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Girl of New Zealand presents a nuanced insight into the way violence and colonial attitudes shaped the representation of M¿ori women and girls. Michelle Erai examines more than thirty images of M¿ori women alongside the records of early missionaries and settlers in Aotearoa, as well as comments by archivists and librarians, to shed light on how race, gender, and sexuality have been ascribed to particular bodies.
Viewed through M¿ori, feminist, queer, and film theories, Erai shows how images such as Girl of New Zealand (1793) and later images, cartoons, and travel advertising created and deployed a colonial optic. Girl of New Zealand reveals how the phantasm of the M¿ori woman has shown up in historical images, how such images shape our imagination, and how impossible it has become to maintain the delusion of the "innocent eye." Erai argues that the process of ascribing race, gender, sexuality, and class to imagined bodies can itself be a kind of violence.
In the wake of the Me Too movement and other feminist projects, Erai's timely analysis speaks to the historical foundations of negative attitudes toward Indigenous M¿ori women in the eyes of colonial "others"-outsiders from elsewhere who reflected their own desires and fears in their representations of the Indigenous inhabitants of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Erai resurrects M¿ori women from objectification and locates them firmly within M¿ori wh¿nau and communities.
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Michelle Erai was an assistant professor of gender studies at University of California, Los Angeles. She is originally from Whangarei, Aotearoa, and is descended from the tribes of Ngapuhi and Ngati Porou.
