Sex, Sexuality and Sovereignty: Reclaiming Indigenous Sexuality in Aotearoa and the Pacific
TE AO MĀORI | ISSUE ELEVEN | MAHIMAHI / SEX
Written by Skye Lunson-Storey (they/them) | Whakatōhea, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Tūwharetoa | @uku_rangi | Arts, Culture, and Te Ao Māori Editor
The present-day understandings of gender and sexuality of Indigenous people across te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa have been disrupted through the colonial gaze that enforced their Christian and heteropatriarchal values.
Historically, such values built a colonial foundation that stereotyped our people as exotic, erotic, and morally different. Contemporary Māori and Pacific artists such as Lisa Reihana, Robyn Kahukiwa and Manuha‘apai Vaeatangitau challenge this history by reclaiming Indigenous understandings of sexuality, gender, autonomy and erotic power.
In Pursuit of Venus [infected] by Lisa Reihana is a major video project that directly responds to the European construction of the Pacific as an exotic space. The European voyages by Cook, Bougainville and La Pérouse generated a deep fascination with the Pacific. The work is based on Joseph Dufour’s elaborate twenty panel scenic wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1804). Set against a utopian Tahitian landscape it presents both an idealised and exoticised vision of Pacific Peoples. Reihana, two centuries later, uses contemporary digital technology to reanimate this narrative and imagery by adding key histories that were absent from the original wallpaper. These include the exchange of goods for sexual favours, misunderstandings around ownership and reciprocity, and violence. Sexual representation became a part of the colonial process because European descriptions could turn Indigenous women into objects of European desire while simultaneously subjecting our Indigenous sexual practices to judgement and ridicule through Christian morality.
European settlement brought Christian and patriarchal values that as I’ve mentioned before in past writings positioned men as political and social authorities. Māori women’s existing political and social authority was consequently misunderstood or diminished. Robyn Kahukiwa’s (1938-2025) painting Hinetitama (1980) is one of eight works from the Wahine Toa series that challenges this assumption that Māori women were historically subordinate to men. This specific piece follows the well-known pūrākau of Hinetitama. After she discovers that Tāne is both her husband and father, she chooses to leave Tāne and become Hine-nui-te-pō, the goddess of death. Kahukiwa poignantly captures this moment of transition from Hinetitama into Hine-nui-te-pō. Kahukiwa's representation emphasises the agency and mana of Hinetitama rather than portraying her as a passive victim. In this, her decision becomes an act of autonomy and responsibility. Whereas colonial representations often positioned Indigenous women as objects of European sexual observation, her work Hinetitama is a reflection of how mana wāhine exercise authority over their own tinana, relationships and destiny.
Māori understandings of sexuality and relationships were far more complex than the heterosexual binary imposed by colonial society. The term takatāpui has a longer history than its nineteenth-century dictionary definition suggests. The discovery of Māori scholar Te Rangikāheke’s 1849 manuscript Ngā Tama a Rangi references the relationship between Tūtānekai and Tiki. This provides an important example of the term being used in a context of same-sex intimacy and demonstrates how colonialism suppressed and obscured existing Indigenous understandings, taking our terms and knowledge with it.
Manuha‘apai Vaeatangitau’s works Tau‘atāina, Hiko and Manako (all 2024), explore gender-fluid deities/couplings from Tongan mythologies. In an interview with The Art Paper in 2024 Vaeatangitau spoke of her readings into queer lesbian black theorists Saidiya Hartman and Audre Lorde, positioning the work in “critical fabulation and erotic power as a means for liberation.” Painted on fringed animal hides with acrylic, the works disassemble the Western assumptions that gender and sexuality exist within a strict binary. Dedicated to fakaleitī, fa’afafine and other gender-diverse Pacific communities, Vaeatangitau provides space to see themselves in an “erotic reverence.” Their use of erotic imagery becomes something affirming and liberating, separate from the significant given histories of colonial violence, erasure, and suppression of queer identities, and reinforcing the power of visibility and reclaiming narratives/history that were never theirs (colonisers) to begin with.
Together, these artists demonstrate that Indigenous sexuality cannot be understood through the colonial histories that attempted to define it. Lisa Reihana exposes the violence and eroticisation embedded within European representations of the Pacific, Robyn Kahukiwa reasserts the mana and autonomy of Māori women, while Manuha‘apai Vaeatangitau uses erotic power as a means to create space for queer and gender-diverse Pacific identities. Their practices transform sexuality from something historically observed and controlled by outsiders into a site of self-definition and liberation.
Mauri ora.
Comments