Saturday, January 9, 2010: 3:10 PM
Manchester Ballroom E (Hyatt)
Utopian fantasies of South Sea Islands have a long tradition in western thinking. In the United States, during the 19th century these fantasies increasingly began to focus on the islands of Hawaii. As Hawaii underwent dramatic political, economic and cultural changes due to growing American influence, U.S. popular culture continued to imagine the islands as a paradise of exotic otherness. These representations functioned as a corrective critique of American society by constructing a primitive Hawaii, unspoiled by civilization and its inhibitions.
Hollywood films have played an important role in producing and spreading these utopian fantasies. My paper wishes to analyze some of these filmic representations of Hawaii and their cultural function by situating them in the discursive field out of which they emerged at a specific historical moment: the post-World War II United States. 1950s and early 1960s America was obsessed with a heavily sexualized iconography of exotic primitivism. I will analyze this iconography and its filmic expressions as a product of intersecting discourses of gender and race. Against the backdrop of the widespread critique of domestic conformity and the alleged feminization of hegemonic masculinity, the exoticization of the white male body in films such as Blue Hawaii, Ride the Wild Surf, or Gidget Goes Hawaiian functioned as a strategy of remasculinization. Paradoxically, at the same time this association of white bodies with Hawaiian primitivism and exoticism also threatened both the whiteness and the virility of these bodies. Through a reading that focuses closely on both the films and their discursive context(s), the paper thus tries to analyze filmic representations of Hawaii in postwar America as constructions of an always unstable and problematic white masculinity
Hollywood films have played an important role in producing and spreading these utopian fantasies. My paper wishes to analyze some of these filmic representations of Hawaii and their cultural function by situating them in the discursive field out of which they emerged at a specific historical moment: the post-World War II United States. 1950s and early 1960s America was obsessed with a heavily sexualized iconography of exotic primitivism. I will analyze this iconography and its filmic expressions as a product of intersecting discourses of gender and race. Against the backdrop of the widespread critique of domestic conformity and the alleged feminization of hegemonic masculinity, the exoticization of the white male body in films such as Blue Hawaii, Ride the Wild Surf, or Gidget Goes Hawaiian functioned as a strategy of remasculinization. Paradoxically, at the same time this association of white bodies with Hawaiian primitivism and exoticism also threatened both the whiteness and the virility of these bodies. Through a reading that focuses closely on both the films and their discursive context(s), the paper thus tries to analyze filmic representations of Hawaii in postwar America as constructions of an always unstable and problematic white masculinity