Western Attempts To Reinterpret and Redefine Third Gender By Sexual Orientation
According to some scholars, the West is trying to reinterpret and redefine the ancient third gender identities to fit into the Western concept of "sexual orientation". In her research paper titled "Redefining Fa'afafine: Western Discourses and the Construction of Transgenderism in Samoa," Johanna Schmidt has argued that the Western attempts to reinterpret the Samoan third gender identity of Fa 'afafine in terms of homosexuality is influencing the fa'afafine identity itself which is being reorganised in western ways, i.e. from being a feminine gender space to being a homosexual space. She also argues that this is actually changing the nature of Fa'afafines itself, and making it more 'homosexual.'
As a Samoan Fa'afafine says, "But I would like to pursue a masters degree with a paper on homosexuality from a Samoan perspective that would be written for educational purposes, because I believe some of the stuff that has been written about us is quite wrong."
In his paper, 'How to become a Berdache: Toward a unified analysis of gender diversity', Will Roscoe writes that "This pattern can be traced from the earliest accounts of the Spaniards to present-day ethnographies. What has been written about berdaches reflects more the influence of existing Western discourses on gender, sexuality and the Other than what observers actually witnessed."
According to Towle and Morgan:
“Ethnographic examples can come from distinct societies located in Thailand, Polynesia, Melanesia, Native America, western Africa, and elsewhere and from any point in history, from Ancient Greece, to sixteenth century England to contemporary North America. Popular authors routinely simplify their descriptions, ignoring...or conflating dimensions that seem to them extraneous, incomprehensible, or ill suited to the images they want to convey” (484).
Western scholars often get confused when analysing the history of sex between males, because they fail to make the distinction between third genders and men, and count the third genders as men. By doing this, they fail to notice the difference between the third genders as primarily being of feminine gender, and tend to put this difference down to the gender role of the third genders, of being anally or orally penetrated. E.g., when analysing the non-normative sex gender categories in Theraveda Buddhism, Peter A Jackson, says that it appears that among the early Buddhist communities men who engaged in receptive anal sex were seen as feminized and thought to be hermaphrodites. In contrast, men who engaged in oral sex were not seen as crossing sex/gender boundaries, but rather as engaging in abnormal sexual practices without threatening their masculine gendered existence.
Read more about this topic: Third Gender
Famous quotes containing the words western, attempts, reinterpret, gender and/or orientation:
“Institutions of higher education in the United States are products of Western society in which masculine values like an orientation toward achievement and objectivity are valued over cooperation, connectedness and subjectivity.”
—Yolanda Moses (b. 1946)
“Society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him; he has become tediously good in some particular but negligent or narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It makes no sense to say what the objects of a theory are,
beyond saying how to interpret or reinterpret that theory in another.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Most women of [the WW II] generation have but one image of good motherhood—the one their mothers embodied. . . . Anything done “for the sake of the children” justified, even ennobled the mother’s role. Motherhood was tantamount to martyrdom during that unique era when children were gods. Those who appeared to put their own needs first were castigated and shunned—the ultimate damnation for a gender trained to be wholly dependent on the acceptance and praise of others.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“Every orientation presupposes a disorientation.”
—Hans Magnus Enzensberger (b. 1929)