- Xavier Livermon "Kwaito Futurity: New Directions in South African Music and Performance"
- Erin MacLeod "Them things wasn’t normal”: White Gyals, Dancehall and Jamaica"
- Ali Colleen Neff "Mermaids Rising: Women, Water and Afrodiasporic Pop"
- Allen Thayer "Black Power and Masculinity in Brazilian Funk & Soul Music"
Moderator: Roshanak Kheshti
Across pop’s global landscape, gender dances with a host of other kinds of
otherness: race and ethnicity, place and diaspora, and the non-binary nodes, performances and identities that come from alternative ways of understanding bodies and the relations between them.
Emerging global genres engage with, sometimes reproduce, and more often, critically
trick back on the binaries that fall on conventional pop performativities. As we work from ethnographic ways of understanding musical movements that queer the masculine/feminine divide, we lift up the complicated intersections, hidden practitioners, and aesthetic undergrounds in which pop creativity flourishes across the Global South. In the folds of the music, we locate critiques of white capitalist colonial patriarchy: fissures in the entwined roots of gender, race, and power.
This panel shifts the paradigm to ask how gender complicates and is complicated by the global circulation of pop. In many of the traditions we work with, women have long held places of authority in musicmaking and fandom; in others, new movements of underclass youth have worked to configure alternative masculinities and emergent modes of queerness.
As collaborative researchers with musical communities throughout the Global South, we work to disrupt conventional approaches to understanding pop’s gender divide by offering intersectional models for approaching pop innovation and experimentation: the queer cosmopolitanisms of Johannesburg’s Gqom movement, the construction of Brazilian Afro-masculinity in 70’s funk, the queering figure of the African mermaid goddess as she circulates through global pop, the reconfiguration of white femininity in the Jamaican dancehall.
In doing so, we ask: What are the pop sounds and styles that produce gendered performances the world over? How does the fluid notion of the feminine relate to global feminisms, and to the embodied dimensions of musical creativity and movement? How do gender and Blackness intersect on the global pop stage?
