ABSTRACT
Intimate heterosexual relationships reveal much about how men and women interact with each other outside of public spaces, how gender inequities are manifested within those relations, and how people embody their places in society. Bourdieu uses gender to explore cultural creations of social hierarchies, describing how communities justify their arbitrary manifestations of categories such as gender through normalizing particular ideas that maintain the social order. Federated States of Micronesia is a small island nation formed in the north Pacific after over 100 years of colonization by Spain, Germany, Japan, and the United States. Colonizers brought patriarchal values to the region, and each colonizer created a space for missionaries to spread Christianity. Situated in the historical and migratory context are women’s experiences of and vulnerability to sexual violence in intimate relationships. Dernbach and Moral depict contemporary Chuukese marriage as at least partly due to Christian influences that reshaped families into nuclear, husband-headed households.
