LGBT Studies Fellow 2019, Alika Bourgette

Aloha mai kākou,

My time in residence at Yale LGBTS has helped guide my research effort in ways that will continue to bear fruit for time to come. I had the opportunity to confer with talented graduate students, faculty, and archivists who each provided congenial and generative feedback at the WGSS Graduate Working Group. The suggestions and research leads shared help prepare my manuscript, “Mālama I Ka ʻĀina O Kakaʻako: Elder-Youth Intimacies and Native Hawaiian Resilience in Kakaʻako, Honolulu, 1891-1916,” for inclusion in Radical History Review no. 139, a special issue on Critical Histories of Aging and Later Life. The paper examines the working-class, waterfront neighborhood of Kakaʻako, Honolulu, centering community elders’ recollections of playground intendants and other adults who formed interdependencies with them to upend carceral efforts enforced by settler lawmakers. Trips to the Beinecke Library, Yale Divinity Library, and Sterling Library Manuscripts and Archives yielded insight to the crucial role youth education and the installation of binary gender roles played in shifting relational understanding of land and criminalizing undesired activities as “gang” phenomena.

I wanted to conclude by thanking the LGBTS and WGSS Departments for making such gracious hosts for my visit. Patricia Ekpo, Jacinda Tran, Alison Kibbe, and Aanchal Saraf each made the Working Group process memorable and worthwhile. I have enjoyed my conversations with Joseph Fischel, Ana Ramos-Zayas, and Evren Savci over the past year. I hope to stay in correspondence as I continue my project.

Mahalo nui mai.