which will stay in people’s minds, as what they have really ‘seen.’”
35
In the photos,
‘feminine’ is attached to the native body in general, both male and female, as well as to
nature. All images take on the appearance of passivity and all accepting. In such cases
the male that is evoked is that of structure and order. Entire cultures are feminized along
with the landscapes. “Hawai`i is systematically feminized in that the natural environment
and the Hawaiian people are constructed as female, and tourism, through the trope of
exploration with its inference of penetration, is constructed as an act of masculine
possession.”
36
That nature and the female can be so easily collapsed into one another and
malleable to patriarchy is an assertion by “eco-feminists.”
For Haunani Kay Trask, the notion of lovely hula hands represents a sick cycle of
cultural prostitution that also reads Hawai`i as feminine and in so doing enforces the need
for the gendering West. “Above all, Hawai`i is ‘she,’ the Western image of the Native
‘female’ in her magical allure. And if luck prevails, some of ‘her’ will rub off on you,
the visitor. This fictional Hawai`i comes out of the depths of Western sexual sickness
that demands a dark, sin-free Native for instant gratification between imperialist wars.”
37
Trask calls such reproductions of cultural images ‘thefts of identity’ and are reflective
and read only from the haole (white) perspective in regards to native culture. According
to Trask, Hawaiians are read from this perspective to legitimate the very real violences
that accompany tourism in the forms of economic, social, and political exploitation.
Desire is anticipated and met with the feminine passivity of the Islands. “The abiding
memory of sailors visiting the Lands was of women. They were beautiful and wanton.
35
John Urry, The Tourist Gaze. London: SAGE Publications, Second Edition, 2002; 78.
36
Goss; 682.
37
Trask, Haunani-Kay. From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in
Hawai`i. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 1993; 137.
Convention