Reading “Lovely Hula Hands” was very interesting and caught my attention. Trask provides the comparison of the tourism in Hawaii to a woman being a prostitute, and explains how those two transformations are similar. She describes that Hawaii is no longer being used for it’s beauty and culture, but rather only for economic purposes. Trask also argues that the tourism industry is only benefitting larger companies, not everyone because the profits tend to go back to the countries where they came from. As she said, “…tourism has appropriated and prostituted the accomplishments of a resurgent interest in things Hawaiian” (Trask 24).
What caught my eye the most was her descriptive example of the “hula dance”. She explains how the meaning of the dance has simply gone away and has become something only for entertainment and profit, rather than understanding and appreciating the Hawaiian celebration of human nature. Trask presented a word that we sometimes use away from Hawaiian culture, “Ohana”. Some people use it to say “Ohana means family” just to make it seem like distantly-related people are close together like a family. But Trask uses it to help the reader understand how women are the lifegivers of the nation, and that their culture holds traditional sexual values. She continues to compare it to Hawaii, and how it “is the female object of degraded and victimized sexual assault” (Trask 27). Instead of their lands being a source of land and shelter, or for a woman, her body as something so pure, it is now a place for profit and money only; being used. In conclusion, cultural degradation is what seems to be causing Hawaii it’s many problems, as Trask explains. While tourism brings more jobs, and less unemployment for local Hawaiian’s, it does make them blind-sided to the fact that it is ruining their culture and only being used for profit.
Skye Shaffer 