No Ka Māhūi Aloha: Unsettling Homo/Hetero-Nationalist Logics of Belonging

Abstract: In this essay, I argue that settler queer modernity attaches itself to logics of US nationalism in ways that naturalize settlement within US-occupied Indigenous territories. In Hawai'i, settler modernity and settler queer modernity seek to settle our ancestral ontologies, ascribing a "queer" framework onto poorly understood modes of Kanaka Maoli being, for example, māhū. The concept of the māhūi seeks to unmoor the idea of māhū from "queer" frameworks that enable the hetero-homo binary through notions of national belonging that figure us as vanishing. Thus, through theoretical and archival conversations about belonging, the māhūi is illuminated to be an epistemological plug-in to a Kanaka Maoli present conceived on our terms and through our thought structures.