Collection · 5 entries
MVPFAFF: The Pacific Names Itself
Seven Pacific gender categories, grouped under an acronym their own communities made. MVPFAFF stands for mahu, vakasalewalewa, palopa, fa'afafine, akava'ine, fakaleiti and fakafifine, and it was coined by the Niuean community advocate Phylesha Brown-Acton for a specific reason: Pasifika gender categories were being folded into LGBTQI, a set of English initials built somewhere else, and losing their own names on the way in. The acronym is a refusal of that. It says these categories exist as a set, they are related to each other before they are related to anything Western, and the relationship is theirs to name.
The morphology is the argument. Fa'afafine is in the manner of a woman in Samoan, Akava'ine is to behave as a woman in Cook Islands Maori, and Vakasalewalewa is acting in the manner of a woman in Fijian, three languages that separated centuries ago producing the same construction. Mahu breaks the pattern and means in the middle, which is why it heads the list rather than sitting inside it. What the set does not do is present a single story. Fakaleiti borrows the English word lady into its own compound, so it cannot predate contact. The Cook Islands identity was substantially shaped in the New Zealand diaspora and carried home. And vakasalewalewa is rejected by many of the Fijians it names as old-fashioned. Five of the seven are catalogued here; palopa and fakafifine are not yet written.
Plate for the collection
Hand-set, never alphabetical
The set, in order
5 entries
- MahuThe M, and the one that breaks the pattern: in the middle rather than in the manner of a woman, with teaching and healing functions the others do not carry.
- VakasalewalewaThe V, and the case that complicates the whole grouping. Many Fijians it describes reject it as old-fashioned and say qauri instead.
- Fa'afafineThe first F, and the best documented of the set. The only one with a published prevalence range, and the influence that shaped the Cook Islands identity.
- Akava'ineThe A. The word is in the 1995 dictionary; the identity sense was made through contact with Samoan communities in New Zealand and carried back.
- FakaleitiThe second F. Its compound borrows the English lady, which dates the word to after contact whatever the underlying role may be.
Keep going
The other collections
- The Pairs People Mix UpFour pairs of gender terms that get mixed up constantly, and what each pair actually turns on: the body, the axis, the register, or a plain category error.
- Categories That Resist TranslationSeven gender categories routinely given as the local word for transgender, and the specific reason each of those renderings fails.
- The Vocabulary of the 1990sSeven words first attested between 1992 and 1996, made in zines and newsletters before the general internet, carrying most of the framework still in use.
- The Numbers That Get MisquotedSix figures quoted constantly without the sentence that makes them mean anything, including one that fell sixfold because a checkbox was removed.