work

15

2

Bikinis and Other S/pacific N/oceans

Teresia K. Teaiwa

Specific Notions

What does the word “bikini” evoke for you? A woman in a two-piece bathing suit, or a site for nuclear-weapons testing? A bikini-clad woman invigorated by solar radiation, or Bikini Islanders cancer ridden from nuclear radiation? Th e sensational bathing suit was named for Bikini Atoll. Th is was the site in the Marshall Islands for the testing of twenty- fi ve nuclear bombs between 1946 and 1958. Bikini Islanders testify to the continuing history of colonialism and ecological racism in the Pa- cifi c basin. Th e bikini bathing suit is a testament to the recurring tourist trivialization of Pacifi c Islanders’ experience and existence. By draw- ing attention to a sexualized and supposedly depoliticized female body, the bikini distracts from the colonial and highly political origins of its name. Th e sexist dynamic the bikini performs—objectifi cation through excessive visibility—inverts the colonial dynamics that have occurred during nuclear testing in the Pacifi c, that is, objectifi cation by rendering invisible. Th e bikini bathing suit manifests both a celebration and a for- getting of the nuclear power that strategically and materially marginal- izes and erases the living history of Pacifi c Islanders. Th e bikini emerges from colonial notions that marginalize “s/pacifi c” bodies while generi- cizing and centering female bodies.

For Pacifi c Islanders the name “Bikini” evokes memories and visions of a s/pacifi c historical and contemporary political reality. Nuclear test- ing is just one—albeit a most pernicious one—of the many colonial phe- nomena and processes that aff ect the Pacifi c region. In 1980 the United

Shigematsu, S., & Camacho, K. L. (Eds.). (2010). Militarized currents : Toward a decolonized future in asia and the pacific. University of Minnesota Press. Created from sfsu on 2022-10-21 03:56:35.

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16 · TERESIA K. TEAIWA

Nations reported that more than two hundred nuclear bombs and devices had been detonated in the Pacifi c, but this fi gure did not include nuclear missiles launched into the Pacifi c by the United States, the Soviet Union, and China.1 Britain exploded twelve nuclear bombs on Johnston Atoll be- tween 1958 and 1962 and in the 1950s conducted twelve tests at Monte Bello, Emu, and Maralinga in Australia. Since 1966, France has tested forty- one atmospheric bombs and continued to test underground at Moruroa and Fangataufa until 1996.2

Th e New World Times reported tests at Moruroa in June and November of 1990, bringing to 130 the total of underground tests there since 1975. Th e New World Times also reported Professor M. Hochstein, director of Auckland University’s Geothermal Institute, as saying that the shaft s at Moruroa may contain about a hundred times the amount of radioac- tive material dropped on Hiroshima.3 Nuclear testing in Australia and French Polynesia profoundly aff ects the health and welfare of indigenous peoples. In April 1992, France announced a twelve-month suspension of its nuclear tests in the Pacifi c, with the possibility of extension if other countries joined in a moratorium.4 Although both the United States and France signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, their nuclear- powered (and armed) vessels continue to patrol the ocean. Current global political realignments and the development of nuclear capabilities in Bra- zil, India, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, and other countries have compli- cated the confi guration of both the nuclear arms race and the antinuclear movement. Th e Pacifi c Ocean, however, still churns with its colonial and nuclear legacies. Bikini epitomizes these legacies.

Bikini

On a Euro-American map, Bikini Atoll is located at 165 degrees east of Greenwich or 15 degrees west of the international dateline, between lati- tudes 10 and 20 degrees north of the equator. Th e atoll surrounds a la- goon some 40 kilometers long and 20 kilometers wide, and is composed of twenty-six islands—Bikini being the largest—covering a surface area of 7 square kilometers. Bikini Atoll is part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, former colony of Germany, Japan, and the United States. Th e re- public is currently linked in “free association” with the United States.5

Th e Marshall Islands became a part of the U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacifi c as a result of Japan’s defeat in World War II. Th e most horrifi c

Shigematsu, S., & Camacho, K. L. (Eds.). (2010). Militarized currents : Toward a decolonized future in asia and the pacific. University of Minnesota Press. Created from sfsu on 2022-10-21 03:56:35.

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BIKINIS AND OTHER S/PACIFIC N/OCEANS · 17

component of U.S. military strategy during the war was the nuclear bomb- ings of Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. Within the subsequent context of a cold war with the Soviet Union, the United States proceeded to further test and develop its nuclear and naval powers on and around the Pacifi c islands entrusted to it by the United Nations.6 Th e United States decided to test at Bikini for several strategic reasons: Th e area was under its control; the islands were in a climatic zone free of storms and cold temperatures; the lagoon was large enough for a fl eet of target vessels; the population of Bikini in 1946 was between 166 and 170 people—small enough to be relocated with relative ease; and, ultimately, Bikini—and the Marshall Islands in general—were at least fi ve hundred miles from all sea and air routes, distant enough that ensuing radioactive contamination would not endanger “heavily populated areas.”7

Th e U.S. military secured the cooperation of the Bikinians in vacating their island by appealing to their sense of Christian duty.8 On February 10, 1946, the Islanders were told by the military governor that Bikini would be used for “the good of mankind and to end all world wars.”9 By March 7, 1946, aft er repeatedly reenacting for camera crews their “consultation” with the military governor, the Islanders departed for the temporary home of their choice on another atoll, Rongerik, just over a hundred miles east of Bikini. Th e nuclear project, code-named Operation Crossroads, could then be implemented. Some forty-two thousand U.S. military personnel— twenty of whom were women—were on hand for the two tests conducted on July 1 and July 25.10 Th e U.S. military went on to conduct other nuclear tests on Enewetak Atoll and to establish a support base on Kwajalein. During this period, the people of these atolls, and others like Rongelap and Utirik, were subject to radiation, displacement, or both.11

Since 1946, the Bikini Islanders have experienced the many troubles at- tendant on relocation—or dislocation. Within a year Rongerik proved inap- propriate because its lagoon and plant life could not support the Bikinian population. Th e move to Rongerik had also placed the Bikinians under the jurisdiction of a paramount chief, a fact that did not please them. Sub- sequently the Islanders were sheltered at the military base on Kwajalein Island. In 1948 they were moved to Kili Island, and in the 1950s the U.S. government awarded them $25,000 in cash plus a $300,000 trust fund for full use in their homeland. Th is monetary compensation provided some relief, but eventually the Bikinians faced more population pressures on Kili as their numbers grew to three hundred by 1970.12 Furthermore, their

Shigematsu, S., & Camacho, K. L. (Eds.). (2010). Militarized currents : Toward a decolonized future in asia and the pacific. University of Minnesota Press. Created from sfsu on 2022-10-21 03:56:35.

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18 · TERESIA K. TEAIWA

desire to return to Bikini was still strong, for they had a specifi c physical and spiritual relationship to their homeland that the colonial government could not fully appreciate.13

In 1968, aft er the Atomic Energy Commission declared the island safe, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson guaranteed the Bikinians return, but the island was still dangerously radioactive because of the twenty-three nuclear tests conducted there between 1946 and 1958; it would take a min- imum of thirty to sixty years for some areas to be safe again.14 When the United States fi nally admitted that the island was still unsafe, the Islanders were forcibly evacuated again in 1978.

At this time, Bikini Islanders are scattered throughout the Marshall Is- lands, with most living on Kili, Kwajalein, or Majuro.15 Numerous claims had been fi led against the United States as the Islanders became affl icted with radioactivity-related cancers and birth defects. A radically altered version of the Compact of Free Association between the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the United States, approved by the U.S. Congress in 1986, allocated a $150 million trust fund for nuclear victims from four atolls—Bikini, Enewetak, Rongelap, and Utirik—exposed to radiation dur- ing the testing period.16 Bikinians subsequently fi led a $450 million lawsuit against the United States, to which the U.S. Congress responded in 1988 by approving a $90 million trust fund for cleaning up and resettling Bikini.17 Although the Bikinians may attempt to take the U.S. government to court again, it is not likely they will achieve much more than this. Th e Bikini Islanders’ resettlements have been troubled by environmental, social, eco- nomic, political, physical, and emotional considerations.

Bikinis

In 1946 French designer Louis Reard launched a sensational two-piece bathing suit.18 Th e bikini, as it was christened, celebrated the Allied eff orts in World War II. Fashion historians have noted that European vogues in revealing clothing tend to coincide with periods of war: “Fashion is al- ways at its most provocative during or aft er times of war, for the excellent reason that, from the woman’s point of view, there is more than a good chance of a lot of eligible males turning up their toes at any minute (one night at the Duchess of Richmond’s Ball, the next day carnage at Waterloo) so speed is of the essence in the sexual come-on message.”19 Clothing and fashion, of course, can be manipulated by both individuals and society. A

Shigematsu, S., & Camacho, K. L. (Eds.). (2010). Militarized currents : Toward a decolonized future in asia and the pacific. University of Minnesota Press. Created from sfsu on 2022-10-21 03:56:35.

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BIKINIS AND OTHER S/PACIFIC N/OCEANS · 19

woman may choose to expose her body for attention, but society also has investments in such display.

In the context of war, society has an ideological stake in the reifi cation of female bodies when male bodies are being sacrifi ced heroically: “During the First World War women were urged to inspire and distract the boys as they marched off to battle or came home on leave. A new coquettishness began to aff ect female swimwear as daring exposures overtook everyday dress and corsets were abandoned. Collar-bones and elbows, ankles and calves came into view on the street, and evening dresses, suspended by the thinnest straps bared even the armpit. On the beach, instead of fending off mascu- line attention with massive yardage, it now became entirely respectable, even a tinge patriotic, to begin cautiously to gratify the searching male gaze.”20 Th e bikini bathing suit found its position in this fashion ideology.

While being liberated from earlier cumbersome swimsuits, bikini-clad women21 joined other variously clothed—or unclothed—model female images pinned up for a heterosexual male gaze: “A system of power . . . au- thorizes certain representations while blocking, prohibiting or invalidat- ing others. Among those prohibited from Western representation, those representations denied legitimacy, are women. Excluded from representa- tion by its very structure, they return within it as a fi gure for—a represen- tation of—the unrepresentable (Nature, Truth, the Sublime, etc.). Yet in being represented by, women have been rendered an absence within the dominant culture.”22 Th e mass production and distribution of seminude female images are forms of sacrifi ce—or symbolic atonement—that sub- stitute and domesticate the unrepresentable chaos of nuclear war: “Th e original scientists working at Los Alamos took bets among themselves as to whether they would ultimately have a ‘boy’ or a ‘girl,’ that is, a success or a dud. A success it was, and the ‘fathered’ (by J. Robert Oppenheimer) bomb was nicknamed ‘Little Boy.’ A few years later, the bomb underwent a sex change operation: the device dropped on the Bikini Islands was nick- named ‘Gilda’ and painted with an image of sex symbol Rita Hayworth.”23 Th e sacrifi ce of the Islanders and military personnel during nuclear testing in the Pacifi c cannot be represented without threatening the legitimacy of colonial power, so nuclear technology becomes gendered and domesticat- ed. In the end the female body is appropriated by a colonial discourse to successfully disguise the horror of the bomb.

Edward Said describes such a colonial discourse as positioning the West as actor as well as spectator and the Orient (or, for our purposes, the

Shigematsu, S., & Camacho, K. L. (Eds.). (2010). Militarized currents : Toward a decolonized future in asia and the pacific. University of Minnesota Press. Created from sfsu on 2022-10-21 03:56:35.

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20 · TERESIA K. TEAIWA

exotic) as passive reactor or malleable site.24 In this sense the bikini off ers a female body as affi rmation of a colonial gaze. Th e bikini politically negates the female body by exposing it, but, by its mass exposure in the bikini, the female body also negates the history of s/pacifi c bodies.25 Th e bikini-clad woman is exotic and malleable to the same colonial gaze that coded Bikini Atoll and its Islanders as exotic, malleable, and, most of all, dispensable.

Th e bikini is, in eff ect, more about European and American sex–gender cultural history than about Pacifi c Islanders. But the bikini’s seminudity also refl ects a conjunction between conceptions of the neoclassical and the South Sea noble savage that began in eighteenth-century European imagi- nation. Aft er his 1768 voyage, French explorer Bougainville explicitly com- pared the Tahitians with ancient Greeks: “I never saw men better made, and whose limbs were more proportionate: in order to paint a Hercules or a Mars, one could nowhere fi nd such beautiful models.” A naked young Tahitian girl on the deck of his ship appeared, “as Venus . . . herself to the Phrygian shepherd having the celestial form of that goddess.”26 Eighteenth- century artistic representations of Venus were lent validity by documenta- tions of European encounters with scantily clad South Sea Islanders. When early bikini-clad women were hailed as “Venuses,” the bikini’s genealogy seemed noble: “Th e most simple way for society to get away with practically anything, or practically nothing, was to pretend that their fashions were in- spired by some great bygone age. Th us when confronted with accusations of indecency they could pretend an innocent hauteur towards anyone who complained . . . the most extraordinary displays of fl esh have been permit- ted under the justifi cation that they were ‘classically inspired.’”27 Th e bikini exoticized generic female bodies by constructing them as references to a Grecian golden age and a South Sea paradise; in this genealogy the more immediate colonial and nuclear ancestry was conveniently marginalized. (By “generic female body,” I mean a body that emphasizes femaleness and implies heterosexuality over and above any other specifi city of social iden- tity.) As a result of emphasizing continuity between the Euro-American past and the Pacifi c Island present, this genealogical construction masked the ruptures caused by their convergence.

If, at its birth, the bikini off ered white bodies the opportunity to become tanned, colored, or otherwise marked as exotic, bikini-clad bodies have subsequently become “natural” props in a scene of leisure. American media representations of the bikini, like Entertainment Tonight’s bikini specials, emphasize the desirability of an idealized female body.28 While some women

Shigematsu, S., & Camacho, K. L. (Eds.). (2010). Militarized currents : Toward a decolonized future in asia and the pacific. University of Minnesota Press. Created from sfsu on 2022-10-21 03:56:35.

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BIKINIS AND OTHER S/PACIFIC N/OCEANS · 21

in the United States have recognized that the representation of women in bikini bathing suits undermines their eff orts at redressing sexism,29 the sin- ister implications of the bikini go beyond sexism. Th e bikini’s deep struc- tural symbolism is signifi cantly repressed in its popular manifestations.30

Th e appropriation of the name “Bikini,” a s/pacifi c site of trauma and dispossession, for a sexy generic bathing suit functions as fetishism. By using the fetish as a theoretical framework I do not intend disrespect to those objects Westerners have labeled fetishes or those that have embed- ded sacred meaning for indigenous peoples. I intend rather to critique the type of fetishization that objectifi es and vulgarizes otherwise meaningful subjects. Several critics have warned of the remystifying abilities and the dangers of making a fetish out of the concept of fetishism.31 Nevertheless, this chapter mobilizes a concept such as the fetish to describe a(nti)histor- ical and sexist elements of European and American cultural constructions and political processes in the Pacifi c.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud discussed a process by which the fetish stopped the memory in traumatic amnesia: the fetish is a conceptual substitute for a penis (for Freud, the mother’s) that “should normally have been given up, but . . . is precisely designed to preserve it from extinction . . . [Th e fetish] remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it.”32 I take nuclear weapons as the ultimate phallic and castrative symbols for specifi c national cultures with- in a global political context.33 Th e bikini bathing suit functions as a token of triumph (a fetish for Western Europe and the United States) over the threat of castration by enemy nations and as psychic protection against the horror of their own destructive powers.

Th e simultaneously reifi ed and repressed multiple symbolisms of the bikini-as-fetish resonate with aspects of Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic framework. Kristeva discussed woman’s position as “both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ male society, both a romantically idealized member of it and a victimized outcast. She is sometimes what stands between man and chaos, and sometimes the embodiment of chaos itself.”34 Th rough assumptions of its signifi cance on a generic female body, the bikini represents sex–gender ideologies produced in Western Europe and the United States. A bikini- clad woman visually embodies and denies both sexual and nuclear chaos.

As Freud maintained, there is “an aversion, which is never absent in any fetishist, to the real female genitals.”35 Th e bikini exposes everything but the breasts and the pubic area. While the breasts are tantalizingly emphasized,

Shigematsu, S., & Camacho, K. L. (Eds.). (2010). Militarized currents : Toward a decolonized future in asia and the pacific. University of Minnesota Press. Created from sfsu on 2022-10-21 03:56:35.

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22 · TERESIA K. TEAIWA

pubic hair is considered fashionably deadly if not concealed: women are encouraged to shave or wax their bikini lines. Th e fetishistic aversion to real female genitals extends to female body hair—solidifying the relation- ship between the bikini-clad woman and the classical female nude, which is never portrayed with pubic hair. Th e classical fetishization of the female body converges with contemporary fetishization of the bikini-clad body.

As a commodity, the bikini exceeds its material utility and begins to mediate social—that is, gender and colonial—relationships.36 Although a traditional Marxist analysis would focus on the commodity’s evolu- tion from product of human labor to “idol of the marketplace,” I am more interested in the process that alienates the colonized referent of the commodity. To this end, I fi nd a discussion by Emily Apter particu- larly illuminating. She comments on literary representations of the com- modifi cation of exotic others in a French fi n-de-siècle novel, La Goutte d’or. Idriss, a Maghrebian man, sells a polyethylene cast of himself to a Parisian department store and is subsequently recruited as a model to stand in the store window performing a few angular and spasmodic ges- tures to promote the sale of the casts: “In the mirror refl ection of a thou- sand, identical department-store mannequins, one can extract a political critique of the alienated, colonized, North African self. In this sense, fe- tishism ‘buys back’ its political redemption. Th ough Idriss may be pros- tituted, frozen, and reifi ed, his dead stare (Medusa’s head) gives back to consumer society the very alienation that consumer society has infl icted on him.”37 Th e relationship between the commodity (the mannequin) and its colonized referent (Idriss) in this case is direct; the bikini on the other hand has two colonized referents, and privileges (however minimally) one (generic South Sea noble savage) over the other (dispossessed Bikinians). Th e mass-produced and mass-marketed bikini simultaneously transcribes and erases the dispossession of the Bikini Islanders onto millions of fe- male bodies. Although Apter sees some redemption in such a paradox, the emptiness of commodity consumption is only benign if we ignore the malign eff ects of the bikini’s companion commodity, the bomb.

Toward Nuclear-Free and Independent S/pacific Bodies

Th e bomb and the bikini are colonial military and neocolonial tour- ist technologies respectively, and as such they have a profound impact on s/pacifi c bodies. I would like to take some time here to explain my notion

Shigematsu, S., & Camacho, K. L. (Eds.). (2010). Militarized currents : Toward a decolonized future in asia and the pacific. University of Minnesota Press. Created from sfsu on 2022-10-21 03:56:35.

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BIKINIS AND OTHER S/PACIFIC N/OCEANS · 23

of the s/pacifi c body. Barbara Christian criticized French feminist theorists’ position of the body as the generating source of knowledge because they “return to the old myth that biology determines everything and ignore the fact that gender is a social rather than biological construct.”38 I agree with Christian insofar as constructions of biological inferiority have le- gitimized the historical oppression of many people. I hold, however, that the body is the site of physical and social experience and, as such, cannot be denied the potential for generating liberative knowledge. For, as Eliza- beth Spellman has noted, somatophobia, or fear and disdain of the body in Western thought, has been associated historically with intellectual su- periority.39 Th e s/pacifi c body emerges for me as a site for comprehending specifi c social and physical environments and for apprehending generic colonial technologies of marginalization and erasure.

Th e decolonization of s/pacifi c bodies is intimately woven into island women’s activism.40 Women have been in the vanguard of many Pacifi c Is- land sovereignty movements. Perhaps most exemplary of women-initiated decolonization in the Pacifi c is the group of Belauan women, Otil a Beluad, who have consistently organized resistance to U.S. and domestic pressures to amend the antinuclear constitution of Belau.41 Th e nuclear presence in the Pacifi c, however, is only one symptom of the everyday multiplic- ity of (neo)colonial onslaughts on s/pacifi c bodies. Pacifi c Island women also organize around issues of health, environment, substance abuse, and domestic violence for the sovereignty of s/pacifi c bodies. Activist eff orts counter colonial notions that attempt to marginalize and erase them: the romantic notion of a nude South Sea Islander and the militaristic notion of islands as expendable spaces for nuclear testing.

Because nudity and nuclear testing both take on moral and ethical di- mensions, Christianity—the most overtly popular religion in the Pacifi c— fi gures prominently in any discussion of both the colonization and the decolonization of s/pacifi c bodies. If we remember that the Bikinians surrendered their island out of Christian charity, we must also acknowl- edge that Christian organizations of predominantly indigenous women are instrumental in the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacifi c movement (NFIP).42 Christianity’s role in the Pacifi c has certainly been ambiguous.43

Early encounters between men (and women) of the cloth and naked natives were marked by violence.44 By the late eighteenth century, Euro- pean Christians had determined that the islands were purgatorial rather than paradisical, and that the noble savage was really ignoble: Islanders

Shigematsu, S., & Camacho, K. L. (Eds.). (2010). Militarized currents : Toward a decolonized future in asia and the pacific. University of Minnesota Press. Created from sfsu on 2022-10-21 03:56:35.

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24 · TERESIA K. TEAIWA

needed both salvation and civilization, and mostly they needed to be clothed.45 Th e missionaries swathed s/pacifi c bodies in cotton laplaps, mother hubbards, and short trousers. Clothing functioned as a device of colonial social control, not only by eliminating nudity, but also, in colonial Papua for instance, by distinguishing appropriate dress for Islanders from appropriate dress for Europeans.46

As tourism has become a primary industry for many of the postcolonial Pacifi c Island nations, Islanders are increasingly exposed to sun-seeking and seminude “First-Worlders.” In general, Islanders are wryly amused by con- temporary Euro-Americans’ various states of undress: “It’s an irony that the white man who came to us puritanically stiff and overdressed, now wears hardly anything on the beach on a summer day or on a Sunday aft ernoon. He has even gone further that that: he now streaks through the streets or the parks in America or Europe, and some countries plan to set aside certain areas and beaches for nudists only . . . So who is playing naked now? I hope we have taught the white man a lesson in innocence and healthy living!”47 Most Islanders, infl uenced by Christian modesty, wear bathing suits that are considerably more voluminous than the bikini. Th e lavalava, pareo, shorts and a T-shirt, and even dresses (for women), rather than the bikini, are the most common attire for Islanders at the beach.

In a tourist economy, the beach becomes the principal site of leisure— and a clichéd backdrop for bikini-clad tourists. Of course, tourism also aff ects Islanders’ perceptions of themselves and their environment, and increasing numbers of upwardly mobile Islanders—especially in Fiji, Hawai‘i, and Tahiti—may be seen lounging leisurely on the beach in their bikinis. Th ere is a bitter irony in the transformation of the beach and the production of the bikini, for in Marshallese “bikini” means “beach,” and for the Bikini Islanders the beach was the space they crossed to surrender their island for the nuclear tests of the United States.48

Organized protest against nuclear testing in the Pacifi c began in 1970 when the Committee Against Tests on Moruroa (ATOM) was formed in Suva, Fiji. Its membership came from the Pacifi c Th eological College, the University of the South Pacifi c, and the Fiji Young Women’s Chris- tian Association. When ATOM organized the fi rst Nuclear Free Pacifi c conference in Suva in 1975, the Pacifi c Conference of Churches was its principal cosponsor.

NFIP gained momentum with subsequent conferences in various is- land states: Pohnpei in 1978, Hawai‘i in 1980, and Vanuatu in 1983, the

Shigematsu, S., & Camacho, K. L. (Eds.). (2010). Militarized currents : Toward a decolonized future in asia and the pacific. University of Minnesota Press. Created from sfsu on 2022-10-21 03:56:35.

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BIKINIS AND OTHER S/PACIFIC N/OCEANS · 25

most recent being held in Suva in 1991.49 A loosely organized information and lobbying network, NFIP encompasses trade unions, private aid or- ganizations, environmentalists, disarmament lobbies, women’s collectives, and Christian groups.50 Australian scholar Stewart Firth described its suc- cesses in his book Nuclear Playground:

Its lobbying has helped dissuade the Japanese, so far, from dump- ing radioactive waste in the deep ocean trenches off the Northern Mariana Islands in the northern Pacifi c; and because of the move- ment’s complaints, the military forces of Australia and Japan no longer bombard the island of Kaho‘olawe during annual exercises with the Americans, in deference to the cultural signifi cance of the island to native Hawaiians. Who would have predicted in 1980 that within six years the independent countries of the South Pacifi c would be seeking to establish a nuclear free zone? Or that the ANZUS Treaty would be in abeyance because the New Zealanders refused to be defended by nuclear weapons? Or that the forces in favour of the nuclear free constitution in Belau would have resisted the U.S.A. for so long?51

NFIP has adopted a radical platform that advocates independence and sovereignty movements in the Pacifi c. Th ese include supporting the Kanak independence struggle in the French colony of New Caledonia and opposing the Indonesian government’s policy of transmigration and genocide in its colony, West Papua.52

NFIP operates on the premise that whatever happens in one part of the Pacifi c Ocean aff ects the whole ocean, the continentals living on the edge of it, and the Islanders living in the midst of it.53 Since the nuclear specter fi rst appeared in the Pacifi c—Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and Bikini in 1946—it has spread its poison at an alarming rate.

Th e biggest stumbling block for Pacifi c Islanders in lobbying interna- tionally is that they constitute a very small portion of the world’s popu- lation. By 1986 statistics, the total population of the Pacifi c Islands was 4,952,470.54 Th e size of Bikini Atoll’s population was a signifi cant factor in making it a site for nuclear testing. When addressing the future of the U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacifi c Islands in 1969, Henry Kissinger made a comment for which he has become notorious in the Pacifi c: “Th ere are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?”55

Shigematsu, S., & Camacho, K. L. (Eds.). (2010). Militarized currents : Toward a decolonized future in asia and the pacific. University of Minnesota Press. Created from sfsu on 2022-10-21 03:56:35.

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Th is is all about bodies—but vastly diff erent ways of fi nding meaning in bodies. Th ere are more bikinis being sold globally every summer than there are Bikinians receiving compensation for dislocation and exposure to radioactivity. While practically every slick nightclub in Waikīkī holds a weekly bikini contest, the NFIP movement organizes annual com- memorative and educational events on March 1, which is designated Bi- kini Day.

S/pacific N/oceans

What are we to make of these bizarre juxtapositions? Th e bomb and the bikini remind us of the militarist and tourist notions that shaped a partic- ular historical moment in the West and continue to shape the contempo- rary Pacifi c Islands. At their inception, the bomb and the bikini refl ected a supreme ambivalence in Western thought: the valorization of woman as nature, the abom(b)ination of nature manifested by military and scientifi c technology, the naturalization of racial diff erence, and the feminization or domestication of military technology. How else can we explain the infl ux of images of women as sex symbols, the persistent development of nuclear weapons technology, the racist paternalism toward colonies and territo- ries, and the psychological domestication of nuclear technology except as a peculiarity of Western culture and history? More to the point, how are we to deal with this peculiarity? I am tempted to conclude this chapter with a simple demand for a moratorium on the production and display of bikini bathing suits to coincide with a moratorium on the production and testing of nuclear weapons. But while I do believe that such a demand is warranted, the more immediate purpose of this particular academic expo- sition is to develop a critical understanding of cultural artifacts and repre- sentations of the Pacifi c Islands.

Military, economic, racialized, and gendered histories converge in the bikini bathing suit with far-reaching ideological and material implica- tions. In this chapter I have attempted to explore and elucidate some of these implications by selectively applying Marxist, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories. Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis are particularly illuminating lenses through which to view commodities or fetishes like the bomb and the bikini. Feminist approaches provide a crucial critique of the gendered social relations, representations, and audience reception that surround the bikini’s particular history. But although they may eff ectively

Shigematsu, S., & Camacho, K. L. (Eds.). (2010). Militarized currents : Toward a decolonized future in asia and the pacific. University of Minnesota Press. Created from sfsu on 2022-10-21 03:56:35.

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describe processes of violence and commodifi cation, largely Eurocentric theories must remain ornamental to narratives that interrupt dominant historical and cultural constructions of islands as military bases and tour- ist sites.

Faced with a thesis as disturbing as the bomb and the bikini’s erasure of specifi c (Bikini) Islander history, I have had to acknowledge both de- structive and life-sustaining histories. Th e Bikinians and other Marshal- lese Islanders are at a distinct disadvantage in negotiating terms with the U.S. government. Remembering and rearticulating the history of Bikin- ians’ forced migration and exile is a beginning form of resistance to the ideology that created both the bomb and the bikini. I believe that the hope for most specifi c Islanders is in collective resistance to military and tour- ist encroachments; this is why I have retold a history of the NFIP move- ment. With its commitment to indigenous rights and support from and for women’s organizations, the movement embodies a history that radi- cally challenges military and, especially, tourist notions of the island Pa- cifi c’s signifi cance. NFIP’s history is informed by what I call “s/pacifi c n/oceans”—an explicitly politicized version of what some call the “Pacifi c Way.” S/pacifi c n/oceans honor the specifi cities of Islander experience, recognize the generic eff ects of (neo)colonialism on all Islanders, and are committed to political and cultural cooperation at the regional level. Together the histories of specifi c islands and s/pacifi c n/oceans surround cultural artifacts and representations of the Pacifi c and erode the generic constructions on which both military and tourist industries depend.

Notes

I am grateful to Setsu Shigematsu and Keith Camacho for inviting this chapter as a contribution to this important volume. An early version of this chapter was pre- sented at the ninth Pacifi c History Association Conference in Christchurch, New Zealand, in December 1992. It was subsequently published as “bikinis and other s/pacifi c n/oceans,” in Th e Contemporary Pacifi c 6, no 1 (1994): 87–109 and was re- printed in David Hanlon and Geoff rey M. White, ed., Voyaging the Contemporary Pacifi c by Rowman & Littlefi eld in 2000. Although the chapter has been edited for this volume, it is important to note that information, sources, and analysis in this chapter are specifi c to the temporal context of its production and publication. I accept responsibility for any and all remaining problems.

Shigematsu, S., & Camacho, K. L. (Eds.). (2010). Militarized currents : Toward a decolonized future in asia and the pacific. University of Minnesota Press. Created from sfsu on 2022-10-21 03:56:35.

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28 · TERESIA K. TEAIWA

1. Stewart Firth, Nuclear Playground (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1987), ix. 2. Suliana Siwatibau and B. David Williams, A Call to a New Exodus: An Anti- Nuclear Primer for Pacifi c People (Suva, Fiji: Lotu Pasifi ka Productions, 1982). 3. “Testing Continues on the Polynesian Islands,” New World Times, Winter 1990, 29. 4. “France Suspends Nuclear Testing until 1993,” San Jose Mercury News, April 9, 1992, 17a. 5. Giff Johnson, “Marshall Islands: Politics in the Marshall Islands,” in Mi- cronesian Politics, ed. Ron Crocombe (Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacifi c, 1988), 67–85. 6. Firth, Nuclear Playground. 7. Robert C. Kiste, Th e Bikinians: A Study in Forced Migration (Menlo Park, Calif.: Cummings, 1974), 27. 8. Ibid., 18. Bikinians fi rst encountered Christian missionaries in 1908. 9. Ibid., 28. 10. John Stone, Radio Bikini: A Film (Carmel, Calif.: Pacifi c Arts Corps, 1988), 88. Th e U.S. forces observed the tests from the edges of a twenty-mile perimeter around ground zero. Th e eff ects of radioactive exposure on the observers have not been acknowledged by the U.S. government. In Stone’s fi lm, a former naval corps member talks about the life-threatening physical ailments affl icting him since he observed the tests. 11. Ibid. 12. Firth, Nuclear Playground. 13. Laura Hyun-Yi Kang has pointed out that the ease with which the colonial United States dislocated the Bikinians arose out of its generalization of islands— “one island is just like another”—and its denial of the subjectivity of colonized others (personal communication, 1992). 14. Micronesian Support Committee, Marshall Islands: A Chronology, 1944– 1978 (Honolulu, Hawai‘i: Micronesia Support Committee, 1978). 15. Firth, Nuclear Playground. 16. Johnson, “Marshall Islands.” 17. Ibid. 18. Graeme Donald, Th ings You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know (St. Leonard’s, Australia: Unwin, 1985). 19. Prudence Glynn, Skin to Skin: Eroticism in Dress (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1982), 96. Most of Glynn’s feminist analysis may seem moralistic and somewhat simplistic, but it has a certain political eff ectiveness. Other aspects of her discussion are more nuanced, including her attention to male fashion and fashion’s relationship to church and state.

Shigematsu, S., & Camacho, K. L. (Eds.). (2010). Militarized currents : Toward a decolonized future in asia and the pacific. University of Minnesota Press. Created from sfsu on 2022-10-21 03:56:35.

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20. Anne Hollander, “Swimsuits Illustrated,” American Heritage, July–August 1990, 58, emphasis added. 21. When the French fi rst introduced the bikini bathing suit to the United States, models were reportedly uneasy about their tops slipping off , their bottoms hitching up, and their pallid skin being exposed. See “Th e Trouble with the Bi- kini,” Life, no. 27, 1949, 65–66. 22. Craig Owens, “Th e Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in Th e Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 59. 23. Jane Caputi, “Th e Metaphors of Radiation: Or, Why a Beautiful Woman Is Like a Nuclear Power Plant,” Women’s Studies International Forum 14, no. 5 (1991): 426. 24. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). Incidentally, the South Seas was sometimes confl ated with the Orient or “East” by seventeenth- century Europeans. As Bernard Smith observes, a contemporary reviewer of the pantomime Omai wrote, “Th is pantomime is founded on an Eastern tale”; he also described a Tahitian marae in the pantomime as a “repository for the bodies of the Eastern kings in Otaheite” (93). Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacifi c, 1768–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960). Such confl ations illus- trate just how randomly and generically Europeans imagined their exotic “others.” 25. John Berger has discussed how a ruling class mystifi es history by making art inaccessible to the general populace (11). John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972). Th is chapter works on a variation of his thesis: when the general populace sees so much of the bikini, history is still mystifi ed. 26. Smith, European Vision and the South Pacifi c, 1768–1850, 25. 27. Glynn, Skin to Skin, 96. 28. CBS’s Entertainment Tonight featured a series on the bikini that included stories on people who had made fortunes either by designing and marketing the bikini or by promoting beach bikini contests (November 8, 1991). Th e “ideal” fe- male bodies displayed in bikinis in this series become generic commodities for the titillation of a male gaze and the enticement of a female consumer. 29. ABC’s A Current Aff air (November 27, 1991) reported on a confl ict be- tween female employees and the Stroh’s Corporation over the company’s use of a “Swedish” bikini team in its beer advertisements. 30. On ABC’s family sitcom series Growing Pains, the adolescent character, Ben Seaver, has a poster of bikini-clad women in his bedroom. Th e poster is en- titled “Island Girls,” but all of the women are white. 31. Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (New York: Cornell University Press, 1991). 32. Sigmund Freud, Th e Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 153–55.

Shigematsu, S., & Camacho, K. L. (Eds.). (2010). Militarized currents : Toward a decolonized future in asia and the pacific. University of Minnesota Press. Created from sfsu on 2022-10-21 03:56:35.

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30 · TERESIA K. TEAIWA

33. For a psychoanalytic discussion of the bomb, see Brian Easlea, Father- ing the Unthinkable: Masculinity, Scientists and the Nuclear Arms Race (Concord, Mass.: Pluto Press, 1983); for a feminist critique of military strategic discourse, see Carol Cohn, “Clean Bombs and Clean Language,” in Women, Militarism, and War: Essays in History, Politics, and Social Th eory, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Sheila Tobias (Savage, Md.: Rowman & Littlefi eld, 1990), 33–55. 34. Terry Eagleton, Literary Th eory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 190. 35. Freud, Th e Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 154. 36. My use of Marxist analysis here is superfi cial; Marx’s earlier work on alien- ation and the transformative power of money might inform my analysis diff er- ently, but I have focused only on the fi rst volume of Capital. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Edan and Cedar Paul (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962). 37. Apter, Feminizing the Fetish, 12. 38. Barbara Christian, “Th e Race for Th eory,” in Gender and Th eory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauff man (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 233. 39. Elizabeth Spellman, Th e Inessential Woman: Th e Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Th ought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988). 40. Spellman demonstrated the shortcomings of feminist theories that con- struct sexism and racism as separate and unequal processes of oppression (ibid., 117). Pacifi c Island female activists and academics seem to approach colonialist rac- ism and sexism as coterminal forces. See Laura Marie Torres Souder, Daughters of the Island: Contemporary Chamorro Women Organizers on Guam (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1992); and Haunani-Kay Trask, “Fighting the Battle of Double Colonization: Th e View of an Hawaiian Feminist,” Ethnies, Human Rights and Tribal Peoples: Renaissance in the Pacifi c 4, no. 8–10 (1989): 61–67. 41. Teresia K. Teaiwa, “Microwomen: US Colonialism and Micronesian Women Activists,” in Pacifi c History: Papers from the 8th Pacifi c History Associa- tion Conference, ed. Donald H. Rubinstein (Mangilao, Guam: University of Guam, 1992), 125–42; and Meikam Weera, “Palau Trusteeship Council Petition,” Inter- national Work Group for Indigenous Aff airs Newsletter, September–October 1991, 28–29. 42. NFIP in its turn supports indigenous women’s organizing; for example, it cosponsored the conference “Wahine Maoli: Sisters in Solidarity” for native Hawaiian and American Indian women at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, March 8, 1992. 43. Historically, missionaries and colonial agents worked closely, as in the case of Hawai‘i; contemporarily, the lines between church and state have been blurred, for example, in the legislative and legal battles over abortion in predominantly Catholic Guam and in Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka’s claiming of divine inspiration for a two-year period of martial law in Fiji.

Shigematsu, S., & Camacho, K. L. (Eds.). (2010). Militarized currents : Toward a decolonized future in asia and the pacific. University of Minnesota Press. Created from sfsu on 2022-10-21 03:56:35.

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44. According to Hempenstall and Rutherford, the earliest missionaries to the Pacifi c Islands were Spanish Jesuits who landed on Guam in 1668 (98). Peter Hempenstall and Noel Rutherford, Protest and Dissent in the Colonial Pacifi c (Apia, Sāmoa: University of the South Pacifi c, 1984). 45. In European Vision and the South Pacifi c, Smith explains that the Duff , a vessel enlisted for a British Methodist project, embarked for Tahiti in 1796, mark- ing the beginning of the second and most extensive wave of missionary eff orts in the Pacifi c (104). 46. As Woolford explains, missionaries and colonial offi cials imposed a hier- archy of clothing on native people: shoes were denied to many Islanders as they had been to African American slaves; Papuan men were expected to wear short trousers or laplaps but would be penalized, usually by fl ogging, for donning a shirt (9–10). Don Woolford, “Blacks, Whites, . . . and the Awful Press,” New Guinea and Australia, Southwest Asia and the Pacifi c Islands, January 1974, 4–25. 47. Tunumafono Apelu Aiavao, “Who’s Playing Naked Now? Religion and Sa- moan Culture,” Pacifi c Perspective 12, no. 2 (1983): 9. 48. An idea to create a marine park out of Bikini lagoon and the twenty-one vessels sunk during the 1946 atomic tests received publicity in the 1990s. Needless to say, the transformation of “a nuclear graveyard” into a tourist site that might generate revenues for Bikinians seems both symbolically and materially bankrupt. See John L. Eliot, “In Bikini Lagoon Life Th rives a Nuclear Graveyard,” National Geographic, June 1992, 70–82. 49. Firth, Nuclear Playground, 133. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 134. 52. Ibid. For a history of Indonesian policy in West Papua, see Carmel Bu- diardjo and Liem Soei Liong, West Papua: Th e Obliteration of a People (Surrey, United Kingdom: TAPOL, the Indonesian Human Rights Campaign, 1988). 53. For this reason NFIP has formed alliances with Pacifi c-Rim groups in Japan and Canada. See Firth, Nuclear Playground. 54. See South Pacifi c Commission, South Pacifi c Economies Statistical Sum- mary (Noumea, New Caledonia: South Pacifi c Commission, 1993). 55. Kiste, Th e Bikinians, 198.

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