American Samoa is the only U.S. jurisdiction that does not recognize gender-neutral marriage despite the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision invalidating laws that limit marriage to male–female ...couples. Among U.S. territories, American Samoa has five unique features: It is the only territory that the United States acquired through negotiation with ruling sovereigns, whose land is largely communally owned, whose residents lack birthright citizenship, that remains under control of the Secretary of the Interior, and that lacks a federal court. This Essay explains how these characteristics have combined to thwart marriage equality in American Samoa.
American Samoa’s denial of marriage equality is surprising because for centuries Samoan culture has respected third-gender individuals, called fa‘afafine. Despite this heritage and the Obergefell opinion recognizing the constitutional right to gender-neutral marriage, American Samoa does not allow fa‘afafine to marry their male partners.
After documenting the centuries-old Polynesian tradition of respecting third-gender individuals, this Essay shows how current leaders in American Samoa are using suspect precedent to prohibit marriage equality for the fa‘afafine. In a series of racist opinions from 1901, known as the Insular Cases, the Supreme Court held that the U.S. Constitution does not apply to U.S. territories because their residents cannot be entrusted with rights and self-governance. Although all other U.S. territories acceded to Obergefell, American Samoa’s politicians have relied on Insular logic to block marriage equality from reaching America’s most distant territory. This Essay explains the inherent unfairness of allowing the anachronistic Insular Cases to prevent fa‘afafine from having marriage rights today.
An Age of Rights? Simmonds, N. E.
The Canadian journal of law and jurisprudence,
08/2023, Volume:
36, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Rights seem to occupy a prominent place within the moral and political lexicon of modernity. But is this truly an age in which the idea of individual rights has flourished? Or might the frequency ...with which we speak of rights reflect a failure to appreciate the stringent demands that genuine rights would inevitably place upon us? Does our willingness to frame so many moral issues in terms of rights simply illustrate our failure to take the idea of rights seriously? Does our monocular focus upon rights lead us to ignore the broader context of law, virtue, and civility that is necessary if rights are to be a reality? These are the questions forming the background to my discussion in this essay.
The Problem with kapwa Remoquilo, Andi T.
Alon,
08/2023, Volume:
3, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article brings into question the ethics of conducting feminist research on and with Filipina American women as a Filipina American researcher. Through identifying and challenging the assumptions ...of kapwa—a “pillar” of Filipino cultural values that refers to viewing the “self-in-the-other” —I ask, how does one research communities they have deep and personal stakes in without reproducing the existing “fissures and hierarchies of power” existing in Filipinx American studies?² Drawing from personal experiences of navigating research-participant conflict during fieldwork, I center this methodological question to interrogate the affective assumptions of sameness and unity amongst Fil-Ams in diaspora and to address what responsibilities we might have as Fil-Am feminist researchers to challenge such assumptions in our research and writing. In order to center women’s complex lived experiences and disrupt positivist, static representations of Filipinx American diaspora, kapwa must be reimagined as a critical standpoint and “sameness” de-centered through the feminist methodological tool of critical self-reflection.
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