Maori Gender Non-conforming Identity: Analysing the 'Takatapui' Discourse

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the process of reconstruction of Maori postcolonial cultural identity in the twenty-first century which also passes through the reclamation and redefinition of 'takatapui' notion. 'Takatapui' is an umbrella term that nowadays indicates all the Maori with non-conforming wairua (spiritualities, gender identities), sexualities and sex characteristics. It is a culturally specific word which represents a form of intersectionality by identifying people as both Maori and queer. As a consequence of the increasing spread of the Internet, which has become a virtual place to construe identity and to promote the dissemination of ideas, a Multimodal Discourse Analysis is conducted on a corpus comprising 10 audiovisual texts fully retrieved from the web and exclusively produced by Maori takatapui activists and/or containing Maori takatapui activists' self-narratives or claims. The corpus is analysed by applying a MMDA (Multimodal Discourse Analysis) framework based on Kress and van Leeuwen's social semiotic framework (2006). The analysis is conducted also by taking into account Blommaert's linguistic and ethnographic framework (2014). The findings of the analysis show the different strategies through which Maori identities are construed and conveyed reinforcing what the Maori scholar, Tuhiwai Smith (1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: Zed Books Limited, 28), calls "a very powerful need to give testimony to and restore a spirit, to bring back into existence a world fragmenting and dying".