Abstract
Since the 1980s, a focus on gender relations has opened up new questions about the Pacific past across a diverse set of issues.1 Health, sexuality, war, the family, reproduction, and many other areas have benefited from the analytical insights made possible by gender as a ‘category of analysis’.2 Gender, as Patricia O’Brien has argued, has been ‘vital to understanding the cultural kaleidoscope of the Pacific’.3 For instance, recognition that gender is a socially constructed category and system of meaning has produced an influential body of scholarship on Western representations of Pacific bodies since the eighteenth century across a range of cultural texts.4 Because gender is woven into the structure of institutions, the allocation of resources, and the sexual division of labour, it has been a particularly fruitful area for the examinations of power and rank in Indigenous societies, while studies of cross-cultural encounters have highlighted the centrality of gender and sexuality to imperial and colonial projects.5