Text Fwd:Legacies of Pacific Island Militarization Project::Teresia Teaiwa - What Makes Women Soldiers?Context, Context, Context: The Case of Fiji

* Text Fwd from Martha Duenas on April 1, 2011

UCLA: The Legacies of Pacific Island Militarization Project - Postcolonial Theory and Literature Colloquium

What Makes Women Soldiers? Context, Context, Context: The Case of Fiji
Teresia K. Teaiwa, Pacific Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ


Monday, April 18, 2011
5:00-6:30pm
UCLA - University of California at Los Angeles
Royce Hall 314

Senior Lecturer, Pacific Studies
"In the words of Victoria alumnus Albert Wendt, 'Oceania deserves more than an attempt at mundane fact'."

Abstract:

'What makes women soldiers?' Between 2008 and 2010 I recorded a series of oral histories of women currently serving in the Fiji Military Forces (FMF), and Fiji women who had been demobilized from the British Army (BA). The oral histories cover three generations of Fiji women soldiers: a small cohort who had served in the BA between 1961 and 1964; a larger cohort who had been the first women admitted into the FMF in 1988; and then an even larger cohort of women who have been recruited into both forces since the late 1990s. This paper forms the basis of the introductory chapter to a monograph based on the research, and will examine the colonial, nationalist and post/neo-colonial contexts in which each of the cohorts is respectively located. The paper espouses a feminist analysis of women soldiers that is attentive to historical and cultural specificity, and historically specific cultural specificity, moreover.

The work that I'm discussing here represents a shift in my own approach to studying militarism in the Pacific. Instead of trying to understand the militarization of the region from 'without' (as I had done in my PhD research and subsequent publications which involved a cultural studies approach based on reading and contextualizing events and texts), I have tried to understand it from 'within' (by conducting interviews with soldiers and officers); instead of trying to understand how militarization works from its center (through men), I have tried to understand it from its margins (through women). My assumption was that since masculinity and militarism are coterminous, and femininity and militarism are oppositional in certain ideological terms, by investigating how women from Fiji have become soldiers, I would learn more about how militarization works. By considering the changing contexts of women's militarization in Fiji, and by illuminating a case study in which extreme forms of violence do not distract from the analysis with their spectacle, I believe I have.

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Professor Teresia K. Teaiwa is a senior lecturer and, from 2000 to 2009, was the founding director of Pacific Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Having trained and taught in the U.S. and the Pacific Islands, Teaiwa's interdisciplinary work makes important interventions in the fields of Pacific, postcolonial and women's studies. She is the author of Searching for Nei Nim`anoa, a groundbreaking poetry collection, the spoken word I can see Fiji: sound and performance, and author of numerous articles about Pacific Cultural Studies, gender, and militarization. She is co-editor of New Zealand Identities: departures and destinations http://www.victoria.ac.nz/vup/2005titleinformation/nzidentities.aspx (Victoria University Press, 2005) and Turning the tide: Towards a Pacific solution to aid conditionality (Greenpeace Australia Pacific, 2002). Her recent articles include "Globalizing and Gendered Forces: The Contemporary Militarization of Pacific/Oceania" in Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific (University of Hawai`i Press) and "On Women and 'Indians': The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion in Militarized Fiji" in Rethinking Security: Gender, Race and Militarization (Rutgers University Press, 2008).

The Legacies of Pacific Island Militarization Project is sponsored by The Burkle Center Faculty Research Working Group Grant, The Humanities Division, The Social Sciences Division, Asian American Studies, American Indian Studies, The Department of English, the Postcolonial Literature and Theory Colloquium, and the Cultures in Transnational Perspective Mellon Postdoctoral Program in the Humanities