Faʻafafine

Fa'afafine (Samoa), fakaleiti (Tonga), rae rae or mahu (French Polynesia) is a Polynesian concept related to gender role and gender identity.

A common representation alleges that, traditionally, a fa'afafine was a boy raised as a girl in a family with too many male children, and parents chose one son to help the mother with domestic chores. Since these chores were strictly the work of women, and because these boys were doing women's work, they were raised as if they were girls. There is little empirical evidence to support this hypothesis, either historically or in contemporary Samoan society. Instead, fa'afafine simply start out as boys who do not perform Samoan standards of masculinity, which can be exacting, and who identify and are identified by others as effeminate. The identity is a complex combination of self-identification and other-ascription, and it varies widely in the way in which it manifests itself.

Fa'afafine fall in the general and vague category called transgender, which covers a wide variety of gender-crossing persons across societies of the world, and whose vagueness is useful in capturing the wide degree of variation from one person to the other and from one society to the other. They are generally sexually attracted to non-transgender men, although some decide to marry heterosexually, which they are sometimes under a great deal of pressure to do. The attitudes of family members to fa'afafine varies greatly from family to family, with parents sometimes approving of their effeminate sons, particularly since they are more likely than "straight" children to take care of them in their old age, since they will not have a family of their own to take care of.

See also

• List of transgender-related topics

References

• ABC. 2005. Fa'afafine - Samoan boys brought up as girls
• Besnier, Niko. 1994. Polynesian Gender Liminality Through Time and Space. In Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. Gilbert Herdt, ed. Pp. 285-328. New York: Zone.
• Mageo, Jeannette M. 1992. Male transvestism and cultural change in Samoa. American Ethnologist 19: 443-459.
• Mageo, Jeannette M. 1996. Samoa, on the Wilde Side: Male Transvestism, Oscar Wilde, and Liminality in Making Gender. Ethos 24(4):588-627.
• Schmidt, J. 2001. Redefining Fa'afafine: Western Discourses and the Construction of Transgenderism in Samoa. Intersections, Issue 6.