‘Your Woman is a Very Bad Woman’: Revisiting Female Deviance in Colonial Fiji

AUTHOR(S)
History

This article sets out to retrieve two accounts of female deviance in colonial Fiji. It will posit rule-breaking behavior as a reaction to colonial and patriarchal efforts to regulate female behavior and sexuality. The article simultaneously aims to undo rigid categorizations of female deviance by relating such acts to historical circumstance. Police records, court proceedings and news items from The National Archives of Fiji are cited to show how indigenous Fijian woman, Davilo, and
indentured Indian woman, Sukhrania, transgressed socially constructed paradigms of morality by procuring abortions in 1884 and engaging in prostitution in 1909, respectively. By relabeling these alleged acts of deviance as survival strategies emerging out of women’s experiences of ‘double colonization’, this article will reconstruct two ‘minor’ anecdotal fragments awkwardly wedged within the realm of ‘mainstream history’.

Downloads
There are no downloads available
Research Type(s)
Journal Article
Submitted by Margaret Mishra
April 1, 2021
Published in
2016
SHARE
explore similar papers

Leave a comment

Leave a Reply

What are you looking for?

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website.

Filter by Categories

Sort by Categories

Filter by Year

Sort by Year

Filter by Review Status

Sort by Review

Filter by Country

Sort Country Popup
Skip to content