'BEAUTY AND POWER'
Fascinating rare glimpse inside Tahiti’s ancient ‘third gender’ community who don’t identify as male or female on Polynesia island
SURREAL photos of Tahiti’s semi-sacred “third gender” – androgynous mahu, who are gender-variant – have been snapped in lush settings in French Polynesia.
Swiss-Guinean photographer Namsa Leuba has created a stunning set of images showing models highlighted with colourful cosmetics and body paint, to convey a “surreal sense of beauty and strangeness”.
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Leuba is exhibiting the collection, "Illusions: The Myth of the 'Vahine' through Gender Dysphoria" at , a gallery in Mayfair, London.
On show throughout October, her aim is to challenge traditional male artists' views of Tahitian women.
explains that Tahiti's mahu are recognised as “being outside of the traditional male-female divide”.
The broadcaster says they are seen as a “third gender, born biologically as a male, but recognised by peers as distinct, from early in their lives”.
Leuba said: “Mahu have this other sense that men or women don’t have.
“It is well known in [French Polynesia] that they have something special.”
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Mahu play social and spiritual roles, as guardians of cultural rituals and dances in Tahiti.
Or, they care for the island’s elders and children, CNN adds.
On her website, Leuba says her Illusions project was "inspired by the paintings of Paul Gauguin and 'tropical' images in Modern art, which occupy the Western collective unconscious."
Gauguin described mahu as “human beings of uncertain gender” when he arrived in Tahiti for the first time in 1891.
According to the , because he had hair down to his shoulders and was clad in flamboyant clothes, islanders initially believed he was also mahu.
He was told that they were a man-woman who have “existed from time immemorial in the cultures of the Pacific, but which had been demonised and banned by both Catholic and Protestant missionaries”, the Tate adds.
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Having spent nine years in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, Gauguin’s paintings are “full of human beings of uncertain gender who share equally masculine and feminine attributes”, the attraction explains.
Leuba says her contemporary portraits feature sitters known in Tahiti as either mahu or 'rae rae' – transgender.
The photographer also wanted to show their strong connection to nature, "like creatures between myth and reality", as opposed to casting Polynesian women as "beautiful, desirable and subservient".
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