Identity politics on the local and global scale: Transgender mobilization in Tonga (South Pacific)

In the past few decades, international NGOs working in the Global South have developed emancipation policies based on universalizing interpretations of gender and sexual practices and identities that do not conform to conventional norms. Some critics argue that, far from having a liberating effect, these policies pave the way for new forms of repression. In Tonga, all social and personal projects operate within the framework of a “double vision” (local and global) associated with the profound instability of the local context. Transgender women (assigned male at birth) are particularly sensitive to these dynamics, and challenge local mores by suggesting that their practices need to be assessed in the light of a cosmopolitan context, associated in particular with global discourses of HIV prevention. But hitherto undeveloped repressive discourses have also been introduced in the context of moral codes associated with Pentecostalism and Mormonism, which claim to be equally cosmopolitan and emancipatory. The global circulation of discourse on these issues is thus made up of a complex set of positions and ideas that do not refer to a simple distinction between the local and the global.