What are you passionate about?
Art. I think that a lot of people don’t appreciate what I see or consider art. Like all forms of art. Another thing I’m passionate about is equal rights for men and woman, and all the genders in between. Especially here [in American Samoa], I feel like religion plays a huge role in gender equality, and it’s not really talked about I guess.
Interesting! So even though, for example, the fa’afafine is very much accepted in the Samoan culture… would you accept that as welcoming of other genders?
I just feel like the LGBTQ spectrum should be wider than it is now. I feel like people try to fit into a label but there’s more than that. For some people who identify as gay, I feel like some of them are forced to become a mala when they could be anywhere else in between. And I feel like there’s not much support for it.
How did you get so passionate about these things?
So when I was a senior, I started to think more about this type of stuff. My group of friends sort of shifted, and that’s the kind of thing we would talk about. And my friends Marcie and Allie–they’re majoring in women’s gender studies–and I became so interested in how society thinks about it and how it differs between countries and stuff like that. I guess that’s what sort of inspired me to take on comparative ethnic studies because we talk a lot about like gender and culture and race, ethnicity, sexuality, and stuff like that.