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This is the first study of gender, globalization, and expressive culture in the Cook Islands. It demonstrates how dance in particular plays a key role in articulating the overlapping local, regional, and transnational agendas of Cook Islanders.

Male to female cross-dressing and performing have a long indigenous history in the Cook Islands. In recent years, Western-style drag shows have also been included in the Cook Islands cross-dressing repertoire. This article takes the highly cosmopolitan vehicle of the drag show and uses it to track the relationship between local and global models of gender and sexuality. It examines ways in which the iconography of domesticity and motherhood has been used to signify an uneasy relationship between local and global ideas of sexuality and gender.

Touring Pacific Cultures captures the central importance of tourism to the visual, material and performed cultures of the Pacific region. It explores new directions in understanding how culture is defined, produced, experienced and sustained through tourism-related practices across that region.

Transgender identities and other forms of gender and sexuality that transcend the normative pose important questions about society, culture, politics, and history. They force us to question, for example, the forces that divide humanity into two gender categories and render them necessary, inevitable, and natural. The transgender also exposes a host of dynamics that, at first glance, have little to do with gender or sex, such as processes of power and domination; the complex relationship among agency, subjectivity, and structure; and the mutual constitution of the global and the local. Particularly intriguing is the fact that gender and sexual diversity appear to be more prevalent in some regions of the world than in others. This edited volume is an exploration of the ways in which non-normative gendering and sexuality in one such region, the Pacific Islands, are implicated in a wide range of socio-cultural dynamics that are at once local and global, historical, and contemporary. The authors recognize that different social configurations, cultural contexts, and historical trajectories generate diverse ways of being transgender across the societies of the region, but they also acknowledge that these differences are overlaid with commonalities and predictabilities. Rather than focus on the definition of identities, they engage with the fact that identities do things, that they are performed in everyday life, that they are transformed through events and movements, and that they are constantly negotiated. By addressing the complexities of these questions over time and space, this work provides a model for future endeavors that seek to embed dynamics of gender and sexuality in a broad field of theoretical import.

En las sociedades polinesias, las personas con un género o sexualidad no-heteronormativos ocupan, a un mismo tiempo, posiciones marginales y lugares centrales en la estructura social: forman una categoría social extremadamente visible, pero cuyas fronteras son a la vez borrosas. Esta duplicidad nos insta a pasar desde una aproximación que pretende aislarlos en tanto categoría identitaria a otra aproximación que se centra en las prácticas sociales, culturales y políticas. Esta aproximación comienza con la historia de los contactos entre Isleños y Occidentales, una historia que parece haber cumplido un papel central en la emergencia social de la no-heteronormatividad en la región. Rechazando los modelos simplistas que enfrentan "tradición" y "modernidad" para abrazar en su lugar la complejidad de estas categorías, pretendemos localizar la no-heteronormatividad polinesia en la convergencia de fuerzas locales y globales y en los intersticios entre moralidades diferentes que, sin embargo, funcionan simultáneamente. ; ABSTRACT: In Polynesian societies, persons of non-heteronormative gender and sexuality are both deeply embedded in the structure of society and marginal to it. They form a very visible social category, but one whose boundaries are blurred, calling for a shift from an approach that seeks to isolate them as an identity category to an approach that focuses on social, cultural, and political practice. This approach begins with the history of contacts between Westerners and Islanders, which appears to have played a pivotal role in the social emergence of non- heteronormativity in the region. Eschewing simplistic models based on contrasts between "tradition" and "modernity" to come to grips with the complexities of the category, we seek to locate them at the convergence of local and global forces and in the interstices between different but co-occurring moralities.