Contextualising Identity: The Stranger At Home Journey
Words by Alex Marinkovich-Josey (he/him)
When I started at Salient Podcasts in 2020, I had just moved to Aotearoa from Singapore. Singapore was my home for 11 years. It’s a beautiful country at the end of the Malaysian Peninsula—a city-wide island. It’s got an amazing array of people from different cultural backgrounds, and a vast diversity of experiences and perspectives.
Singapore, however, isn't widely accepting of LGBTQIA+ people. This meant I grew up without great physical examples of the spectrum of identities that are possible beyond the established heteronormativity and the cis gender binary.
Moving to Aotearoa was a chance to actually see gender and sexual fluidity in practice. I remember the shock as I walked down Cuba Street and saw two men holding hands. In Singapore, until last year, sex between men was criminalised, and no men would dare walk down the main streets showing any sort of affection to one another.
I feel a great shame about how shocked I was, but I think I was experiencing a deep sense of hurt. I wished at that moment to have been able to grow up amongst people unafraid of experimenting and expressing themselves.
When I pitched my podcast Stranger at Home to Salient Podcasts, I wanted to investigate that feeling of otherness. As a New Zealander who hadn’t ever lived here before, the culture shock was pretty devastating. It would be a show that explores the intersections between personal and national identity. Initially, I ran this podcast alone with more of a focus on the third-culture-kid aspect, centring around my experience as someone unfamiliar with much of Aotearoa’s culture. But eventually, I realised the show would benefit from more than one voice to explore this world.
Enter Gil, my co-host with the most. He’s from Aus, having moved to NZ in the same year as me, and is keenly interested in conversations about national identity. His major in History focused largely on the history of colonisation and Pacific histories, equipping him with the tools to delve into the questions posed in a post-colonial nation like Aotearoa.
When I invited Gil on, the show experienced a necessary shift, focusing more on broad concepts of identity. We started talking about issues of expression, fluidity, and queerness, as well as more conversation about te ao Māori, and experiences beyond my own. We brought on guests who whakapapa Māori to discuss their journeys navigating a colonised Aotearoa.
When we talked about gender and sexuality in Aotearoa, it was impossible to ignore the presence of national conceptualisations of masculinity and femininity. We recognise specific norms in Aotearoa when it comes to how men and women present themselves, so expanding that conversation became a necessary part of what we did on the show.
The show refocused more broadly on those often conflicting questions of identity and expression. Gender identity itself became a key part of the show, as we explored masculinity in depth. It continues to play a part in the next chapter of Stranger at Home. We have four new episodes to release over the course of the next month or so that will continue to expand these conversations, and look both outward and inward.