![]() ![]() Williams said her house mother taught her and her sisters to “be who we want to be be who we are, especially in public. The support of her “drag house,” consisting of elder mahu and fellow mahu sisters, helped her cope. She remembers people saying, “Stop acting mahu.” Leikia Williams, the drag show’s producer and a performer, said mahu was a derogatory word when she was growing up in Honolulu in the 1980s. annexed Hawaii in 1898, making it a territory. government overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy and a few years later prohibited the teaching of Hawaiian language in schools. Christian missionaries who first arrived in 1820 taught Hawaiians to shun anything deviating from clearly defined male and female roles. Hawaiians placed four boulders on the beach to honor them, which are still visible today.ĭespite these deep roots, mahu awareness in Hawaii has faded during centuries of foreign influence. ![]() One story reflecting this history is that of four mahu healers who visited Waikiki from Tahiti more than 500 years ago. The council normally holds its conventions in Hawaii but met in Nevada for the first time - coincidentally during Pride month - in an acknowledgement that more than half of all Native Hawaiians now live outside the islands. The “Mahu Magic” show on Tuesday was sponsored by the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, a nonprofit organization better known for administering rent relief and job training programs. Sometimes we completely walk away from one and walk to the other. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re coming from male to female or female to the male, and it doesn’t matter what your physical articulation is,” Wong-Kalu said. In the Western context, Wong-Kalu uses “she” and “her” but prefers the word “o ia,” which is a Hawaiian language pronoun used for all people. The Hawaiian language makes it easier to inhabit that spot because it doesn’t have gendered pronouns. ![]() ![]() “That’s what mahu does - mahu offers a space between the concepts of male and female,” Manalo-Camp said. The crowd erupted in raucous cheers and applause.Īdam Keawe Manalo-Camp, an ethnohistorian who identifies as mahu and queer, said mahu also can include people who would be nonbinary, would define themselves as third gender and those attracted to someone of the same gender. “It is meant to reinstate the rightful place that mahu have between kane and wahine,” Wong-Kalu said, using the Hawaiian words for man and woman. “It’s a little different from other drag shows because this one has a very specific purpose,” Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, who is mahu, a community leader and a master teacher of hula and chanting, told the audience midway through the event. They starred in a drag show this week called “Mahu Magic” on the sidelines of a Native Hawaiian convention in Las Vegas to remind the world of the respected place gender-fluidity has held in Hawaiian culture for hundreds of years, while also making a foray into the national conversation about transgender rights. Spectators roared as a performer shook her hips in a Tahitian-style dance.Īll were “mahu” - a Hawaiian term for people with dual male and female spirit and a mixture of gender traits. LAS VEGAS (AP) - Drag queens donning the white, red and blue of the Hawaiian flag shimmied across the stage to a throbbing techno remix of “Aloha Oe,” a song composed by Hawaii’s last reigning monarch. ![]()
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