of the female is more South Pacific—the Cook Islands and Tahiti—while that of the male is more Hawaiian. (He wears a Hawaiian loincloth called a malo.) The ad smugly asserts the hotel dinner service as a l u ‘au, a Hawaiian feast (which is misspelled) with a continuously open bar, lavish “island” buffet, and “thrilling” Polynesian revue. Needless to say, Hawaiians did not drink alcohol, eat “island” buffets, or participate in “thrilling” revues before the advent of white people in our islands.
But back to the advertisement. Lahaina, the location of the resort and once the capital of Hawai‘i, is called “royal” because of its past association with our ali‘i, or chiefs. Far from being royal today, Lahaina is sadly inundated by California yuppies, drug addicts, and valley girls.
The male figure in the background is muscular, partially clothed, and unsmiling. Apparently, he is supposed to convey an image of Polynesian sexuality that is both enticing and threatening. The white women in the audience can marvel at this physique and still remain safely distant. Like the black American male, this Polynesian man is a fantasy animal. He casts a slightly malevolent glance at our costumed maiden whose body posture and barely covered breasts contradict the innocent smile on her face.
Finally, the “wondrous allure” referred to in the ad applies to more than just the dancers in their performances; the physical beauty of Hawai‘i “alive under the stars” is the larger reference.
In this little grotesquerie, the falseness and commercialism fairly scream out from the page. Our language, our dance, our young people, even our customs of eating are used to ensnare tourists. And the price is only a paltry $39.95, not much for two thousand years of culture. Of course, the hotel will rake in tens of thousands of dollars on just the l u‘au alone. And our young couple will make a pittance.
The rest of the magazine, like most tourist propaganda, commodifies virtually every part of Hawai‘i: mountains, beaches, coastlines, rivers, flowers, our volcano goddess, Pele, reefs and fish, rural Hawaiian communities, even Hawaiian activists.
The point, of course, is that everything in Hawai‘i can be yours, that is, you the tourist, the non-native, the visitor. The place, the people, the culture, even our identity as a “native” people is for sale. Thus, the magazine, like the airline that prints it, is called Aloha. The use of this word in a capitalist context is so far removed from any Hawaiian cultural sense that it is, literally, meaningless.
Thus, Hawai‘i, like a lovely woman, is there for the taking. Those with only a little money get a brief encounter; those with a lot of money, like the Japanese, get more. The state and counties will give tax breaks, build infrastructure, and have the governor personally welcome tourists to ensure they keep coming. Just as the pimp regulates prices and guards the commodity of the prostitute, so the state bargains with developers for access to Hawaiian land and culture. Who builds the biggest resorts to attract the most affluent tourists gets the best deal: more hotel rooms, golf courses, and restaurants approved. Permits are fast-tracked, height and density limits are suspended, new groundwater sources are miraculously found.
Hawaiians, meanwhile, have little choice in all this. We can fill up the unemployment lines, enter the military, work in the tourist industry, or leave Hawai‘i. Increasingly, Hawaiians are leaving, not by choice but out of economic necessity.
Our people who work in the industry—dancers, waiters, singers, valets, gardeners, housekeepers, bartenders, and even a few managers—make between $10,000 and $25,000 a year, an impossible salary for a family in Hawai‘i. Psychologically, our young people have begun to think of tourism as the only employment opportunity, trapped as they are by the lack of alternatives. For our young women, modeling is a “cleaner” job when compared to waiting on tables, or dancing in a weekly revue, but modeling feeds on tourism and the commodification of Hawaiian women. In the end, the entire employment scene is shaped by tourism.
Despite their exploitation, Hawaiians’ participation in tourism raises the problem of complicity. Because wages are so low and advancement so rare, whatever complicity exists is secondary to the economic hopelessness that drives Hawaiians into the industry. Refusing to contribute to the commercialization of one’s culture becomes a peripheral concern when unemployment looms.
Of course, many Hawaiians do not see tourism as part of their colonization. Thus tourism is viewed as providing jobs, not as a form of cultural prostitution. Even those who have some glimmer of critical consciousness don’t generally agree that the tourist industry prostitutes Hawaiian culture. To me, this is a measure of the depth of our mental oppression: We can’t understand our own cultural degradation because we are living it. As colonized people, we are colonized to the extent that we are unaware of our oppression. When awareness begins, then so too does decolonization. Judging by the growing resistance to new hotels, to geothermal energy and manganese nodule mining which would supplement the tourist industry, and to increases in the sheer number of tourists, I would say that decolonization has begun, but we have many more stages to negotiate on our path to sovereignty.
My brief excursion into the prostitution of Hawaiian culture has done no more than give an overview. Now that you have heard a native view, let me just leave this thought behind. If you are thinking of visiting my homeland, please don’t. We don’t want or need any more tourists, and we certainly don’t like them. If you want to help our cause, pass this message on to your friends.
Author’s Note
“Lovely Hula Hands” is the title of a famous and very saccharine song written by a haole who fell in love with Hawai‘i in the pre-statehood era. It embodies the worst romanticized views of hula dancers and Hawaiian culture in general.
Notes
1. Lilikala¯ Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1992), p. 2.
2. See Larry Kimura, 1983. “Native Hawaiian Culture,” in Native Hawaiians Study Commission Report, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior), pp. 173–97.
Reading 13 “No Way my Boys are Going to be Like That!”: Parents’ Responses to Children’s Gender Nonconformity
Emily W. Kane
In this and the following three selections, we examine socialization, the process of learning cultural values and norms. Socialization refers to these social processes through which an individual becomes integrated into a social group by learning the group’s culture and his or her roles in that group. It is largely through this process that an individual’s concept of self is formed. Thus, socialization teaches us the cultural norms, values, and skills necessary to survive in society. Socialization also enables us to form social identities and to develop an awareness about ourselves as individuals. We construct our social identities through social interaction with others, including members of our families, our peers, teachers, and employers. The following reading by Emily Kane, a professor of sociology at Bates College, is taken from a 2002 article in Gender & Society of the same name. Here, Kane examines socialization and how we learn our gender identities following birth.
Parents begin gendering their children from their very first awareness of those children, whether in pregnancy or while awaiting adoption. Children themselves become active participants in this gendering process by the time they are conscious of the social relevance of gender, typically before the age of two. I address one aspect of this process of parents doing gender, both for and with their children, by exploring how parents respond to gender nonconformity among preschool-aged children. As West and Zimmerman
