Abstract:
This Masters research critically explores the ‘coming out’ experiences of eight lesbian and queer
Sāmoan women in Aotearoa-New Zealand, utilising a lens of relationality and employing
intersectionality as a core conceptual standpoint. In this thesis, I report how participants highlighted
complexity in negotiating and navigating coming out within a diasporic Sāmoan context. Shedding
light on how non-normative sexual identities are experienced – and made sense of – by Sāmoan
lesbian and queer women in our context. In exploring their realities against existing theoretical
models of homosexual identity formation, participants’ stories underscore how the formation and
understanding of their non-normative sexualities are always juxtaposed relationally to ways they
experience their ethnic/racialised, gendered and often politicised bodies. Indicating an intersectional
experience that requires a more capacious and culturally grounded understanding of the coming out
process. Utilising Talanoa and deploying a Thematic Analysis to generate and guide the dataanalysis process, this research also reveals how the majority of participants do not identify as lesbian;
often questioned the performativity and linearity attached to coming-out models that currently exist,
and uniquely, highlights how participants centred a Sāmoan relationality in their coming-out and
being-out process. These findings highlight the truly complicated nature of participants’ lived
experiences. Their stories reveal the multiple, and often contradicting, factors that they faced in
developing non-normative sexual identities while maintaining the other facets of their intersectional
positioning.
