In recent decades, Euro-American NGOs concerned with human rights, particularly gendered and sexual, have operationalized in the Global South a liberatory politics predicated on the conversion of same-sex practices into identities that are legible through Western eyes. Joseph Massad has provocatively argued that, far from freeing anyone, this politics has authorized new local forms of structural repression.
In Tonga, all social, personal, and sexual projects are deployed in the context of a "bifocality" associated with the profound instability of the local that diasporic dispersal has engendered since the 1960s. All actions are backgrounded by realms of reality of differing scale, which agents constantly negotiate intersubjectively. The transgender are particularly attuned to this bifocality, through which they contest local moralities by claiming that their practices should be evaluated against certain aspects of a cosmopolitan context associated with NGO discourses of HIV prevention. While the privileged are particularly adept at appropriating this discourse, it has also opened up new forms of experience for the less privileged, affecting sexual, personal, and social subjectivities.
Yet bifocality has also introduced Pentecostal and Mormon moralities that are equally cosmopolitan and liberatory, but lead to radically divergent solutions. Transgender identities in Tonga are being transformed by global discourses, including HIV prevention efforts and new forms of Christianity. All discourses are liberatory and embed transgender identities in global flows of morality, but they have radically different consequences. The transnational circulation of discourse is constituted by a complex array of positions and agents that complicate what is local, what is global, and everything else in between, and requires a much more subtle understanding of these dynamics that Massad offers.
Séminaire en français.
In Tonga, all social, personal, and sexual projects are deployed in the context of a "bifocality" associated with the profound instability of the local that diasporic dispersal has engendered since the 1960s. All actions are backgrounded by realms of reality of differing scale, which agents constantly negotiate intersubjectively. The transgender are particularly attuned to this bifocality, through which they contest local moralities by claiming that their practices should be evaluated against certain aspects of a cosmopolitan context associated with NGO discourses of HIV prevention. While the privileged are particularly adept at appropriating this discourse, it has also opened up new forms of experience for the less privileged, affecting sexual, personal, and social subjectivities.
Yet bifocality has also introduced Pentecostal and Mormon moralities that are equally cosmopolitan and liberatory, but lead to radically divergent solutions. Transgender identities in Tonga are being transformed by global discourses, including HIV prevention efforts and new forms of Christianity. All discourses are liberatory and embed transgender identities in global flows of morality, but they have radically different consequences. The transnational circulation of discourse is constituted by a complex array of positions and agents that complicate what is local, what is global, and everything else in between, and requires a much more subtle understanding of these dynamics that Massad offers.
Séminaire en français.
