Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities
"Focuses on expressions of male homoerotic fantasy in the Western literature and art of South Sea exploration."—Chronicle of Higher Education, July 25, 2003"Sexual Encounters bursts with absorbing information about sexuality and the South Pacific. . . . The overall thesis of the work, however, is absolutely compelling: heterosexist assumptions have blinkered both Western fantasies about Polynesia and critiques of those fantasies."—Robert Deam Tobin, Whitman College, H-Net Reviews, July 2004"In Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities, Lee Wallace proposes a new understanding of the erotics and ambivalences of encounters between Euro-Americans and Polynesians. . . . Wallace argues that contact placed at issue not—as he has been widely assumed—degrees of heterosexual freedom, but rather the cultural permutations of male relationships. The book reveals its brilliance at the level of close reading. It proceeds through a series of beguiling exegeses that cumulatively expose some of the blind spots in recent reappraisals of Pacific encounters. . . . Her approach to the alternately prurient, fascinated or studiously silent documents of early contact is a mode of interstitial analysis, always necessitated in reading archives of encounters between oral and literate cultures, and acquiring an added imperative for Wallace by the absence of explicit referencing of homosexuality in her chosen texts. She theorizes the challenge to speak for her subject skillfully and directly, never resorting to the knee-jerk double-entendre of vulgar Freudianism."—Vanessa Smith, University of Sydney, Journal of Polynesian Society, vol. 16, no. 3, 3 September 2004"Lee Wallace's exceptional book argues an original thesis in language which is consummate, zesty, and witty—even brilliant."—Margaret Jolly, Australian National University"Sexual Encounters is a well-researched, critically imaginative, and intellectually astute book. I found Wallace's forceful—but thoughtful—engagement with powerful critiques by leading scholars such as Peter Brooks and Marshall Sahlins truly refreshing and thought-provoking."—Joseph Bristow, author of Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885