Gendered Representations in Hawai‘i's Anti-Gmo Activism

Background

Hawai'i has been occupied by the US since a coup overthrew the established Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and, similar to other Pacific territories, has never been decolonised (Trask, 1999 [1993]; Kauanui, 2008; Baldacchino, 2010). Native Hawaiian organised resistance to the overthrow and to US occupation is longstanding (Kame'eleihiwa, 1992; Silva, 2004), and native-settler coalitions continue to resist environmental and socio-culturally destructive land use practices (Goodyear-Ka’ōpua et al., 2014). Since the late 2000s, food and land-related movements have gathered momentum and visibility in Hawai'i, including activism against GMOs, as Hawai'i has become a global centre for transgenic seed production. ¹ While some of the gender politics of Native Hawaiian resistances have been analysed (Trask, 1999 [1993]; Tengan, 2008a; Goodyear-Ka’ōpua, 2009; Hall, 2009), so far nothing has been written about the gendered politics of contemporary food, land and environment-related activism or anti-GMO organising. This article deploys an intersectional understanding of gender in order to analyse the ways in which multiple axes of difference inflect and are shaped by one another (Crenshaw, 1989; McCall, 2005) within political organising (Chun et al., 2013) and specifically within food movements (Harper, 2010).

Gender, Social Movements and Representation

The intersectional politics of Hawai'i's anti-GMO organising and representations thereof are of interest to several areas of feminist and other critical scholarship. In the first case, this includes how multiple axes of identities materialise and are represented in collective action, shaping possibilities for alliance, coalition and social change. In particular, feminist theorising of intersectionality within different social movements has shown how social meanings are made and identifications are constructed within political organising (Chun et al., 2013, p. 937). In this way, social movement identity framings can mobilise, as well as exclude, potential members and supporters (ibid.). This is because constructions of identities can come at the expense of particular groups, ignore differences within groups and/or exclude people with membership in more than one category of identity (Crenshaw 1991; Chun et al., 2013, p. 937). These insights mainly stem from consideration of feminist and anti-racist organising—so-called ‘identity-based’ social movements—and their application within studies of food and environmental justice organising is more recent (Harper, 2010; Porter and Redmond, 2014).

In another vein, gender research on social movements is also of interest to the intersectional politics of Hawai'i's anti-GMO activism. This literature crosses diverse disciplinary terrain and is subdivided by political positionings (e.g. Marxist, liberal, etc.), along geographic lines (e.g. global South, global North), and according to whether movements articulate gender-related goals (Conway, 2013, p. 6). Green and environmental movements within the global North are often theorised as examples of new social movements, ² and are analysed for how they frame social issues and ‘grievances’, and construct identities and belonging within particular places and spaces (Horn, 2013, p. 21). New social movement research has emphasised the construction of identities as complex and contingent processes of meaning making and knowledge production (Conway, 2013, p. 6) wherein movements rework diverse significations, myths, codes and ideologies, including gendered ones (Williams, 1995; Yulia, 2010, pp. 630–631). This research has explored how gender influences the ways in which movements make appeals to different audiences, their processes of mobilisation, political tactics and ‘framing processes’ as well as divisions of labour, organisational dynamics and ‘opportunity structures’ (Einwohner et al., 2000; Kuumba, 2001; Yulia, 2010, p. 628). This research on the gender dimensions of social movement processes is useful in analysing the work that gendered representations in anti-GMO activism do to shape supporter identification and participation in movements.

In a different way, feminist research on mixed-gender movements helps to analyse movements in which women predominate, but where gender is not an explicit area of focus (Horn, 2013, pp. 45–46), as in the case of anti-GMO activism in Hawai'i. This research has shown how women in mixed-gender movements often participate strongly in early organising but are not always recognised as leaders once movements professionalise, since women's ‘grassroots’ community work is not always acknowledged as political (Yulia, 2010, p. 630). Even when gender is not explicitly acknowledged, mixed-gender movement actors may nonetheless ‘use’ gender strategically to claim or contest legitimacy within the political realm—either for themselves or in ways that affect others’ political claims (Einwohner et al., 2000, p. 680). Accordingly, gender forms a part of the larger social stories invoked by social movements that define who is a legitimate political actor (ibid., p. 691).

Einwohner et al. (ibid., p. 681; see also Caiazza, 2002) posit that social movements whose framings coincide with normative ideas about gender are more likely to resonate with the public, and that in general, familiar social ideas are more likely to seem compelling and unthreatening to public audiences (Einwohner et al., 2000, p. 691). Examples of familiar gender norms deployed within activism include tropes of mothering and caring (Yulia, 2010, p. 633) as well as masculine framings of soldiering (Noonan, 1995; Yulia, 2010, p. 631). While these insights are useful in drawing connections between a range of otherwise dissimilar movements, they nonetheless rely on a somewhat unitary notion of ‘the general public’ with the assumption that familiar gendered norms are welcomed and ignores how different audiences make sense of activist messages.

However, several further insights in relation to femininities are particularly useful for thinking about the quandaries that gendered representations present for different audiences. Einwohner et al. (2000, p. 693) argue that female activists in particular are caught in a double bind in which they are expected to demonstrate normatively ‘feminine’ characteristics, while being delegitimised as ‘irrational’ and ‘emotional’ on the same basis. These gendered politics of who is seen as a legitimate political actor may indeed influence support for movements and yet gender is not the only dynamic of difference that shapes political legitimacy: processes of racialisation and classing also offer their own double binds for differently positioned social movement subjects who may be delegitimised as political subjects. The intersectional politics of reason and legitimacy within social movements are therefore sometimes contradictory and always context specific. For these reasons, it becomes possible to see how normative gender and other social ideals can operate to advance social movement goals by conforming to familiar frames, which can generate sympathy and support, while at other times these familiar frames may also form the basis for delegitimation (Ferree and Mueller, 2000; Yulia, 2010).

This is also true for green and environmental movements. Bell and Braun (2010) and Alkon (2011) have argued that representations of working-class miner masculinities specifically constrained Appalachian men's participation in activism against coal mining, while ideas about femininity and caring facilitated women's roles as movement leaders. This work demonstrates the need for relational accounts of how gender, race, class and other axes of difference influence mixed-gender movements, including food movements (Brown and Ferguson, 1995; DeLind and Ferguson, 1999). An important method for undertaking such accounts includes analysing how activists (re)present themselves by framing, highlighting and downplaying different markers of identities (Hall, 1997).

Accordingly, research on representation has been important for analysing how identities are (re)presented, emphasising the relationships between the politics of the visible and the power of the normative. Scholars of representation thereby connect what is made visible and what is rendered absent as continually intertwined and embedded within relations of power (Foucault, 1970 cited in Hall, 1997, p. 27; Chow, 1993). In relation to gender and gender norms, representations can be said to encompass ‘the real of symbolic and cultural practice that produces images, ideas and fantasies of gender’ (Wearing, 2014, p. 143). In other words, representations function as sites where gendered meanings are reflected, resisted and constructed (ibid.) which, for social movements, can influence the sympathies and antipathies of different audiences. By citing and reworking normative gender, social movement representations are both political and normative, helping to construct desirable norms for gendered performances in politics while also helping to establish the very conditions by which ‘gender’ and ‘politics’ become intelligible in the first place (Butler, 1990, p. 1; Whelehan, 2014, p. 240).

Methods

The task of analysing gendered social movement representations can benefit from multiple methods. Social movement research typically mixes participatory and ethnographic work and textual and media analysis (e.g. Tyler, 2013), but there is as yet no rigorously defined methodology for the study of gendered visual representations in social movements (Mattoni and Teune, 2014, p. 876). However, some feminists have combined visual methods in their research on public protests (Tyler, 2013; Coe, 2015) in order to unpack the discourses, symbols and visual culture activists deploy. This research engages with the dual meanings of representation by interrogating not only how gender is represented, but how gender informs what comes to be recognised as political (Coe, 2015, p. 891). In another area, visual ethnographies tie together analysis of visual cultural production with ethnographic observation and participation (Pink, 2013).

This article draws on these methods and is based on wider ethnographic fieldwork since 2012 on gender, labour, food and farming in Hawai'i. This paper focusses on activist representations from 2012 to 2013, at a time when local anti-GMO activism was gaining momentum (Gupta, 2013). During this period, I observed gendered themes within anti-GMO organising that had been highlighted elsewhere by researchers on environmental and food movements. These included the use of maternal and warrior metaphors for activists, as well as the prominence of certain representations of young female sexuality in activist work and materials. Gender was most obviously a theme for groups that used specifically gendered language (e.g. ‘Moms on a Mission’), but I also observed more subtle deployment of gender norms within activist use of imagery of women as mothers and children across the movement. ³ Moreover, I observed that Hawai'i GMO debates, as with many other food and environmental debates, rely on scientific and legal frames that delegitimise emotion and therefore the knowledge of those associated with emotion, such as women and people of colour (Seager, 2003).

Within the context of these ethnographic observations, it was determined that activist representations offered a generative site for analysing the work that gender and other intesecting markers of difference do in relation to GMO debates and specifially within anti-GMO movements. The photographic images analysed in this article were chosen from activist YouTube videos and slideshows that largely depict public protest events and activist signage. The images were chosen to spotlight some of the ways in which multiple markers of identities are deployed within Hawai'i anti-GMO organising, using the visual to anchor the discussion, rather than to represent the whole range of gendered representations in activism. In this sense, the approach is similar to Tyler's (2013) who draws on mixed methods in her research on gendered protest. Tyler (ibid., p. 213) argues for engaging with protest materials in order to trouble existing understandings of politics, without trying to fix the meaning of protest acts or to speak for protestors themselves. The purpose here is comparable: to analyse the work that intersectional gender does in mixed-gender organising in ways that may trouble prevailing theorising on gender- and food-related social movements. The analysis of images thus helps to reflect on how identities are represented within social movement organising and how this shapes, constrains and enables different subjects’ participation.

Because the images were selected based on fieldwork observations, they partially reflect broader research relationships (Posocco, 2011) and my access to particular subsets of organising—access that is of course directly influenced by my own location as a locally raised white (haole) ⁴ woman. Issues of personal location are particularly important to consider when analysing representations of race, as Campt (2012) highlights, given that the desire to ‘see’ race can animate even critical researchers’ work. Campt (ibid., pp. 127–128) reminds that transparent relationships between the visual and ‘racial truths’ cannot be assumed, as images always result from socially embedded processes of ‘conjuring and fixing’—in this case, from fieldwork encounters (Posocco, 2011). The analysis offered here is thus informed by these positionings and social relationships, is necessarily partial, and forms just one part of what might be more systematic accounts of how gender operates within anti-GMO organising and within Hawai'i food politics more broadly.

Hawai'i's Anti-GMO Organising in Context

Hawai'i's anti-GMO organising takes place within the context of global debates concerning the safety, ethics and economy of transgenic crops amidst wider arguments about the effects of input-intensive agriculture, corporate concentration and gene patenting (Kleinman and Kloppenburg, 1991; Schurman and Munro, 2010; Wield et al., 2010; Lapegna, 2014). Proponents of transgenic technologies highlight the yields of transgenic crops, arguing that they require fewer pesticides (Federation of American Scientists, 2014; James, 2014) and that new plant traits will help sustain growing populations, deal with climate change and reduce costs for farmers (Qaim et al., 2013; James, 2014).

Other research cites concerns about GMOs’ effects on human and environmental health, uncertainties associated with genetic drift, and exposure to the pesticides that transgenic crops have been engineered to withstand. Some social scholars have argued that patents associated with transgenic technologies represent a form of biocolonialism on indigenous plants and people (Goldberg-Hiller and Silva, 2015) and that pesticides have differentiated gendered, classed and racialised health effects, disproportionately affecting those who live, work and play near exposure sites (Acero, 2012).

Differing opinions on transgenic technologies emanate not only from the academy but also from scientific, policy and regulatory entities tasked with the safety of the food supply. The US has declared GMOs safe, and about half of US farmland is used to cultivate transgenic crops, including corn (Fernandez-Cornejo et al., 2014, p. 9). Transnationally, transgenic technologies are promoted through US-backed food aid and philanthropic support (Kleinman and Kloppenburg, 1991), while a handful of transnational corporations dominate the global market for seeds and agrochemicals.

Today, nearly all genetically modified seeds spend some time during their development in the Hawaiian islands (HCIA) and over the last several years, the US-occupied archipelago has become a key centre in the global transgenic seed supply chain. Present since the 1960s, seed companies use Hawai'i's year-round growing season to shorten seed breeding times. Early seed companies have since been acquired by agrochemical giants Dow AgroScience, Monsanto, Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Syngenta and BASF, who now conduct a significant amount of open-air research in Hawai'i—more, in fact, than anywhere else in the US (Callis, 2013). Exported transgenic and hybrid seed ⁵ corn is now the state's highest monetary value agricultural commodity and primary agricultural export, sent to breeders in the US and beyond for cultivation.

Seed companies often utilise the land and infrastructure of former sugar and pineapple plantations, owning and leasing about 10 per cent of total Hawai'i agricultural land from a range of landowners including the state, army and others (Brower, 2013a, 2013b). The companies employ around 1,800 people on the four islands where they operate, hiring field workers from rural areas, many of whom are first or second generation Filipino/a Americans, Native Hawaiian or mixed-raced Locals and migrants from the Pacific and Latin America (Hofschneider, 2014). Research is growing on the social dimensions of anti-GMO activism in the archipelago (Black, 2012; Brower, 2013a, 2016a, 2016b; Gupta, 2013, 2014), but nothing has been written yet about the gender dimensions of seed/agrochemical companies or local GMO debates.

Hawai'i's anti-GMO and pesticide activism

Hawai'i's anti-GMO activism overlaps in some ways with Native Hawaiian sovereignty organising; conservation, food and environmental justice work; and with other consumer and subcultural movements (Brower, 2013b; Gupta, 2013, 2014). Since at least the mid-2000s, Hawai'i activists have contested the presence of seed companies and the ecological, cultural, economic and public health impacts of gene patenting, genetic modification and pesticide use. Specifically, the human and ecological health effect of pesticides has become a prominent issue mobilising supporters who otherwise might not be motivated by concern about GMOs. ⁶ And yet the precise relationships between GMOs and pesticide use remain highly disputed and lack long-term, independent research.

For their part, activists have argued that pesticide use by seed companies in Hawai'i is the likely cause of illnesses affecting surrounding areas, including at least one cancer cluster (Aana v Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Inc., 2013), and that it has led to several reported cases of acute pesticide poisoning in schools (Center for Food Safety, 2015). They argue that the health effects remain unconfirmed in part because seed companies are not required to disclose specific information about pesticide application. Activists contend that Hawai'i's case is unique because plants grown for resistance testing on transgenic field research sites are more frequently sprayed with pesticides, and as weed resistance increases, companies turn to the application of older, more deleterious agrochemicals (Center for Food Safety, 2015).

For their part, seed companies argue that activists do not have sufficient scientific evidence to justify their claims and that, in fact, fewer pesticides overall are used to grow transgenic crops than in conventional agriculture, because plants themselves manufacture genes that resist pests or the weed killers sprayed on them. ⁷ The industry has long asserted that most pesticides used on genetically modified crops, such as RoundUp (glyphosate), are safe even when used in large quantities (Williams et al., 2000; Monsanto, 2002–2012) and cite US federal law as establishing the baseline of public health regulation for both pesticides and GMOs. For both sides, these debates are ongoing, and independent research on the relationships between pesticides and GMOs remains lacking, although one study on pesticides on the island of Kaua'i has recently been drafted (Adler, 2016).

Focussing on the relationships between GMOs and pesticides can be understood as a strategy aimed at convincing a public in a context where GMOs have been declared safe and long-term scientific studies are lacking. In contrast to research on GMOs, there is relatively more scientific and popular consensus concerning the negative health effects of pesticides, including recent concern about glyphosate in particular (see Guyton et al., 2015). Rather than focussing on the direct pesticide exposure faced by applicators and seed company workers, local activism generally highlights pesticide drift—when pesticides move away from sites of application through wind, dirt and groundwater. ⁸ As such, activism tends to centralise consumer, resource-user and public health perspectives, rather than worker ones.

Given the centrality of the pesticide issue in the Hawai'i case, local anti-GMO activism must also be understood in relation to the longer history of environmental and social struggles against chemical use in the islands. Hawai'i already suffers a significant toxic load due to military testing in the environment and the use of agrichemicals by plantation agriculture. As research has shown, the effects of pesticides are socially differentiated, affecting poorer people of colour disproportionately and producing gendered differentiated effects on reproductive systems (Birke, 2000; Seager, 2003; Ayuero and Swistun, 2009; Iovino, 2013). Indeed, Hawai'i already reports higher than average breast cancer rates (Allen et al., 1997, p. 679), and activists are concerned about what they see as continued threats to ‘āina (land), communities and future generations.

While there is significant feminist scholarship on gender, biotechnology and endocrine-disrupting chemicals, ⁹ relatively little has been written specifically about gender and agribiotechnologies (Di Chiro, 2004; Bryant and Pini, 2006) or anti-GMO activism (Bloomfield and Doolin, 2012), let alone from an intersectional perspective. However, feminist theorising on food and environmental justice can help to explore how gender and other axes of difference are deployed, constructed and challenged within anti-GMO organising, even as further research is needed.

A Gender and Food Justice Approach to Analysing Hawaii's Anti-GMO Activism

Movements for ‘food justice’ in the US have emerged at the interstices of environmental, farmworker, indigenous, feminist, civil rights and other transnational movements (Alkon and Agyeman, 2011; Lukens, 2013, p. 74). Food justice scholars emphasise the ways in which social inequalities shape food and farming (Gottlieb and Joshi, 2010; Harper, 2010; Agarwal, 2014; Porter and Redmond, 2014), technologies and science (Haraway, 1989, 2008; Acero, 2012). They also analyse the gender, race and class dimensions of environmental justice activism (Seager, 1994, 2003; Di Chiro, 1998; Stein, 2004; Bell and Braun, 2010; Perkins, 2012) and food and farming movements (Slocum, 2007; Guthman, 2008a, 2008b, 2011; Alkon, 2011; Kimura, 2011; Sachs and Alston, 2014).

Hawai'i's anti-GMO activism intersects with these national and transnational movements for food and environmental justice, as well as with localised struggles for Native Hawaiian sovereignty, the environment and specific conflicts over resource, land use and development (Brower, 2013a, 2013b; Gupta, 2013, 2014; Goodyear-Kaopua et al., 2014). Anti-GMO activism encompasses mixed-gender and multi-ethnic alliances of Native Hawaiians, mixed-race Locals, Asian and haole settlers, and US continental and transnational actors. Different activists and groups utilise distinctive strategies and tactics, seeking and obtaining different degrees of media attention and public visibility (Black, 2012). In Hawai'i, anti-GMO activism is often associated with recent, upper-middle class haole settlers from the US mainland (so-called ‘transplants’) and with various subcultural subjects (e.g. hippies, surfers, environmentalists, etc.) (Entine, 2013a, 2013b).

Within the localised anti-GMO movement, there is significant recognition by activists that a large share of early community organising about the consumption of GMOs was undertaken by older haole transplant, Native Hawaiian and Asian American women organisers. At the same time, especially in the period from 2012 to 2013, younger Native Hawaiian, mixed-race Local and haole activists, many of whom were women, began playing increasingly visible roles in movement organising, even while the most visible spokespeople of these movements were often professional haole male experts, lawyers and politicians, and Native Hawaiian male activists. Although they have undergone significant shifts and changes in ensuing years, including professionalisation, such divisions of labour are broadly schematic of the period from 2012 to 2013 amongst a certain cadre of activists and groups. However, in order to understand gendered representations in anti-GMO activism, it is useful to focus on the period from 2012 to 2013 and to explore how this organising is linked with Hawai'i's history of food and farming politics.

Colonialism, Agriculture and Gender in Hawai‘i

Native Hawaiian agricultural systems involve complex socio-ecological and spiritual relationships (Kame'eleihiwa, 1992), and Hawaiian conceptions of gender link together spiritual meanings, kinship relations, divisions of labour and political leadership in ways that differ markedly from (post)colonial gender norms (Linnekin, 1990; Kame'eleihiwa, 1992; Merry, 2000; Tengan, 2008a). With missionary, US and European economic and political ideological influence during the eighteenth century, social and gender relations underwent significant and violent change. During this time, the deaths of many Native Hawaiians profoundly shaped how existing political leaders sought to negotiate growing missionary and colonising influences, including foreign pressures to privatise property in the 1860s (Kame'eleihiwa, 1992). Private property enabled the development of US and European sugar plantations, for which racially segregated labour was supplied by mostly male migrants from particular parts of Japan, China, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Korea, Spain, the Philippines and beyond (Takaki, 1984; Fujikane and Okamura, 2008).

In this way, changes to food and agriculture worked as significant colonial technologies (Kame'eleihiwa, 1992; Lukens, 2013), remaking social and ecological relationships (Trask, 1999 [1993]; Pomaika'i McGregor, 2007; Goodyear-Ka’ōpua, 2011) and even shaping the aesthetics of taste itself (Hobart, 2015). These changes further entrenched Christian and US social ideals, including gendered divisions of the public/private sphere and a heteropatriarchal nuclear family model. While the colonial gaze historically feminised the islands and Native Hawaiian people (Kame'eleihiwa, 1992; Hau'ofa, 1993; Teaiwa, 1999; Trask, 1999 [1993]; Wood, 1999), changes in the 1790s figured Native Hawaiians and Asian migrants through shifting gendered optics of deviance, threat and domestification.

In the nineteenth century, feminised and exoticised images of welcoming ‘hula girls’ (Trask, 1991a; Jolly, 2008; Hall, 2009) were used to promote both military and tourism economies (i.e. ‘militourism’) (Teaiwa, 1994; Ferguson and Turnbull, 1999), while ideas of multiracial harmony were drawn on by white and Asian settler elites to promote US statehood and entrench their political power (Fujikane and Okamura, 2008).

These violences were, and are, powerfully and widely resisted by Native Hawaiian organisers and allies (Trask, 1991a, 1999; Silva, 2004; Pomaika'i McGregor, 2007), including through revalorising Hawaiian socio-ecological ways of knowing (Goldberg-Hiller and Silva, 2011) within land-based movements (Pomaika'i McGregor 2007; Tengan, 2008b; Goodyear-Ka'opua, 2009). Some groups explicitly draw on Native conceptions of gender, sexuality and family within this cultural and land-based revitalisation work (Tengan, 2008a; Wong-Kalu, 2013).

Aloha ‘āina is an important concept in Native Hawaiian organising (Kame'eleihiwa, 1992; Silva, 2004; Goodyear-Ka’ōpua, 2011; Gupta, 2014, p. 6; Baker, 2015; Meyer, 2015) and in anti-GMO activism (Altemus-Williams, 2013; Gupta, 2014). It roughly translates to ‘love (aloha) for the land (‘āina)’—where land is defined as ‘that which feeds’ (Andrade, 2008). Scholars have conceptualised aloha ‘āina as a ‘space to link issues of social, cultural, and ecological justice’ (Beamer, 2013 in Gupta, 2014, p. 5) through mutual obligations of serving, honouring and loving ancestors (Kame'eleihiwa, 1992, p. 25; also cited in Ohnuma, 2008, p. 379). However, there is some concern that the concept of aloha is also easily co-opted by settlers and used to consolidate ‘Local’ identities and the (neo)liberal multicultural settler state (Trask, 1991b; Ohnuma, 2008).

In this way, it is important to differentiate between Native Hawaiian, settler and ‘Local’ identities and to understand the work that indigenous-centred concepts, such as aloha ‘āina, perform within anti-GMO organising. ‘Local’ (capitalised) in this case refers to shifting configurations of racialised signifiers to which ethnicity, class and language contribute, but which cannot be reduced to these categories (Fujikane and Okamura, 2008). ‘Local’ is variously defined as participation in cultural conventions (e.g. removing shoes before entering a house), demonstration of awareness of different cultural practises of Hawai'i's ethnic groups, speaking Hawaiian English Creole (HEC or Pidgin), simply being of mixed ethnicity, or referring to one or a number of these and other factors (Fujikane and Okamura, 2008).

Scholars have analysed how Local identities emerged in relation to both Native Hawaiian sovereignty movements and mainland haole immigration in the 1960s and 1970s and have been used to produce a view of Hawai'i as the ideal multicultural state (Ohnuma, 2008, p. 375). In contrast, Native Hawaiian identities have been particularly affected by US conceptions of race and narratives of disappearing natives (Ledward, 2007), enforced through ideas of blood quantum (Kauanui, 2007, 2008) that also determine material (e.g. land) entitlements. ¹⁰ In contrast, local-born haole developed the term ‘kama’āina (one born in a place) to distinguish themselves from newer white settlers (Wood, 1999), (those now known as ‘transplants’). This brief gloss on the relational and shifting categories of identity in Hawai'i speaks to some of the wider processes of colonisation, US hegemony and migration that shape current social and political relations. This context is key to understanding how anti-GMO organising engages with, cites and reworks intersecting identities in their activist representations.

Aloha ‘āina Warriors

The Hemo Wai Bros.’ video “Āina warriors’ features two activists explaining the effects GMO fields have on the island of Molokai, as well as footage of public protests, hearings and pesticide sprayers in fields. ¹¹

Towards the beginning of the video (00:22), an image appears featuring the protagonists, activist brothers Hanohano and ‘Ua Ritte (sons of Native Hawaiian sovereignty and environmental activist Walter Ritte) along with professional surfer and martial arts fighter turned Kauai mayoral candidate, Dustin Barca. The three men appear with their arms crossed, looking back at the camera, while behind them a banner proclaims ‘WHAT WE LOVE, WE WILL PROTECT’. Appearing along the bottom of the screen, the text “Aina Warriors’ underlines the image.

Identification with the idea of aloha ‘āina warriors is strongly connected with Native Hawaiian anti-colonial movements (Tengan, 2003, 2008a; Goodyear-Ka’ōpua, 2011; Baker, 2015) and is now used widely within Hawai'i's anti-GMO activism (Gupta, 2014). Aloha ‘āina entails defence and restoration of historic livelihoods, sacred spaces, cultural practises and historic pathways for provisioning food and managing resources (Pomaika'i McGregor, 2007; Andrade, 2008; Goodyear-Ka'opua, 2009, 2011; Isaki, 2011; Goodyear-Ka'opua et al., 2014). The Hemo Wai Bros.’ image depicts themes of love and protection for land and future generations, bringing together concepts of militarised resistance, sacredness and Hawaiian ways of knowing (Tengan, 2003, 2008a; Kauanui, 2008; Goodyear-Ka’ōpua, 2011).

The warrior dimension to aloha ‘āina organising can be theorised in relation to Pacific scholarship on masculinities and gender (Tengan, 2003, 2008a; Jolly, 2008; Walker, 2008; Teves, 2012, p. 132) and specifically in relation to European views on Polynesians. Jolly (2008, p. 7) argues that in the Pacific, Europeans viewed Maori as paradigmatic warriors, masculinising Maori people. Tengan has argued that some Native Hawaiian men's groups draw on Maori masculinities to contest European feminisation of Hawai'i and Hawaiians through martial arts and cultural practice (Tengan, 2003, 2008a; Teves, 2012, p. 132). At the same time, contemporary representations often construct Native Hawaiian men as professional athletes and military warriors (Teves, 2012, p. 94), either as ‘patriotic’ military men or ‘resistant warriors’ (Jolly, 2008, p. 8), and often as criminals (Goldberg-Hiller, 2014). Processes of feminisation and resistant warriordom are therefore relational, trans-Pacific and shaped by colonial institutions of the military, sport and education (Jolly, 2008, p. 7).

Moreover, not only are there symbolic, gendered associations at stake in the framing of aloha ‘āina warriors, but gender can also entail material constraint on movement participation. For example, some men in Tengan's (2008a, p. 60) study linked the relative and perceived lack of male participation in Native Hawaiian sovereignty movements as directly related to their focus on fulfilling colonial notions of the male breadwinner and emphasis on obtaining paid work. In another area, Braun and Bell (2010) argued that Appalachian men's historic work in coal industries tied their identities to notions of toughness and stoicism that made it difficult for them to participate in anti-coal activism. In this way, racialised and classed ideas about masculinity can shape and limit movement participation and identification in relation to environmental struggles (Kuumba, 2001; Bella and Braun, 2010). In this case, aloha ‘āina warrior frames appear masculinised and are also bound up with gendered themes of protection, defence and threat mobilised within anti-GMO organising.

This production of threat within social movement organising has been found to perform specific gendered work, often framing land, women and children as objects of safeguard (Ayuero and Swistun, 2009; Foster, 2011, p. 143). In this way, masculine identities are differentially constructed as, Young (2003) describes, ‘dominative’ versus ‘protective’ masculinities. Engaging in the production of protective aloha ‘āina warrior identities, therefore, might work to construct ‘virtuous masculinity [which] depends on its constitutive relation to the presumption of evil others’ (ibid., p. 15)—in this case, the seed/agrochemical companies.

In the case of the Hemo Wai Bros. video and in anti-GMO activism more broadly, the idea of threatening seed company outsiders is invoked and reworked against these protective aloha ‘āina warrior framings. Critically, this framing of threat must be understood through histories of destruction of Native Hawaiian bodies, livelihoods and foodways by settler-state supported corporate agriculture. ¹² Seed companies are seen within this history as threatening resources and practices such as fishing, hunting and foraging because of the effects of pesticides, monocropping and genetic drift. In this case, Native Hawaiian-centred warrior identities come to be constructed in part against seed company managers, who are often white male transplants, as well as against haole and Asian settler government managers and economic elites who support the seed company presence.

Aloha ‘āina warrior masculinities within anti-GMO organising link with the longer histories of resistance to colonialism that connect surfing subcultures, aloha ‘āina warrior identities and ecological knowledge. For example, Native Hawaiian ecological and oceanic knowledges have been at the forefront of efforts to challenge environmentally destructive practices and also in some ways, colonial logics (Tengan, 2003; Walker, 2008). Comer (2010, p. 61) argues that surfing subcultures were instrumental in ‘politicized critical localisms’ resisting development in Hawai'i, while Walker (2008) sees Native Hawaiian oceanic prowess as an important space of anti-colonial resistance and autonomy. ¹³

While these histories may facilitate Native Hawaiian men's involvement in anti-GMO activism, they may also work to constrain the participation of other men based on other locally specific masculinities. Particularly, the linkages between Asian settler masculinities, plantation culture and the uncritical (re)production of Localness (Isaki, 2011) may work to disenable the participation of certain Local mixed-race and Asian settler men in and support for anti-GMO activism. This may be because of material positions in government and agribusiness, but also because of associations between Asian settler masculinities and agricultural work linked with the history of plantation-based migration and the ongoing nostalgic production of plantation culture (Fujikane and Okamura, 2008).

Additionally, concepts of aloha ‘āina and warrior masculinities may be especially amenable to capture by white settlers: when anyone can join the call of aloha ‘āina, local haole may also find space to consolidate insider identities against paradigmatically threatening white others and institutions (e.g. Monsanto) in what Wood (1999) calls ‘kama’āina anti-conquest’. Wood (ibid., pp. 40–41) describes kama’āina anti-conquest narratives as those that seek to preserve local haole innocence by figuring newer white others as threatening and colonising, maintaining local haole hegemony. Moreover, anti-GMO activism's overall figuring of threat by outsiders can also work together with xenophobic localisms that invisibilise the struggles of the predominantly rural Local and (im)migrant, mixed-gender labour force working in agrochemical/seed companies. Such invisibilisation is significant, given that it is these workers who are arguably most directly affected by the issues anti-GMO activism politicises (such as pesticides) and who would be most economically affected by any industry closures.

Aloha ‘āina warriordom may shape movement identification and anti-GMO activism may otherise those with stakes in GMO debates; however, analysing masculinities alone is not enough to account for the overall gendered dynamics of these representations. Kauanui (2008, p. 285) cautions that warrior masculinities may reinforce stereotypes about Native Hawaiian male violence and potentially also exacerbate material experiences of gender-based violence in Native Hawaiian communities. In fact, given that in Native Hawaiian epistemologies ‘both war and peace—fighting to defend and nurturing growth—have male and female manifestations’ (Goodyear-Ka’ōpua, 2011, p. 155), there is reason not to associate warriordom exclusively with men or masculinities. The power of female aloha ‘āina warriors and mana wahine ¹⁴ within other related political struggles (Trask 1999; Tengan 2008a) offers ample reason for considering aloha ‘āina warrior representations beyond exclusively masculine associations.

While an intersectional gender analysis of aloha ‘āina has yet to be undertaken, we have begun to see some of the ways in which gendered representations shape potentials for movement identification, reception and support. I have argued for reading representations of aloha ‘āina warrior activism relationally as part of efforts to (re)work protective masculinities (Tengan, 2008b; Walker, 2008), but have also cautioned, with others, that the warrior framing may also be amenable to neocolonial capture in ways that risk gendered and racialised stereotyping (Kauanui, 2008; Teves, 2012). Moreover, Western associations between masculinity and warriordom may also work to downplay the contributions of Native Hawaiian and multiracial women activists at the same time that the framing of threatening outsiders can reinforce uncritical understandings of working class and migrant others who work in seed/agrochemical companies.

Moms on Missions

Molokai M.O.M. (Moms on a Mission) and the statewide Mom Hui are but two examples of groups that draw on tropes of motherhood in their framing of anti-GMO activism. Appeals to mothering and parenting roles are commonplace in Hawai'i's anti-GMO protests, activist videos and public testimony. Closely linked with the focus on mothering and parenting is an emphasis on keiki (children) and future generations. ¹⁵ This tendency can be observed in an image that appears at the beginning of a video slideshow posted on YouTube by activist and founder of Molokai M.O.M., Mercy Ritte. ¹⁶ The video is a slideshow of residents’ protest signs and proposals for change, and strongly features women, children and elders as well as footage of GMO fields. The second image that appears in the slideshow (00:14) depicts two women standing on a roadside with a sign proclaiming ‘WHAT WE LOVE, WE WILL PROTECT’, as one woman points to the other's rounded, presumably pregnant belly.

Critiquing certain ecofeminist conceptions that uncritically feminise the environment (‘mother earth’), some scholars have analysed the role of motherhood identities in environmental justice activism, often referred to as ‘maternalist’ or ‘motherist’ tropes (Kuumba, 2001, p. 92; Bell and Braun, 2010). Some argue that women's roles as carers for children and the health of others mean that they are often amongst the first to notice and respond to environmental issues (Seager, 2003), and that women of colour are also leaders within environmental justice organising in part because poor communities of colour are disproportionately burdened by toxicity and pollution (i.e. ‘environmental racism’) (Stein, 2004; Porter and Redmond, 2014). In particular, scholars analyse the use of motherhood themes in environmental justice and anti-GMO activism as an explicit legitimising tactic and movement motivation strategy intended to emotively appeal to and reach potential audiences (Brown and Ferguson, 1995; Bell and Braun, 2010) and downplay the political and threatening nature of movements (Bouvard, 2002).

Common within this scholarship is the emphasis on women's relative apoliticism prior to seeing their children, family and communities affected by environmental issues (Perkins, 2012), even though other research shows that caring duties are not always the primary ways in which women describe their politicisation and activism (Prindeville, 2004; Perkins, 2012). Indeed, other scholars caution against overdrawing these links in ways that responsibilise women for environmental, food and caring work in step with neo-liberal ideologies (Agarwal, 2010) and raced, classed discourses of proper motherhood (Kimura, 2011; Skeggs, 2013). Moreover, theorists in other areas have critiqued the tying of femininity to reproductive capacity in environmental discourses (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, 2010; Foster, 2011; Gandy, 2012), showing how emphasis on reproductivity can reinforce normative portrayals of gender and sexuality, ideas of naturalness and discourses of nation (Butler, 1990; Edelman, 2004).

With these caveats in mind, motherism within Hawai'i's anti-GMO organising also requires a contextualised reading of how mothering tropes may shape different subjects’ and women's identification, participation and support for movements. Strolovitch and Townsend-Bell (2013, p. 376) contend that appeals to ‘motherhood can offer a common identity that cuts across class, race and other identity differences’. And yet, indigenous feminist and queer theorists have demonstrated the ways in which racial and colonial logics assign hierarchical and distinct social value to settler, migrant and native motherhood and reproduction (Brown, 2003; Driskill, 2011).

In this way, the Mom Hui's use of motherism can be thought in relation to resistance both to disappearance narratives and to colonial logics that hold native women to Western standards of individualised motherhood while stigmatising indigenous childcaring pathways, essentially denying indigenous people the ability to care for children (Brown, 2003; Stoler, 2006; McClintock, 2013 [1995]). Brown contends that the denial of Native Hawaiian parents’ symbolic and material ability to care takes place through the targeting of Hawaiian sexual, social and childcare relations. This works to undermine historic practices of ‘ohana and hanai—diffusion of childcare and adoption—and also ‘reframes motherhood as a moral identity underwritten by law’ (Brown, 2003, p. 84). Brown (ibid., p. 85) argues that colonial logics figured certain Native Hawaiian and some Asian migrant femininities, ideals of motherhood and family forms as suspect, deviant and dysfunctional. These logics enforced expectations that mothers maintain family ‘respectability’, take on moral responsibility for families (ibid., p. 115) and facilitate upward mobility and integration into the settler state (ibid., p. 254). In this way, motherist tropes within anti-GMO activism may reinforce heteronormative colonial logics of settler reproduction and multiculturalism (Isaki, 2011), just as they may also be read to contest the criminalisation of Native Hawaiian pathways of care and resist the disciplining of ‘deviant’ mothers. In this way, motherist tropes may work to contest forces of disappearance by emphasising material and cultural reproduction and survival (Smith, 2006; Goodyear-Ka’ōpua, 2011).

At the same time that tensions can be observed in representations of motherism within anti-GMO organising, motherist tropes may be employed strategically to downplay the overt tensions of GMO debates and to appeal to a cross-ethnic frame of identification (Perkins, 2012, p. 86) that harmonises with normative gender expectations (Einwohner et al., 2000). However, indigenous and queer theorists have also critiqued motherism for its association with the heterosexual family; instead, they highlight indigenous kinship relations and conceptions of gender and sexualities (Driskill, 2011; Morgensen, 2011). As Isaki (2011, p. 97) writes, heterosexual family forms are not problematic in themselves, but rather become so when ‘heterosexual identities are gathered toward being the proper subject of the [Hawai'i] settler state’. In this case, motherist tropes within activism are not in themselves problematic but may become so when particular representations of motherhood come to stand as emblematic representations of proper femininities and as paradigmatic of respectable and non-threatening political subjects.

In this way, emphasis on mothering within anti-GMO activism links with complex and differential visions of ‘generationality, reproduction, intimacy, coupling, and kinship’ and sexualities that do not necessarily challenge colonial logics (ibid., p. 97). Yet motherism may be employed to bridge differences, downplay political threat and even specifically highlight the gendered, racialised and classed dimensions of environmental struggles. Ironically, within the context of Hawai'i, focussing on mothers and grandmothers as non-threatening political subjects goes against the history that women who were/are mothers and grandmothers have often been at the forefront of political resistance to colonialism (Trask, 1999; Silva, 2004) and environmental justice movements (e.g. the Elders of Wai'anae Protect Kaho'olawe Ohana [PKO]).

Babes against Biotech

Another set of gendered representations in Hawai'i's recent anti-GMO activism can be analysed through the work of Babes Against Biotech (BAB), an activist and political watchdog group. ¹⁷ In a slideshow posted by BAB member Karly Cosmos, one activist image in particular brings together some of the prominent gendered themes of this group's work. ¹⁸ Cosmos’ slideshow consists of different moments of political activism interspersed with, amongst other images, photographs from BAB's swimsuit calendars featuring toned and tanned young women posing against Hawai'i landscapes. ¹⁹ Towards the end of the slideshow (8:54) appears the image of an activist at sunset, standing on the rocks near the ocean in a swimsuit, fist raised in the ‘power’ symbol.

This BAB image can be understood in relation to analyses of post-feminist popular culture, sexualisation and youthful femininities. Gill (2007; also cited in Whelehan, 2014, p. 242) argues that the sexualisation of contemporary culture and preoccupation with the body, especially the young female body, are hallmarks of post-feminism, whose current normative standard emphasises a slim and gym-toned, white female body (Grosz, 1994). Lipsos (2013) analyses changing ideals of femininities and racialisation through representations of women in calendar images, linking the circulation of pin-up calendars within military spaces and the sexualised and sensationalised portrayal of female bodies in wartime (see also Teaiwa, 1994). Calendar images often emphasise femininities ‘as fun but with fighting spirit’ (Lipsos, 2013, p. 135)—an apt description for the BAB image of the beach-going activist.

Normative ideals of femininity, race, sexuality, class, appearance and age are also epitomised in the European fetishistic appropriation of the bikini ²⁰ as a ‘neocolonial tourist technology’ (Teaiwa, 1994, pp. 95–96). Teaiwa (ibid., p. 93) posits that the bikini codes both Pacific island women and Pacific islands themselves as passive and exotic in the colonial gaze, and yet exposed flesh has also long been a site for colonial violence (see also Smith, 2006; Stoler, 2006; McClintock, 2013 [1995]). The politics of clothing and exposing the flesh thus entangle (post)colonial processes of sexualisation and gendering, masking the actual experiences of Pacific island women and the violence written into the history of the bikini.

This BAB image may be seen to cite some of these themes of sexualisation of the Pacific but also may entail histories of images specific to Hawai'i. Trask (1991a) and others argue that images of welcoming ‘hula girls’ lump together Native Hawaiian and mixed-race women, and help construct a hypervisible version of sexualised Hawaiian femininity (Hall, 2009). Trask (1991b) argues that these kinds of feminised representations work to welcome the colonial arrival and justify ongoing occupation under the guise of ‘aloha’. In relation to anti-GMO activism, the image from the bikini calendar can be read through its invocation of this sexualised, militouristic Pacific difference that also invokes contemporary ideals of leisure that tan (contingently) white, classed bodies (Ahmed, 1998).

At the same time, tanning and toning represent more than just bodily styles that evidence the classed privileges of leisure, since lives lived outdoors and in the ocean are important parts of life in Hawai'i and the Pacific. The BAB image might be linked specifically to ‘brave femininities’ associated with surfing subcultures—the ‘fun girl with a fighting spirit’ in multi-ethnic surfer-girl frame (Comer, 2010). While the slideshow calendar images may reinforce certain ideals of able-bodied femininities, it is important not to downplay young women's political agency based on these representations. In fact, reading these images only through the lens of post-feminism and coloniality might also bypass histories of strategic sexualisation of female bodies and nudity in activism (Sperling, 2012; Eileraas, 2014). Politicised nudity and exposure can work to disrupt the separation of public and private spheres (Eileraas, 2014, p. 41), which in turn may reshape some of the rules of political legitimacy (Butler, 2011).

BAB representations can be also analysed in relation to the tactics used by other anti-GMO movements that involve public exposure of the female body (Bloomfield and Doolin, 2012). As one New Zealand anti-GMO activist remarked, nude exposure was a tactic they utilised out of desperation when other methods of raising awareness appeared ineffective (ibid., p. 513). Indeed, one BAB member acknowledges the explicit attention-getting strategy of the calendars and that part of the group's aim was to use female sexuality to contravene expectations of what might be described as political subjecthood, propriety and legitimacy, theorised elsewhere by scholars as the normative foundations of politics (Warner, 2002, p. 89). BAB representations must therefore be read within the context of a US regulatory regime in which ‘rational’ questioning of biotechnologies remains difficult (Kleinman and Kloppenburg, 1991) and prompts appeals to the bodily ‘outrageous’ (Bloomfield and Doolin, 2012, p. 513; Tyler, 2013).

And yet questions remain about the ways in which women become associated with the body and the ways in which normative depictions of sexualised femininities can reinforce a heteronormative gaze. Moreover, the relative lack of body, age and ethnic diversity in BAB calendars also seems to limit possibilities for provoking the outrageous, sparking public outrage or inducing shame in political opponents (Tyler, 2013)—some of the key aims of other kinds of nude protest. In this sense, BAB representations may constrain participation by, and even alienate, potential participants or supporters with different embodied, class, cultural and subcultural positionings. This may limit not only their ability to attract bodily and identity-diverse calendar participants but also movement participants more broadly. At the same time, BAB representations of femininities take place within the context of the group's astute political work and members’ own reflections on how their representational practices affect their work.

Conclusion

In this article, I have suggested some of the complexities of certain gendered representations in anti-GMO organising as a movement without explicit gender aims, but wherein, nonetheless, intersectional gender does important work. I would argue that, in combination, the work that these representations do involves the reinforcement of some of the more normative dimensions of femininities and masculinities, but that these representations also have more complex, situated and intersectional histories. Nevertheless, while emphasis on normative ways of (re)presenting gender may reinforce familiar social frames, this familiarity may help to downplay the otherwise threatening nature of anti-GMO campaigns against large agribusinesses and established political and social relations. In this way, tropes of mothering, warriordom and sexualised femininities work to anchor the otherwise destabilising challenge that anti-GMO organising poses to ‘(agri)business as usual’ in the settler state.

This analysis is but a first contribution to theorising representational practices and gendered dimensions of anti-GMO organising and further inquiry is needed to unpack the ways in which less visible and naturalised framings of identities are present within GMO debates. For example, how might classed, racialised representations of experts and professionals (Kimmel, 1993; Frankenberg, 2001; Skeggs, 2013) within Hawai'i's GMO debates help consolidate white and Asian settler masculinities? Moreover, how might the gendered associations between reason and emotion play out in relation to expertise and activism, positioning male subjects as properly political and science as the only legitimate frame (Seager, 2003) for food and environmental debates? Perhaps more conceptually, how do colonial meanings continue to inflect a feminised, passive valence to the ‘aloha’ in ‘aloha ‘āina’ and what implications does this have for movement work?

These are but a few of the ongoing questions raised by this discussion of the intersecting, gendered representations present within Hawai'i's anti-GMO organising. The foregoing discussion has aimed to underscore the importance of contextualised, intersectional accounts of this organising and, by extension, of other food-related social movements. I have tried to show how intersectional feminist theorising is critical to understanding social movement meaning-making processes and that engagements between feminist and food theorising can help to unpick how food movements cite, rework and resist gendered norms. In this way, further research analysing gender intersectionally within anti-GMO organising may yield important insights about the relationships between normativity, subversion and social change relevant to radically transforming food systems, the settler state and perhaps even gender itself.