The archipelago of the third sex (Islands of desire cycle) - 2022
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If at the beginning of the 21st century Western society shows itself more open to the demands and visibility of gender minorities, this evolution is not new in different cultures around the world. The Third Sex Archipelago thus focuses on the rae-rae, well-known figures from Polynesia who have long transgressed the biological boundary between sexes.
The correspondence, in the West, between social sex and biological sex may only be based on an arbitrary distinction that the Polynesian region hardly accommodates. At the beginning of the 20th century, many anthropologists reported examples of different gender classifications. The term "third sex" was born from the research of these scientists who were confronted with these "man-women," such as the mahu of Tahiti.
Continuing from the mahu, the appearance of the rae-rae is more recent and would correspond during World War II to the arrival of thousands of American, then French, soldiers on the islands. The rae-rae go well beyond the mahu in their search for accomplished femininity and may resort to cosmetic and plastic surgery.
Since 18th-century explorers discovered it, Euro-centric gazes on Tahitian women have made them objects of masculine desire. The figure of the vahine has been taken up so often in writings about Tahiti that it has become, in a way, a metaphor for the place. I drew inspiration from photographs by the first Westerners who discovered the island and who originated an imagery that persists a century and a half later.
I thus chose to photograph the rae-rae according to the iconographic codes of the vahine in order to disrupt this profoundly heteronormative representation. These staged situations allow them to affirm both the femininity they claim and their belonging to Polynesian culture.
The vahine has become a marketing object, a motif one encounters daily in Tahiti: whether on beer bottles or gas cylinders, bottle openers and other keychains. So many merchandising products that I chose to document in a photographic inventory.
Project commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture for La Grande Commande - Radioscopie de la France, led by
the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.