by Madeleine Sheffield

In this essay I explore the conventions and ideologies behind the past and present iconographic representations of women indigenous to the Pacific Islands and Aotearoa/New Zealand. I argue that these images reinforce and maintain a double bind of powerlessness and that the ethnographic images produced by early colonial photographers pasted a veneer of "authenticity" over these images of women, producing a voyeuristic, sexualising gaze of white male desire that wished to not only possess the exotic/erotic Other but also the countries they inhabited [Suaalii 1997:84]. Stuart Hall describes this gaze as "fixing us, not only in its violence, hostility and aggression, but in the ambivalence of its desire" [1990:78]. This ambivalence of desire/fear has effected a profound splitting and doubling; what Homi Bhabha has called, "the ambivalent identifications of the racist world"... the "otherness of the self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity"[1990: 78]. In this paper I explore how indigenous women were seen through this sexualising, possessive gaze of powerful colonial masculinity and how this gaze was produced through photographic technologies and early cinema. Pacific and Maori women have been written about and filmed within a fixed (and subsequently, marginalised) context where their real selves and histories have been ignored. In this essay, I want to address how the forms of colonial/post-colonial iconographic conventions such as the nineteenth century postcards and early cinema created and perpetuated the stereotypical tropes of the erotic/exotic, sensualised/sexual Other.

Early Representations - Postcards
 

The early representations of Maori and Pacific Island women as alluring "dusky maidens" signifying the exotic/erotic Other were depicted in the postcards, literature, ethnography, paintings and diaries of the early colonisers and then in the imagery of early cinema. Today, these stereotypical images are perpetuated and maintained in modern media via television advertising, films, tourism manifestos, magazines and newspaper articles, suggesting that the "Dusky Maiden" is still a compelling image of commodification in Aotearoa and the Pacific. Yet there is a history to these more contemporary images as Jacqui Sutton Beets' has argued. In her essay "Images of Maori Women in Postcards after 1900" she discusses how the photographic depictions of the native woman as the sensualised/sexualised exotic/erotic Other were circulated around the world to attract visitors and settlers to the Pacific. These postcards involved the stereotypical depiction of women with lowered eyelids and a shy, "come-hither" glance which, Beets argues, invites possession or ownership of a native woman and her land [Beets 1997:7]. Commodification and objectification of the Pacific female began with these images and the women of the Pacific went from being invisible to being objects for sale. The end result is a calculated redundancy of the native woman into a commercial object, created under the veil of aesthetic or ethnographic representation. 

Postcards were the most widely distributed media in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the photographic/iconographic representation of indigenous women in posed and constructed settings, reflects the reduction of indigenous women by patriarchal mechanisms to the level of commercial prostitution. By prostitution, I am using the definition of a prostitute as a woman who fulfils a sexual-economic function controlled by males. Jacqui Sutton Beets states that the models for these postcards became fallen women, lost in the sense of their ability to maintain individual and cultural integrity, and manipulated by a photographer-pimp and a buyer or viewer-client [Beets 1997:23]. The resulting stereotypes from the early depictions in postcards were either overtly sexual, comic or savage but they have all engendered a synthesized aesthetic perception; that of the exotic/erotic other or savage other or comic other as the authentic Other [Gilman 1986:41]. This perception fixes the conventions of human diversity into a context that ignores the histories, languages and past/present gendered and raced realities of the indigenes. 

The postcard representations of Maori women are therefore of importance in terms of understanding gendered colonial relations in Aotearoa/New Zealand. They represent part of the vast body of calculated pictorial commodifications of women in general and native women in particular. These images therefore contribute to racist and sexist attitudes which have persisted throughout the twentieth century, and which continue to challenge Maori women, Pacific Island women, in fact all women - today.