From the F-Word to a Samoan Feminism: Cultivating Samoan Feminist Thought

Abstract Through the colonial period in Sāmoa, Christian morality was embedded into Samoan culture. This transformed gender relations, introducing a new, well-disciplined figure of the Samoan woman. Because of this shift, we argue for the need to develop Samoan feminist thought, which is as much a development of new thinking as it is a return to and restoration of Samoan feminist thought already in existence within Indigenous Samoan cosmologies. We contextualize this thinking within a coalition of Pacific, Indigenous, Black, and women of color feminist thinkers. As feminist scholars have established, feminism doesn’t resonate or work with a simple copy and paste to culture and context. Rather, feminisms are contextual and subjective. It is thus imperative that those from within various contexts continue to broaden understandings and conceptualizations of feminism/s, which work toward demarcating spaces for feminist thought that illuminates multiple, diverse, and intersecting subjectivities and positionalities. As such, the task for us as Samoan women, people, and communities is to develop a feminist space that encompasses and fosters a by-us, for-us, with-us approach that challenges coloniality in Sāmoa and articulates feminist possibilities and futures.