Imperial Fantasies of Sex in Oceania
Panel for ASECS 2021(fully online)
“Imperial Fantasies of Sex in Oceania” explores eighteenth-century European depictions of Oceanic sexual cultures. Such representations, found everywhere from ship logs to philosophical tracts, depict Oceanic sexuality in Edenic terms, often holding up such cultures as evidence of what human sexuality might be “in the state of nature”. In three papers which explore various elements of these representations, our panelists ask questions about imperialism, alterity, race, and sexual and gender difference. In her paper, “Circean Blandishments: Pitcairn’s Sexual Myths and Harsh Realities,” Erin Spampinato traces the myth of Polynesian female sexual availability, propagated by numerous eighteenth-century travelogues, into the twenty-first century. Focusing on the history and mythology of the Pitcairn Islands, Spampinato compares eighteenth-century British accounts of the Polynesian women who were abducted by Fletcher Christian and his crew and brought to Pitcairn island with accounts of the child sex abuse scandal that rocked the tiny island in 2004, drawing parallels between the sexual ideology suggested by the island’s founding mythology and its abusive twenty-first century sexual culture. 'Ilaheva Tua'one’s paper, entitled, “*HMS Dolphin*: The Ship that Lost Its Integrity and Found the Myth of the Nail,” traces one of the original myths about Tahiti, The Story of the Nail, from its moment of occurrence, through ship logs and journals, into bawdy London pulp fiction. This sexual myth, as Tua'one shows, had profound consequences for the construction of European sexuality, as well as on the Pacific Islands, which continue to be plagued by sexually motivated tourism to this day. Working to disrupt the dominant cultural narrative of this famous encounter—in which English sailors supposedly ripped nails out of their ship to trade with Tahitian women for sex—Tua'one offers a reassessment of the encounter from the perspective of the Tahitian. Closing the panel, Mary McAlpin offers “Bougainville’s Cook: Codifying Male Sexual Response in the Oceanic Travel Narrative,” which examines representations of the sexual responses of European sailors to Polynesian women, as found in narratives such as Bougainville’s Voyage (1771). As McAlpin shows, these texts often draw a distinct line between the reactions of the educated men on board (such as officers and scientists) and those of the sailors engaged in day-to-day manual labor, with the latter presented as barely controlling themselves at the sight of naked women, and seeking out encounters with them whenever possible. McAlpin explores the use of the “common sailor” as a narrative device meant to convey assumptions underlying a variety of sexual metrics: natural male sexuality, European and otherwise; women’s sexuality “in the state of nature’; and the portrayal of the ideal European male sexual response. Pamela Cheek, author of Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex, will write the response.