We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Banana or Cho Cho: Food and Sexual Normativity in Jamaican Popular Music.
- Authors
LATTIBEAUDIERE, WARRICK
- Abstract
This paper contends that while heterosexual normativity and hegemonic masculinity, dual features of Jamaica’s patriarch construct, emerge powerfully in the lyrics of Jamaica’s popular music – Dancehall – they have been the subject of serious challenge by the increasingly powerful voices of female singers in the space. Through a potpourri of food metaphors, masculinist norms are both grounded and destabilised. This research spotlights several dancehall lyrics on sex/power relations [such as, but not limited to, fellatio and cunnilingus] vis-à-vis food, spanning roughly 20 years of the music with a view to determine changes in masculinist norms. For balance, the perspectives of male, as well as female singers, and in two instances a male and a female singer are considered. This paper examines the socio-cultural context, decidedly heterosexual, that is responsible for a man being a man, and draws upon the theoretical lens of Linden Lewis and Rafael Ramírez in articulating the expectation of the hegemon, the macho or the masculinist. Figuring importantly, too, are gendered perspectives of female dancehall theorists, such as Carolyn Cooper, Donna Hope, Sonjah Stanley Niiah, and Patricia Saunders. Employing the metaphor of food, an essential to man, not only reveals how deep-seated heterosexual normativity and hegemonic masculinity are, both in the music of the Jamaican people and their psyche, but the great strides of female singers who challenge these masculinist constructs, which are also mythically contrived, as these so-called male foods are not libido-enhancing.
- Subjects
JAMAICA; POPULAR music; WOMEN singers; NORMATIVITY (Ethics); JAMAICANS; MALE singers; BANANAS
- Publication
Journal of Arts Science & Technology, 2023, Vol 15, Issue 1, p198
- ISSN
0799-1681
- Publication type
Article