Shapeshifters: Searching for Fakatangata(?) and Tonga's queer past

Abstract

This thesis explores the establishment of Tongan sovereignty through a Tongan feminist lens. By examining the 19th century politics of Tonga, I consider how changes to religion, the introduction of written legal codes, and the eventual promulgation of the Tongan Constitution had violent consequences for women. This period in Tonga's past foreclosed the erotic freedom and agency of women which continues to ripple through the diaspora and Tonga's on-the-ground politics today. My thesis works to recenter and unearth the Tongan divine feminine in unsettling mainstream projections of Tonga as the 'true South Pacific' and the 'last remaining kingdom.' I examine our Tongan historical canon and recast the stories of women who were misrepresented as mere appendages to independence: as a murdered priestess, or as a strategic pawn used through marriage, or as only being in relationship with the fonua (land) through the formalization of land tenure via one's husband. I consider the queer possibilities of our past as captured through the stories of deities and women. Utilizing Tongan concepts and practices of fonua (land, nation, placenta, people), fananga (storytelling), and manatu (memory) I rethink gendered connections to land, as well as renegotiate the ta va (time and space) of our Tongan diaspora communities that influence our sovereignty. My research is guided by the central question: what is Tongan queer joy? From this, I question how we might build different forms of Indigenous sovereignty whilst establishing the power of an embodied archive that challenges the erasures of colonial legacies and the mapping of this violence onto our ontologies of land, gender, and sexualities..