Māhū

Colonialism and Heteronormativity

In the 1970s, cisgender Hawaiian scholar Mary Kawena Puku’i, one of the foremost experts on traditional Hawaiian culture and knowledge, described māhū as “homosexuals” and “hermaphrodites” while explaining the coexistence of kāne (men), wāhine (women), and māhū (intersex, queer, trans, two-spirit) in ancient Hawaii. However, her description of māhū ironically failed to adequately describe māhū as a uniquely Hawaiian identity that had evolved despite the domination of Judeo-Christianity, the nuclear family, and heteronormativity. In the light of subsequent scholarship, any such Western bias in Kawena Puku’i’s work can be understood as a reflection of colonialism.

Colonialism in Hawaii began with the arrival of the expedition of the British Royal Navy and Royal Society on a ship commanded by Captain James Cook in 1778 and the arrival of Euro-American, Judeo-Christian missionaries in the 1820s. As military navigators sought goods and natural resources for exploitation, missionaries suppressed Indigenous people through the cultural power of law. Heteronormativity vis-à-vis the nuclear family became a way of imposing social control and cultural imperialism.

The nuclear family is the dominant, often preferred family structure in the West—a problematic concept when it leads to the exclusion of other family forms and practices. These exclusions are evident on cultural, religious, and political levels around the world. European and American forms of colonialism in particular have demonized traditional Indigenous understandings of gender and sexuality, thus criminalizing queer and trans individuals and marginalizing chosen and extended families. The nuclear family is of course not inherently a bad thing, but it is a hegemonic construction of family that can focus more on one’s immediate familial makeup. Such a construction does not incorporate other purposes of family, which include those that establish personal relationships that uphold tenets of unconditional love and support. Extended families may look different, but there is no less love shared between them.

In contemporary Hawaii, māhū have found themselves reclaiming the extended family or ohana as a means to challenge the imposition of the nuclear family structure in debates about same-sex marriage and Hawaiian sovereignty, and they have consistently maintained a sense of inclusive social harmony between the three sexes: wāhine, māhū, and kāne.

Decolonization and Social Harmony

As a concept, māhū indigenizes the coexistence of māhū, kāne, and wāhine as part of the extended family principle central to Hawaiian Polynesian sociality. In the Hawaiian creation story, the Kumulipo, there are three sexes: wāhine (woman; female), which is the first sex; māhū (intersex), the second; and last is kāne (man; male). Acknowledging three sexes has long been a part of Hawaiian mo’olelo (stories) and mo’oku’auhau (genealogies).

...