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
