Martha Macintyre
Martha Macintyre is an Honorary Principal Fellow at the University of Melbourne and until 2015 was editor of The Australian Journal of Anthropology. She has undertaken research in Milne Bay and New Ireland Provinces in Papua New Guinea over a 30-year period and has co-edited several volumes on gender, economic and social change in Papua New Guinea. Her most recent volumes are Managing Modernity in the Western Pacific, co-edited with Mary Patterson, and Emergent Masculinities in the Pacific, co-edited with Aletta Biersack.
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3741-9337
Transformations of Gender in Melanesia »
Edited by: Martha Macintyre, Ceridwen Spark
Publication date: February 2017
Despite the plethora of research on gender and the many projects designed to improve their status in the Pacific region, women continue to be disadvantaged and marginalised in social, economic and political spheres. How are we to understand this and what does it mean for researchers, policy-makers and development practitioners?
This book examines these questions, partly by looking back but also by continuing the effort to explain and understand gender inequities in the Pacific through reference to the concept of societies in transition. The contributors discuss emerging masculinities and femininities in the Pacific in order to chart the development of these in their contexts. Exploring how contemporary Pacific identities are shaped by local contexts and traditions, they focus on how these are remade through interaction with global ideas, images and practices, including new forms of Christianity and economic transformations. Grounded in recent, original research in both the villages and towns of Melanesia, the collection engages with the study of gender in Melanesia as well as scholarship on global modernities.
‘This collection is a welcome addition to the study of gender in Melanesia … Collectively, the essays present complex, locally contextualised and regionally situated case studies of gender transformation occurring alongside, in many instances, the re-codification of hegemonic gendered norms and practices. Gender is not understood as simply code for women in this volume rather, the majority of chapters incorporate men and masculinities in their analysis of gender relations and dynamics. A highlight of the collection is the attention paid to how “the politics of tradition” (and of modernity) are expressed through morally loaded concepts of the “good” or “bad” woman or man and vice versa.’
— Kalissa Alexeyeff, University of Melbourne
Gender Violence & Human Rights »
Seeking Justice in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu
Publication date: December 2016
The postcolonial states of Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu operate today in a global arena in which human rights are widely accepted. As ratifiers of UN treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, these Pacific Island countries have committed to promoting women’s and girls’ rights, including the right to a life free of violence. Yet local, national and regional gender values are not always consistent with the principles of gender equality and women’s rights that undergird these globalising conventions. This volume critically interrogates the relation between gender violence and human rights as these three countries and their communities and citizens engage with, appropriate, modify and at times resist human rights principles and their implications for gender violence. Grounded in extensive anthropological, historical and legal research, the volume should prove a crucial resource for the many scholars, policymakers and activists who are concerned about the urgent and ubiquitous problem of gender violence in the western Pacific.
‘This is an important and timely collection that is central to the major and contentious issues in the contemporary Pacific of gender violence and human rights. It builds upon existing literature … but the contributors to this volume interrogate the connection between these two areas deeply and more critically … This book should and must reach a broad audience.’
— Jacqui Leckie, Associate Professor, Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Otago
‘The volume addresses the tensions between human and cultural, individual and collective rights, as played out in the domain of gender … Gender is a perfect lens for exploring these tensions because cultural rights are often claimed in defence of gender oppression and because women often have imposed upon them the burden of representing cultural traditions in attire, comportment, restraint or putatively cultural conservatism. And Melanesia is a perfect place to consider these gendered issues because of the long history of ethnocentric representations of the region, because of the extent to which these are played out between states and local cultures and because of the efforts of the vibrant women’s movements in the region to develop locally workable responses to the problems of gender violence in these communities.’
— Christine Dureau, Senior Lecturer, Anthropology, University of Auckland