Table of Contents

Pacific texts, modern sexualities; Sexual encounter in Hawaii on Cook's third voyage; Marquesan encounter and male visibility; Sexual difference and the expulsion of William Yate; Gauguin's Manao Tupapau and sodomitical invitation; Fa'afafine, queens of Samoa and sexual elision.

Reviews

"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."-Vanessa Smith, University of Sydney, Journal of Polynesian Society, vol. 16, no. 3, 3 September 2004