Audacious voice for women in the Pacific

How power operates, and in particular, how environmental, social, cultural and economic factors impact on women in the Pacific, has been the core scholarly work of Professor Yvonne Underhill-Sem, who gave her inaugural lecture recently.

The impact of this work was recognised in 2022 with the Dame Joan Metge Medal from the Royal Society Te Apārangi for ‘intellectual leadership on gendered social relations which have transformed development as accepted practice in Aotearoa and the Pacific’.

With proud heritage from the Cook Islands (Mauke, Mitiaro and Mangaia), Niue, and close connections to Papua New Guinea, Underhill-Sem grew up in Porirua, with “many heart-warming moments in the Cook Island, Niuean, Māori, Samoan and Tongan communities in the 1960s and 1970s”.

Like many early Pacific migrants, she said, education was highly valued and was one of the biggest gifts her parents gave her and her siblings.

“But how to use this critically to contribute to changing injustices was something I learned from the struggles; my own, but more importantly, from those whose bodies and voices were overlooked or silenced.”
 

She said her hope is that as an educator and researcher navigating the tensions of gender inequality, she’s been able to shed light on these complexities for others to follow.

Underhill-Sem’s lecture title, the ‘Melia Effect,’ came from a heart-breaking and galvanising moment that informed much of her later scholarship.

“In 2012, my 20-year-old niece Melia experienced heavy menstrual flows throughout her last year at boarding school near Popondetta, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea. Towards the end of the year as exams loomed, she fell ill; according to her mum she was ‘bleeding internally,’ but according to her, she menstruated three weeks every month, felt weak and just collapsed.”

Melia was admitted to hospital, and in her last conversation with her aunt, asked if she would support her again so she could return to high school the following year. She feared failing her exams because of her illness.

Two months later, back home again with her parents, Melia tragically died.

“We – me here in Auckland, and my sister-in-law and her sisters in PNG – tried to retrospectively diagnose the cause of Melia’s death. We talked about the state of her young, apparently healthy, menstruating body. We wondered about the existence of something loosely understood in the West as ‘sorcery’.”

“We talked about why boarding schools didn’t provide iron-rich food all year round for young menstruating women, and we wondered why the local health system allowed her to return to her village located far from a health centre, and why some family members were silent about her ‘condition’.”

But the reason a 20-year-old was still completing high school, Underhill-Sem said, was because Melia was prevented from completing school in previous years due to the combination of two processes: expanding plantation agriculture in the hinterlands of her boarding school, which had stripped away original land cover, and unseasonable heavy rain, linked to climate change.

These factors combined meant the flooding from the water catchment above Melia’s school was unprecedented.

“Among other things, topsoil was washed away from the school grounds. This meant the leafy, iron-rich vegetables students planted to supplement their diets didn’t grow. All students were affected by the shortage of nutritional food, but young menstruating women were particularly affected.”

And she said Melia wasn’t the only one who has died in the process of getting an education.

“Such complex contexts are not unusual in the Pacific, but how we respond to such tragedies is crucial. I want to offer this notion of the ‘Melia Effect’ to refer to the tragic outcomes for women and girls, in all their diversities, which are interlinked: gendered social relations, such as long-standing rigid gender norms in families and communities; education, health and justice systems that fail to recognise gendered bodies, let alone other markers of bodily difference; economic systems that treat people as disembodied consumers and labourers and climate change, which compounds and impacts in disproportional ways.

“These are the intricate webs of connectivity that require intersectional thinking, a careful analysis of power and bold, audacious responses.”

And in her life, teaching and scholarship, she has continued to do exactly that.

Underhill-Sem’s distinguished career includes completing an MA from Hawaii, a PhD from the University of Waikato; teaching English, demography and geography at the University of Papua New Guinea; working at the Office of the Africa Caribbean Pacific Group of States in Brussels, Belgium; and 19 years in the graduate-only Development Studies programme here at Auckland, seven as director.

“These were exciting times,” she said. “We had students from Mongolia who did their fieldwork on new land tenure policies on horseback, and then Harley Davidson motorbikes, a PhD student having to paddle a pig carcass downwind of his writing house in Tuvalu...!”

And alongside, and interconnected with her scholarly and teaching career, she remained involved in global feminist research and advocacy; notably, with Development Alternatives with Women in a New Era (DAWN), a feminist research and advocacy network from the Global South, which she said, “had a huge influence on my analytical framework and experience of global and regional research-based advocacy, as well as fuelling my inclination for hearty debates,” and the Association of Women in Development (AWID).

“Along with the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, every four years we managed to raise funds to get up to 30 women to global forums in Bangkok in 2005, Cape Town in 2008, Istanbul in 2012 and northwest Brazil in 2016.

She said ensuring diverse women from the Pacific had a presence in these global forums was a priority.

“Feminist organisations in the global south are fabulous but include tensions around race, sexuality and cultural status; all of which are also found in the Pacific.”

And we must continue to act on these vital issues, she believes.

“At present, I work with OXFAM in the Pacific, the Pacific Feminist Fund, and Toksave, a Pacific gender resource. My contribution to these initiatives is in both providing critical Pacific gender analysis, which means listening and then asking questions about how power operates, and governance, which involves ensuring our practices are consistent with our values.

“Melia’s was a preventable death, and my scholarship and practice has continually been motivated to ensure we understand better, we communicate better, we fight harder, and we hold our ground.”