the main city of Apia

. I make my way to Apia's oldest hotel, Aggie Grey's, which has long put on fiafia, or evening dance and fire festivals. I end up sipping mai tais under an umbrella by the pool with Tania Toomalatai. Tania, now 55, started dancing at Aggie's when she was 7 and became a star. One of her claims to fame is that when Marlon Brando visited decades ago, he didn't realize pretty Tania was a fa'afafine. "He was surprised," she says with a sly wink.

Tania, wearing a tight tank top, capri pants, and heels, is considered the "mother" of Apia's fa'afafine, who are more flamboyant and open about sex than those in the villages. In a soft, smooth voice, she explains that "the difference between our fa'afafine and your gays is that gay men make love to each other." Fa'afafine, on the other hand, have sex only with straight menÑusually young ones. "ln my time, a manÕs first sexual experience was with a fa'afafine," Tania says. Samoan girls tend to have few partners early in life, so boys "practice" with fa'afafine. "That does not make Samoan guys gayÑthey see fa'afafine as women," says Tania. In other words, most of the macho, muscular men in SamoaÑthe rugby players and the tattooed taro farmers--have had sexual experiences with other men, whom they consider to be women.

Fa'afafine seem to provide a sort of sexual relief valve to an otherwise repressed culture. "We know how to satisfy men better than women do," Tania says. She explains that fa'afafine mimic male/female sex by tucking their penises between their Iegs; they also engage in oral sex, but rarely anal sex. And men continue to see fa'afafine on the side even after they're married. "It's still cheating, but it's more cheating to be with another womanÑthat's when the wives really get ferocious," says Tania. "Being with a fa'afafine is like a joke to the wife."

The waiter comes by, says "excuse me" to Tania, and then laughs. She explains that the way he said "excuse me" doubles in Samoan for "suck me." Fa'afafine are known for their sexual double entendres, and waiters know they can banter back. As we leave, Tania points out a young man in a baseball cap.

"That's one of mine," she says proudly. "I practically changed his Pampers.Ó

That evening, I visit a small club called SelÕs Seabreeze CafŽ and chat with Tara and Kayla, both 29, who perform in the floor show. Tara wears an exuberantly ruffled green dress and ropes of Polynesian shell necklaces; Kayla, who has the build of a bruising rugby player, is sweet and shy and doesnÕt speak English very well. After a glass or two of wine, they reveal that faÕafafine arenÕt always quite as accepted as others have led me to believe. ÒSome families will give them hidings and warn them not to wear dresses anymore, but they canÕt change,Ó says Tara. Nor are their romantic relationships always easy. ÒStraight men are always going to leave us for relationships with women,Ó says Tara, sighing. ÒFaÕafafine canÕt bear children. We laugh it off, but itÕs really heartbreaking.Ó

Taaloga, the clubÕs owner, says that some faÕafafine end up in Apia after being kicked out of their homes. Her brother is a faÕafafine, and the club has taken in another who had been drifting. Everyone in this motley family performs, and when the lights dim, they give a dancing tour of the Polynesian islands, complete with grass skirts, headdresses, and coconut-shell bras.

After the show, I talk with two other faÕafafine who are dressed casually in jeans, tight T-shirts, and subtle make-up. Unlike Tara and Kayla, they never wear dresses; they consider them Òtoo femme.Ó FaÕafafine run the gamut from exaggerated femininity, like Tania, to these young, faintly feminine hipsters. Another extreme is Patty, a friend of TaniaÕs, who looks like a stou, short-haired, 55-year-old manÑexcept that she wears a little flower behind one ear. What they all have in common is that no matter how they dress, they play the role of being female. After dinner, they do the dishes.

50/50s

Still, their masculine sides sometimes come out. The next day, I see it in full force when I visit the playing fields--expanses of cool, thick grass above Apia, with views of both the bright-blue sea and the jagged volcanic peaks above. On the field, you can see why the locals sometimes call fa'afafine "50/50s," since they cheerfully show their masculine brawn. A big, buff fa'afafine will whack a baseball out of the park while her friends cheer her on. In the outfield, another will charge after a ball, then deliver a girlie "yoo-hoo" wave after she's caught it.

After the heat of the game, I go to Mango's, a restaurant overlooking coconut trees and the distant beach, for a beer. There, fa'afafine are more masculine than the "girls" at Seabreeze. The owner, Ken Moala, is a well-educated, articulate fa'afafine who dresses like a man. Peter Taurasese, a flight attendant, is a fa'afafine who has gone so far as to sport the traditional Samoan male's tatau, or tattoo, an intricate design that stretches from the knees to the midriff and is applied during a month-long span of ceremonies that typically prove a man's "machoness." "It's my male warrior side," she says. "I like to hunt--I just like to hunt men on the sea wall!"

The sea wall that surrounds the port at Apia is where the town's fa'afafine and other night crawlers traditionally meet up for a cheap drink before going to a bar, or hook up for a quick tryst after the clubs let out. Across from the sea wall is Seana's, another bar with a fa'afafine floor show. The star here is Vester Collins, 23, who appears in almost every number. During a break from performing, she tells me that the floor shows help Apia's fa'afafafine gain respect in the community. Vester says many islanders used to blame fa'afafine for bringing AIDS to Samoa, until Tania ToomaIatai organized the first beauty pageant for charity. Fa'afafine have also raised money for churches and handicapped children. "Now we do good for the community, so people respect us again," Vester says.

I'm sitting at a table with Tania and her friends. Men spin her onto the dance floor, and they dance with other fa'afafine interchangeably with real girls. They flirt more with fa'afafine, though, pretending to peek up their skirts.

As men ask Tania to dance, I notice one of them has the traditional knees-to-midriff tattoo. I joke to Tania that I'd like to see his whole tattoo. Little do I realize that she'll later arrange for him to show up at my hotel at 2 a.m.! (The hotel manager discreetly tells me, "Madame, we have a strict policy against that sort of thing.") Fa'afafine, explains anthropologist Jeannette Mageo, often act as go-betweens for shy women and the men theyÕre after. Tania was simply trying to show me a little Samoan hospitality

The next dayÑbefore I can get into any more troubleÑI leave Apia for SavaiÕi, a more traditional Samoan island, to see how village faÕafafine are different from the big-city girls. SavaiÕi is an hourÑand a centuryÑaway by boat, a volcanic island with a profusion of gardens, Samoan huts, and colorful oval houses. I go to the village where Talavai Leaoa, 34, a faÕafine teacher, lives and find her parentsÕ open-air house, where pigs graze in the front yard. Inside, her mother weaves straw mats on the floor. No one speaks much English; when I saw the name ÒTalavai,Ó her niece starts giggling. ÒMy auntie,Ó she says, laughing at the joke of her uncle being Òfemale.Ó

Talavai wanders in, wearing her school uniform: a lavalava, the traditional cotton print-cloth skirt, and a white shirt that any man might wear. Gentle and intelligent, she has short hair and a quiet femininity. We go to one of Savai'i's only bars to talk. The waitress is another fa'afafine, with long hair, tight pants, and a feminine blouse.

Most village fa'afafine, says Talavai, have to live more conservatively than those in Apia. "Every village has rules to control the people," she says. "Boys aren't allowed to have long hair here." But there are no rules against being a fa'afafine or dressing up. "My father has a brother who is a fa'afafine,'' says Talavai. "There are six in my extended family." For the most part, they do "women's work," but in villages, if there is men's work to be done--planting and farming--fa'afafine pitch in, too. "We can do both," says Talavai. That's one of the reasons they're so valued.

Talavai takes me to visit Hacy, a fa'afafine farmer who also takes care of her mother. We sit in the shade near Hacy's jungle hut, eating fresh pineapple. Hacy, 5(), dressed in a dirty T-shirt with dyed-blonde hair, rolls her own cigarettes and has the weather-beaten look of someone who's seen hard times. "There are people in Savai'i who have never seen a fa'afafine dressed in ladies' clothing," she says.

Hacy says she isn't sure when she became a fa'afafine. As a child, her father beat her, and when she was 10, she was out feeding pigs when her brother-in-law raped her. "I didn't know I was a fa'afafine yet, but maybe he could sense it," she says. "He grabbed me and pulled down his pants," she says. Talavai, too, was "initiated" by older boys.

Now, Hacy and Talavai laugh freely about sex. "The girls get jealous of us," says Talavai. ÒFaÕafafine are free to have sex, bu thte girls are protected by their families.Ó Hacy says, "Some girls will tell fa'afafine, 'Take my husband for a few nights! Maybe it will improve things."'

" We have a lot of skills," nods Talavai with a little smile. "And methods."

Queen in a bikini

The next day, I return from Savai'I--reluctant to leave the paradise of banyan trees and ocean blowholes--to attend the annual "Miz Samoa" drag pageant in Pago Pago, where a church hall is packed with 800 people. I'm sitting between last year's Miz Samoa, Tiare, and the priests of the parish. ThereÕs a long runway with a backdrop mural of the Virgin Mary. Contestants come out wearing white angel costumes, then start shimmying to techno choral music. They compete in casualwear, eveningwear, Samoan-wear, and the favorite, the swimsuit competition. The crowd claps politely for a red leotard, boos a lavalava, and roars for a 5Õ11Ó queen who strips down to a bikini. The priests next to me are chuckling. When I ask about faÕafafine, they get serious. ÒThey are rewspectable people with talent,Ó one says. ÒThey are fund-raising for the parish.Ó

Tiare, in her silk gown and crown, is enjoying the final evening of her reign. She has a boyfriend and tells younger faÕafafine that they donÕt have to sleep with every man who comes along. ÒWe donÕt want society to think that we just troll t he night to give blow jobs,Ó she says.

Tonight, faÕfafine strut their stuff before an adoring pageant crowd. Tomorrow, theyÕll go back to their schools and workplaces, surrounded by the sounds of gentle, teasing laughter.

[Blaise (imported)]

Kinda of reassuring, isn't it. My old brain struggles to recall accounts from other cultures of the same phenomena.

[JesusA (imported)]

Sorry to be so long in getting on to this one. There is an excellent (though somewhat scholarly) article about the fa’afafine in Third Sex / Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, edited by Glbert Herdt (New York: Zone Books, 1996, 614 pp.)..

The article titled Polynesian Gender Liminality Through Time and Space, by Niko Benier (pp. 285 – 328) is not overly academic in style and explores the range of gender varieties in Polynesia. My favorite parts are the descriptions of the shock of the various Protestant missionaries as they discovered that the Polynesian world was not neatly divided into male and female.

Two articles in the book of specific relevance to readers of the Archive are Living in the Shadows: Eunuchs and Gender in Byzantium, by Kathryn Ringrose (pp. 85 – 110) and Hijras: An Alternative Sex and Gender Role in India, by Serena Nanda (pp. 373 – 418). The other articles are all interesting as well, though less directly relevant.

Definitely a worthwhile book to have on the shelf.