Sexual Encounters

European literary, artistic, and anthropological representation has long viewed the Pacific as the site of heterosexual pleasures. The received wisdom of these accounts is based on the idea of female bodies unrestrained by civilization. In a revisionist history of the Pacific zone and some of its preeminent Western imaginists, Lee Wallace suggests that the fantasy of the male body, rather than of the free-loving female, provides the underlying libidinal structure for many of the classic "encounter" narratives from Cook to Melville. The subject of Sexual Encounters is sexual fantasy, particularly male homoerotic fantasy found in the literature and art of South Sea exploration, colonization, and settlement. Working at the boundaries of a number of disciplines such as queer theory, anthropology, postcolonial studies, and history, Wallace engages in subversive readings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Pacific voyage journals (Cook in Hawaii and a Russian expedition to the Marquesas), an argument concerning Gauguin's treatment of female figures, and a discussion of homosexuality and Samoan male-to-female transgenderism. These phenomena, Wallace asserts, demonstrate the continuity and dissonance between Western and Pacific sexual categories. She reconstructs Pacific history through the inevitable entanglement of metropolitan and indigenous sexual regimes and ultimately argues for the importance of the Pacific in defining modern sexual categories.

Focuses on expressions of male homoerotic fantasy in the Western literature and art of South Sea exploration., Sexual Encounters bursts with absorbing information about sexuality and the South Pacific.... The overall thesis of the work, however, is absolutely compelling: heterosexist assumptions have blinkered both Western fantasies about Polynesia and critiques of those fantasies., In Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities, Lee Wallace proposes a new understanding of the erotics and ambivalences of encounters between Euro-Americans and Polynesians.... Wallace argues that contact placed at issue not—as he has been widely assumed—degrees of heterosexual freedom, but rather the cultural permutations of male relationships. The book reveals its brilliance at the level of close reading. It proceeds through a series of beguiling exegeses that cumulatively expose some of the blind spots in recent reappraisals of Pacific encounters.... Her approach to the alternately prurient, fascinated or studiously silent documents of early contact is a mode of interstitial analysis, always necessitated in reading archives of encounters between oral and literate cultures, and acquiring an added imperative for Wallace by the absence of explicit referencing of homosexuality in her chosen texts. She theorizes the challenge to speak for her subject skillfully and directly, never resorting to the knee-jerk double-entendre of vulgar Freudianism.

Lee Wallace is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Auckland.