Drawing on extensive fieldwork, these essays develop contextual and strategic analyses of the way sex-gender constellations can be figured as political identities, as a resource, or in response to unforeseen contingencies. These constellations of sex-gender can be used instrumentally by colonial, neo-colonial or patriarchal regimes, by global communications networks, and by local moralities: they can govern blinkered research strategies (gender 'neutrality': 'objective' discourse): they can be ambivalent mediators (in brid-wealth negotiations: as a strategy for immigrant success): or they may constitute a subversive counterstrategy (as with the appropriation of the 'two-spirit' notion).