Through interviews with archaeologists and Kanaka Maoli, whose personal knowledge of and experiences with the discipline of archaeology extends back to the 1940s, i examine past and present rela-tionships between people interested in the protection, perpetuation, and preservation of hawaiian culture. These interviews, conducted in 2005, pro-vide insights into the character of contemporary relationships as well as identifying past events and practices contributing to current tensions

Both Mathesons continued to cough.

the intersections between individual lives and the larger historical and political contexts in which they participated.

What can these images say about the actual indi-viduals, living and dead, portrayed in them? What can they tell us about the war and Japanese/American militarism in the Pacific? What stories—whose stories—do they not tell?

“We may be dead tomor-row;”

“the Americans,” for the sake of free-dom, came marching onto the island in 1944 just like we Boy Scouts used to march in the annual Kwajalein Parade, waving the American flag and setting things straight.

a photo her father had taken in 1932, probably of a dance troupe, with an ironic caption painted beside it in white ink: “Is this what they mean by ‘In the South Seas, she’s a beauty?’ ” he asks sarcastically, citing Ishida’s exact lines “Nanyō ja bijin.” His diary and his various descriptions of Micronesian ports of call make the implica-tion quite clear: the realities of the islands and Islanders who inhab-ited them were different from their romantic preconception

ess representative of Marshallese femininity and more like a touristic American postcard advertising 1930s Waikiki. It is suggestive in the way that it directly references a European-American primitive fantasy of the tropics, if not Polynesia. An emulation of the trope of the hula girl, her arms are spread back as she gazes out toward a distant hori-zon. The Polydor image thus fuses the Japanese Nanyō “tropicalistic” optic toward the Marshall Islands in Micronesia with its Western coun-terpart in Polynesia.

Yoden’s earlier version, Ishida’s lyrics no longer imagine the bungling antics of a troupe of “black” Islander men competing for the love of a chiefly woman; the presumably Japanese narrator of the song has already claimed her, like Japan has claimed the Marshall Islands, as his own.

Hannah Arendt,

From the point of view of language, it is possible to assimilate inclusion to sense and membership to denotation. In this way, the fact that a word always has more sense than it can actually denote corresponds to the theorem of the point of excess. Precisely this disjunction is at issue both in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory of the constitutive excess of the signifier over the signified (“there is always a lack of equivalence between the rwo, which is resolvable for a divine intellect alone, and which results in the existence of a superabundance of the signifier over the signifieds on which it rests” [Introduction à Mauss, p. xlix]) and in Emile Benveniste’s doctrine of the irreducible opposition between the semiotic and the semantic

What the example shows is its belonging to a class, but for this very reason the example steps out of its class in the very moment in which it exhibits and delimits it (in the case of a linguistic syntagm, the example thus shows its own signifying and, in this way, suspends its own meaning).

Here the sphere of law shows its essential proximity to that of language, just as in an occurrence of actual speech, a word acquires its ability to denote a segment of reality only insofar as it is also meaningful in its own not-denoting

The paradox of sovereignty consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order. If the sovereign is truly the one to whom the juridical order grants the power of proclaiming a state of exception and, therefore, of suspending the orders own validity, then “the sovereign stands outside the juridical order and, nevertheless, belongs to it, since it is up to him to decide if the constitution is to be suspended in toto”

Sex law is harsh. The penalties for violating sex statutes are universally out of proportion to anysocial or individual harm. A single act of consensual but illicit sex, such as placing one’s lips upon thegenitalia of an enthusiastic partner, is punished in many states with more severity than rape, battery, ormurder. Each such genital kiss, each lewd caress, is a separate crime.

Besides organizing homosexuals and prostitutes into localized populations, the ‘modernizationof sex’ has generated a system of continual sexual ethnogenesis. Other populations of eroticdissidents – commonly known as the ‘perversions’ or the ‘paraphilias’ – also began to coalesce.

My parents, Tēvita and Lakalaka, were among the first groups of students who left Tonga to attend the CCH. My mother came to Hawai‘i in 1959, and my father left Tonga for Hawai‘i in 1960

At the funeral, I delivered my speech and recited six generations from memory. It was a great accomplishment for me.

FIGURE 5.Symmetry, beauty, and emotions.

For example, indigenous Moanan cultures predominantly arrange time and space by locating the past as the time in front, the present as the time in the middle, and the future as the time that comes after or behind.8

In a concrete way, space manifests itself in uho (content) and time expresses itself in fuo (form).5 Finally, according to the tā-vā theory of reality, time and space and form and content are inseparable (Māhina 2010b).

Tātuku:

ender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitu. tive acts and locate and account for those acts within the compulsory| frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of | gender.

f there is something right in Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification.

The presumption here is that the “being” of gender is an effect, an object of a genealogical investigation that maps out the political parameters of its construction in the mode of ontology.

It is not the failed project of criticizing phallogocentrism or heterosexual hegemony, as ifa political critique could effectively undo the cultural construction of the feminist critic’s sexuality. If sexuality is culturally constructed within existing power relations, then the postulation of a normative sexuality that is “before,” “outside,” or “beyond” power isa cultural impossibility and a politically impracticable dream, one that postpones the concrete and contemporary task of rethinking subversive possibilities for sexuality and identity within the terms of power itself. This critical task pre- sumes, of course, that to operate within the matrix of power is not the. same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination. It offers the: possibility of a repetition of the law which is not its consolidation, but its displacement. In the place of a “male-identified” sexuality in which. “male” serves as the cause and irreducible meaning of that sexuality, we might develop a notion of sexuality constructed in terms of phallic relations of power that replay and redistribute the possibilities of that phallicism precisely through the subversive operation of “identifica- tions” that are, within the power field of sexuality, inevitable.

Here it seems wise to reinvoke Foucault who, in claiming that sexuality and power are coextensive, implicitly refutes the postulation of a subversive or emancipatory sexuality which could be free of the law. We can press the argument further by pointing out that “the before” of the law and “the after” are discursively and performatively instituted modes of temporality that are invoked within the terms of a normative framework which asserts that subver- sion, destabilization, or displacement requires a sexuality that some- how escapes the hegemonic prohibitions on sex.

gender proves to be performative— that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gen- der is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed. The challenge for rethinking gender categories outside of the metaphysics of substance will have to consider the rele- vance of Nietzsche’s claim in On the Genealogy of Morals that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.””” In an applica- tion that Nietzsche himself would not have anticipated or condoned, we might state as a corollary: There is no gender identity behind the! expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted byl € the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.

Central to each of these views, however, is the notion that sex appears within hegemonic language as a substance, as, metaphysically speaking, a self-identical being.

“identity” is assured through the stabilizing concepts of | sex, gender, and sexuality, the very notion of “the person” is called ‘ into question by the cultural emergence of those “incoherent” or | “discontinuous” gendered beings who appear to be persons but who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by ' which persons are defined.

In other words, the “coherence” and “continu- ity” of “the person” are not logical or analytic features of personhood, but, rather, socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility.

Is “unity” necessary for effective political action?

The opening discussion in this chapter argued that this globalizing gesture has spawned a number of criticisms from women who claim that the category of “women” is normative and exclusion- ary and is invoked with the unmarked dimensions of class and racial privilege intact. In other words, the insistence upon the coherence and unity of the category of women has effectively refused the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of “women” are constructed.

both marker and marked are maintained within a masculinist mode of signification in which the female body is “marked off,” as it were, from the domain of the signifiable. In post-Hegelian terms, she is “cancelled,” but not preserved.

Beauvoir proposes that the female body ought to be the situation and instrumentality of women’s freedom, not a defining and limiting essence.”

This association of the body with the female works along magical relations of reciprocity whereby the female sex becomes re- stricted to its body, and the male body, fully disavowed, becomes,

Although Beauvoir is often understood to be calling for the right of women, in effect, to become existential subjects and, hence, for inclusion within the terms of an abstract universality, her position also implies a fundamental critique of the very disembodi- ment of the abstract masculine epistemological subject.'

contention that reverses Beauvoir’s argument (and Wittig’s) that the female sex is marked,

rigaray would maintain, however, that the feminine “sex” is a point of linguistic absence,

This relational or contextual point of view sug- gests that what the person “is,” and, indeed, what gender “is,” is always relative to the constructed relations in which it is determined."” As a shifting and contextual phenomenon, gender does not denote a substantive being, but a relative point of convergence among cultur- ally and historically specific sets of relations.

Women are not only represented falsely within the Sartrian frame of signifying-subject and signified- Other, but the falsity of the signification points out the entire structure of representation as inadequate.

Simone de Beauvoir suggests in The Second Sex that “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one.”'’? For Beauvoir, gender is “constructed,” but implied in her formulation is an agent, a cogito, who somehow takes on or appropriates that gender and could, in principle, take on some other gender. Is gender as variable and volitional as Beauvoir’s account seems to suggest? Can “construction” in such a case be reduced to a form of choice? Beauvoir is clear that one “becomes” a woman, but always under a cultural compulsion to become one. And clearly, the compulsion does not come from “sex.” There is nothing in her account that guarantees that the “one” who becomes a woman is necessarily female. If “the body is a situation,”"* as she claims, there is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural meanings; hence, sex could not qualify as a prediscursive anatomical facticity. Indeed, sex, by definition, will be shown to have been gender all along.”

aken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discon- tinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. As- suming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of “men” will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that “women” will interpret only female bodies. Further, even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their mor- | phology and constitution (which will become a question), there is no ‘reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two.®

Perhaps the problem is even more serious. Is the construction of the category of women as a coherent and stable subject an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations? And is not such a reification precisely contrary to feminist aims? To what extent does the category of women achieve stability and coherence only in the context of the heterosexual matrix?’I

y suggestion is that the presumed universality and unity of the subject of feminism is effectively undermined by the constraints of the representational discourse in which it functions. Indeed, the premature insistence on a stable subject of feminism, understood as a seamless category of women, inevitably generates multiple refusals to accept the category. These domains of exclusion reveal the coercive and regulatory consequences of that construction, even when the construction has been elaborated for emancipatory purposes. Indeed, the fragmentation within feminism and the para- doxical opposition to feminism from “women” whom feminism claims to represent suggest the necessary limits of identity politics.

Rather than a stable signifier that commands the assent of those whom it purports to describe and represent, women, even in the plural, has become a troublesome term, a site of contest, a cause for anxiety. As Denise Riley’s title suggests, Am I That Name? is a question produced by the very possibility of the name’s multiple significations.”

the juridical formation of language and politics that represents women as “the subject” of feminism is itself a discursive formation and effect of a given version of representational politics. And the feminist subject turns out to be discursively constituted by the very political system that is supposed to facilitate its emancipation. This becomes politically problematic if that system can be shown to produce gendered subjects along a differential axis of domination or to produce subjects who are presumed to be masculine. In such cases, an uncritical appeal to such a system for the emancipation of “women” will be clearly self- defeating.

, “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire,” reconsiders the status of “women” as the subject of feminism and the sex/gender distinction. Compulsory heterosexuality and phallogocentrism are understood as regimes of power/discourse with often divergent ways of answering central questions of gender discourse: How does language construct the categories of sex? Does “the feminine” resist representation within language? Is language understood as phallogocentric (Luce Irigaray’s question)? Is “the feminine” the only sex represented within a lan- guage that conflates the female and the sexual (Monique Wittig’s contention)? Where and how do compulsory heterosexuality and phallogocentrism converge? Where are the points of breakage be- tween them? How does language itself produce the fictive construction of “sex” that supports these various regimes of power? Within a language of presumptive heterosexuality, what sorts of continuities are assumed to exist among sex, gender, and desire? Are these terms discrete? What kinds of cultural practices produce subversive disconti- nuity and dissonance among sex, gender, and desire and call into question their alleged relations?

“female” no longer appears to be a stable notion,

compulsory heterosexuality.

Divine, the hero/heroine of Hairspray as well, whose impersonation of women implicitly suggests that gender is a kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real.

phallogocentrism