Vakasalewalewa

The construction is the familiar Pacific one, matching Samoan fa'afafine and Cook Islands Māori akava'ine, and the open spelling vaka sa lewa lewa turns up in regional writing as often as the closed form. What the material cannot supply is a date. Colonial historical records are silent on the role of vakasalewalewa in Fijian society, and nobody has dated the first written use of the word itself. The Wikidata item for it holds a one-line English description and links out to five Wikipedia articles, and every statement on that item stands with no reference attached.

How the Pacific terms line up

The Fijian word belongs to a set that runs the length of the region, and the set is what makes the Fijian case legible. Alan Weedon laid the group out for the ABC in 2019, listing the terms for people assigned male at birth who live as women beside the much less frequently named terms for people assigned female at birth who live as men. The names are not translations of one another. Each belongs to a language and a social arrangement of its own, and the article's own caution is that the histories behind them are still argued over.

Kalissa Alexeyeff, who works on Pacific gender and sexuality at the University of Melbourne, told the ABC that the region's gender diverse populations do not constitute a third gender in the way they have often been reported, and describes a range of expression and identity instead. That is a caution against the label Third gender rather than against the Fijian word. Niko Besnier added a second caution about the whole set: outside labels arrive with money attached, and some groups have taken up LGBT vocabulary because it lets them present themselves to institutions that hold funding.

Why many Fijians reject the word

This is the instructive case in the Pacific group, and it runs opposite to the usual story. Elsewhere the argument is between an indigenous word and an English translation pressed on it from outside. Here the pressure comes from inside. In Geir Henning Presterudsten's study of qauri communities in Fiji, many of the people interviewed rejected the label of vakasalewalewa, considering it old-fashioned or restrictive.

The same study carries the finding that complicates it. People who did ascribe to vakasalewalewa reported greater acceptance in Fiji than those who identified as qauri. The word a good many are moving away from is therefore also the word that costs least to hold, and the choice between the two is a trade.

What the word qauri carries

Qauri is the broader and more current term, used collectively for non-heteronormative male-bodied people in Fiji, and its history is not Fijian. Wiktionary derives it from Fiji Hindi gauri, from Hindi गौरी, fair or brilliant, an epithet of the goddess Parvati, and attributes the shift in sense to that goddess standing for divine feminine energy. It began in the Indo-Fijian community and crossed over, so the term now gaining on the Fijian one is a loan from the other half of the country's population.

Wiktionary then reverses the picture the Fijian fieldwork gives. Its entry marks qauri as slang and sometimes derogatory, glosses it as gay man rather than as a gender category, records the derived insult qauri qase, and states plainly that the more traditional and neutral term is vakasalewalewa. The lexicon and the fieldwork disagree about which of the two words is the safer one, and neither is obviously wrong: a dictionary records what a word does when it is aimed at somebody, and the fieldwork records what people call themselves. The Fijian word is also the older category and the narrower one, since qauri covers sexual orientation as well.

What vakasalewalewa are asked to do

Joey Joleen Mataele records that many vakasalewalewa work in hospitality. The broadcaster and human rights activist Kalisito Biaukula, who is vakasalewalewa and was twenty-five when the ABC interviewed them in 2022, set out the same division of labour inside village and church life: at a function vakasalewalewa do the cleaning, the decorating and the housekeeping, and on Sunday they sing in the choir. Biaukula's objection is to the exchange: the roles are relied on and the people holding them are still picked on for who they are.

Biaukula describes growing up in a traditional Fijian family with no other queer relative in three generations, being punished for wearing a mother's sandals or lipstick, and moving to the capital, Suva, to get away from the violence at home. What followed in Suva was public, because, in Biaukula's phrase, a vakasalewalewa is visible enough for society to pick on. The word for the beatings, in the same interview, is that they were the Pacific version of conversion therapy, administered by relatives.

The Fijian figures around that account are about departure, and nobody has counted the numbers. Noelene Nabulivou, who co-founded the feminist organisation Diverse Voices and Action for Equality, told the ABC that the organisation's research found at least thirty-five per cent of young LGBTQI Fijians had already left their birth families by the age of eighteen, and that being open about gender or sexuality without a support system raises the risk of homelessness, poverty and dropping out of university. The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association counts eight of the fourteen states in Oceania as having decriminalised same-sex acts.

Why the colonial record says nothing

The silence of the colonial archive is a fact about the archive. Niko Besnier, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Amsterdam who works on the Pacific, put the methodological point to the ABC in 2019: little can be inferred from historical silence, and the absence of such people from European records does not establish that they were not there. Besnier is also the sharpest sceptic in this material, holding that there is no evidence for categories of this kind in any Pacific culture other than Tahiti and possibly Hawaii, a position he set out in a paper in 1994.

Against that, the activist Shaneel Lal argues that vakasalewalewa were integral to native Fijian society before colonisation, and that colonisation stripped Fijians of those identities and conditioned them into homophobia, transphobia and queerphobia. The temper of the encounter is on record elsewhere in the region: Tahitian māhū prompted one English missionary to call the island "the filthy Sodom of the South Seas" in 1827. Biaukula describes the Fijian word as having been used during colonisation to call queer people evil or wrong, and describes present-day use of it as a reclamation, which is a third position again: the word as something taken back.

The one testimony in this material that bears on continuity is domestic, and not documentary. Tagi Qolouvaki, a Fijian-Tongan queer woman, told the ABC that gay and effeminate men and third-gender people were an ordinary part of the family environment she grew up in, and that their presence is what made room for her own. Léuli Eshragi, a Samoan-Iranian artist and curator, made the wider version of the point in the same reporting: the question of whether pre-contact societies needed to record who was cisgender and who was not may itself be the wrong question to put to the archive.

Where vakasalewalewa sits in MVPFAFF

The V in MVPFAFF is this word. The acronym was coined in New Zealand by the community worker Phylesha Brown-Acton so that Pasifika gender categories were named together on their own terms alongside LGBTQI, and its other members are Mahu, Fa'afafine, Akava'ine and Fakaleiti, along with Papua New Guinean palopa and Niuean fakafifine. Wikipedia writes it MVPFAFF+, the plus standing for the categories the seven letters leave out.

What the acronym is for is visible in what happens without it. Amao Leota Lu, a Melbourne-based fa'afafine performer, told the ABC that in Australia the pressure is to find a box to fit into, and that her Samoan counterparts have no such requirement. Besnier notes that the older Christian denominations in the region, Catholic, Anglican and Methodist, have had no difficulty with leitī, and that the reputation for acceptance is nonetheless overstated, since life as a gender diverse person in the Pacific begins at a disadvantage. Alexeyeff records the specific shape of that disadvantage in the Cook Islands and Samoa: the public performance of femininity is admired, and the same families that admire it will punish a sexual relationship. The vakasalewalewa case sits inside that pattern, with the additional turn that the word itself is contested at home.