Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders

Chapter 7: Re-Visioning Family: Māhūwahine and Male-to-Female Transgender in Contemporary Hawai‘i

135 CHAPTER 7 Re-Visioning Family Māhūwahine and Male-to-Female Transgender in Contemporary Hawai‘i Linda L. Ikeda A way of life can be shared among individuals of different ages, status, and social activity. It can yield intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized. It seems to me that a way of life can yield a culture and an ethics. To be “gay,” I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual but to try and define and develop a way of life. Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life” This chapter explores a particular network of transgender individuals in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, and the ways in which they construct family and other communities of belonging. Though only a minority of these individuals identify as gay, Foucault’s comments tap into the potentiality of “a way of life” over circumscribed modes of being and sexuality, as well as the inventive “self-fashioning”that appears to be central to transgender family making , at least in particular times and places. Both these features of creative development and self-definition are evident in this Honolulu community. For all its creativity,however,the self-fashioning of transgender life has remained largely invisible to outsiders, though several have documented other, often more sensational, aspects of their lives, including transgender residing in urban Honolulu. Matzner (2001), for example, photographed 136 Ikeda and interviewed several prominent māhūwahine (male-to-female transgender ) as part of an oral history project; Owens (2005) directed a controversial documentary entitled Downtown Girls: The Hookers of Honolulu and used candid interviews and hidden-camera footage to record the lives of transgender prostitutes; and Xian (2001) covered both māhū and drag queens in her documentary on colonization, sexuality, and homophobia in Hawai‘i. The mainstream media have also paid little attention to transgender and their ordinary lives, including their family formations, though they remain quick to cover the titillating––such as transgender involvement in sex work, the drug trade, and other illegal or risk-taking practices (e.g., Gulya 2008). As a result, we have information about the novel and the “spectacular” (Namaste 2000), but little understanding of transgender individuals and their everyday lives, particularly with regard to practices of survival and belonging across societies and historical times. Furthermore, we have little understanding of the formation and importance of family for the transgender , as well as other forms of relatedness.1 In this chapter, I have two aims: first, to shed light on female-identified transgender in their making of community and family in contemporary Honolulu and, second, to challenge the sensational––that is, impoverished and bleak accounts as well as those that have been glamorized, exoticized, or sexualized––in favor of the ordinary and the “everyday” (Smith 1987). The Photovoice Project The data for this project were partially comprised of photographs taken by sixteen camera-wielding study participants. These photographs served as springboards for narratives, which I collected in the course of four focus groups conducted in the city and county of Honolulu in the fall of 2007.2 These narratives, including the verbal and photographic, illuminate particular positionings rather than set or static identities. The narratives also serve to situate individual stories within broader cultural and historical trajectories :“Identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by,and position ourselves within,the narratives of the past”(Hall 1989,225). All sixteen participants self-identified as māhū, māhūwahine, or femaleidentified transgender (sometimes referred to as “TG”), with fourteen living as women and two as men (self-identified as “butch queens”).3 Of the sixteen participants, ten self-identified as Hawaiian or part Hawaiian and six as Pacific Islander (mainly Samoan) or mixed Pacific Islander and other Re-Visioning Family 137 ethnicities. The average age of participants was thirty-three; all but one were residing with a partner, family members, or friends or in a residential facility, such as a “clean and sober” house for recovering substance abusers. Though only one had completed college, 18 percent held an Associate’s degree (granted after two years of tertiary education or training) or its equivalent. The average income (for the 81 percent who were employed) ranged from US$800 to US$3,833 a month.4 The community leader who was charged with recruitment for the project was heavily involved in...