Tigers of a Different Stripe: Performing Gender in Dominican Music

By Sydney Hutchinson

Tigers of a Different Stripe takes readers inside the unique world of merengue típico, a traditional music of the Dominican Republic. While in most genres of Caribbean music women usually participate as dancers or vocalists, in merengue típico they are more often instrumentalists and even bandleaders—something nearly unheard of in the macho Caribbean music scene. Examining this cultural phenomenon, Sydney Hutchinson offers an unexpected and fascinating account of gender in Dominican art and life.
           
Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork in the Dominican Republic and New York among musicians, fans, and patrons of merengue típico—not to mention her own experiences as a female instrumentalist—Hutchinson details a complex nexus of class, race, and artistic tradition that unsettles the typical binary between the masculine and feminine. She sketches the portrait of the classic male figure of the tíguere, a dandified but sexually aggressive and street-smart “tiger,” and she shows how female musicians have developed a feminine counterpart: the tíguera, an assertive, sensual, and respected female figure who looks like a woman but often plays and even sings like a man. Through these musical figures and studies of both straight and queer performers, she unveils rich ambiguities in gender construction in the Dominican Republic and the long history of a unique form of Caribbean feminism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9780226405636

Book preview

Tigers of a Different Stripe

Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology

A series edited by Philip V. Bohlman, Ronald Radano, and Timothy Rommen

Editorial Board

Margaret J. Kartomi

Bruno Nettl

Anthony Seeger

Kay Kaufman Shelemay

Martin H. Stokes

Bonnie C. Wade

Tigers of a Different Stripe

Performing Gender in Dominican Music

Sydney Hutchinson

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40532-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40546-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40563-6 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/978-0-226-40563-6.001.0001

Publication of this book has been supported by the Manfred Bukofzer Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hutchinson, Sydney, 1975- author.

Title: Tigers of a different stripe : performing gender in Dominican music / Sydney Hutchinson.

Other titles: Chicago studies in ethnomusicology.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Series: Chicago studies in ethnomusicology | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016015754 | ISBN 9780226405322 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226405469 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226405636 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Popular music—Dominican Republic—History and criticism. | Gender identity in music.

Classification: LCC ML3487.D66 H88 2016 | DDC 781.64097293—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015754

This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Para todos y todas los merengueros y merengueras, seguidores y seguidoras, viejetes y viejetas que me han acompañado tan gentilmente en este largo viaje.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

1  Introduction

2  A Gendered History

3  Tatico Forever

4  Fefita the Great

5  Filosofía de Calle: Transnational Tigueraje

6  Temporary Transvestites: Cross-Dressing Merengue, Bachata, and Reggaetón

7  Listening Sideways: The Transgenre Work of Rita Indiana

8  Dispatch from an Imaginary Island

Appendix A: Dominican Musics Mentioned in This Book

Appendix B: A Comparison of Two Accordionists’ Botaos

Appendix C: Movement and Gesture Analysis of Fefita la Grande Performing La chiflera

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Illustrations

Figures

1.1  Tresillo rhythm

2.1  Concho Primo

2.2  Julián Ramírez, El Viejo Tíguere

2.3  La India Canela

3.1  Tatico Henríquez

3.2  Bust of Tatico in Nagua

3.3  La muerte del merengue: Homenaje a Tatico Henríquez, painting by Raúl Recio

3.4  Tatico’s botao for La mamajuana

3.5  Gaspar Rodríguez at home with portrait of Tatico

4.1  Fefita la Grande

4.2  Santa Fefa divirtiendo a unos chivos sin ley, painting by Chiqui Mendoza

5.1  Flyer for La Organización Típica

5.2  Comparison of tambora rhythms for merengue derecho and maco

5.3  Comparison of forms for merengue derecho and merengue con mambo

5.4  Shino Aguakate

5.5  Geniswing

6.1  Tulile

6.2  Mala Fe

7.1  Rita Indiana with tambora

7.2  El Juidero

7.3  Logo for Los Misterios

7.4  Rita Indiana with güira

A.1  Palos ensemble

A.2  Gagá ensemble

B.1  Botao on Chicha as performed by Fefita la Grande

B.2  Two botaos on Chicha as performed by Siano Arias

Tables

2.1  Antonio De Moya’s Typology of Dominican Masculinities (paraphrased)

5.1  Movement and Gesture Analysis of Raquel Arias Performing the Third Verse of Raquel

5.2  Movement and Gesture Analysis of T-Urban Performing the Beginning of Hay Party

6.1  Structure of Chacarrón as Performed by Tulile

7.1  Video Analysis of a Portion of El blue del Ping-Pong

C.1  Movement and Gesture Analysis of Fefita la Grande Performing La chiflera

Acknowledgments

This book was written with the financial support of an American Association for University Women American Fellowship. In addition, some portions were drafted earlier with the support of a postdoctoral fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. My initial field research on merengue típico was supported by New York University’s MacCracken Fellowship, and hosted by the Centro León in Santiago, while field research on carnival was undertaken with the help of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Nydia and Nicholas Nahumck Fellowship. I am grateful to each of these organizations for their confidence in my work.

However, none of the research would have been possible without the many musicians, artists, and fans who helped me along the way. Most important in this regard is my accordion teacher Rafaelito Román, an outstanding musician and human being, and indeed his whole family, particularly his wife Carmen and his son Raúl. I am also grateful to Rita Indiana, Fefita la Grande, El Prodigio, Eddy Núñez, David David, Rafaelito Polanco, Radhamés Polanco, Belarminio Liriano, Luis Ureña, Ray Chino Díaz, and the many other musicians who took the time to talk and to teach me. Freddy Peña, José Peligro Mateo, Abelardo Martínez, and Américo Mejía also deserve special thanks for always being willing to talk típico with me. Thank you also to the visual artists Chiqui Mendoza and Raúl Recio for always being willing to answer my questions and for the permission to use their artwork, as well as to Shino Aguakate for graciously allowing me to reprint so many of his lyrics. I appreciate the feedback and assistance of numerous colleagues including Tes Slominski, Angelina Tallaj, Rossy Díaz, Lois Wilcken, Martha Ellen Davis, Paul Austerlitz, Darío Tejeda, and Marti Cuevas (owner of Mayimba Music); Rafael Emilio Yunén, Carlos Zapata, and all the staff of the Centro León; and, most of all, Maurice Mengel, always my first and best reader. Thanks also to those who helped with transcriptions along the way—Altagracia Pérez Almánzar, Adelajda Merchán-Drazkowska, Victor Hernández Sang, and Anabelle Grullón—as well as to my graduate assistant Gorda Stan, who assisted with various aspects of preparing this manuscript for publication. Finally, my dissertation advisor, Gage Averill, and committee members Peter Manuel, Ana María Ochoa, Martin Daughtry, and Suzanne Cusick offered important feedback on my early work that helped shape its later development, as the amazing editor Elizabeth Branch Dyson and two anonymous readers did for its more recent incarnations. To all these friends and colleagues go my eternal gratitude.

1

Introduction

Maluca Mala, a Dominican American performer whose stage name roughly translates to Crazy Bad Girl, emerges from a salon into the daylight with her hair still in four-inch rollers. She struts down the streets of Upper Manhattan in a rose-print motorcycle jacket and red leather bustier over sequined hot pants, red-fringed fishnets, and stiletto heels the color of her cherry-red lipstick. An amped-up bass outlining tonic and dominant chords in E minor joins electronic handclaps at 168 beats per minute as she rhythmically speaks a boast beginning "Lo tengo todo, Papi (I’ve got it all, baby). Maluca begins to tell her story—I went to 182nd and Audubon just the other day—as she passes a series of men who are counting money, playing congas and maracas, talking on cell phones, or just watching her go by. Continuing Papi, you keep blowing all that tiguerazo in the air . . . / Durango boots and all / Bacano walking tall, Maluca ditches her heels in favor of a pair of rubber sandals and takes off on a bicycle. But she soon finds herself surrounded by a circle of these street-corner men, each putting on a flirtatious look. With exaggerated eye rolls and expressions of disgust, she taunts them in Spanish: No, no, I don’t have a phone number."

Maluca enters an apartment building and emerges again at night, her outfit changed but her hair still in rollers. As she visits a bodega to buy a cigarette, we see a montage of Dominican New York’s nighttime scenery: the corner store; a Spanish restaurant;¹ men playing cards, dominos, or pool; a group of dancers at a club, one of them wearing those rubber sandals over socks. Maluca—her hair now rolled around beer cans—is performing with an all-woman back-up band on keyboards, bass, and accordion, saying, "A mí me gusta el tiguerazo porque tú tienes la calle unlocked" (I like the tiguerazo because you have the street unlocked). As she and her bandmates continue chanting "el tíguere," the audience looks on and dances, one man stroking an inflatable leopard.²

*

Maluca’s real name is Natalie Yépez. Her music reflects the experiences of many Dominican Yorks, island Dominicans’ sometimes admiring, sometimes disrespectful name for those who grew up abroad. Yépez calls her sound experimental tropical punk, ghetto tech, and hip-house (MTV 2014), and indeed this song produced by the well-known DJ Diplo³ sounds only distantly Latin. Auditory references to her latinidad (Latina/o identity) include the use of Dominican Spanish mixed with English, an occasional rustling sound like maracas or a güira scraper, the up-tempo 2/4 beat recalling Dominican merengue, and the nearly constant presence of the claves, wooden sticks used to tap out Caribbean timelines. Here the rhythm they play (along with the electronic bass) is a 3 + 3 + 2, or tresillo (see Fig. 1.1), an Afro-Caribbean rhythm found in everything from salsa—where it forms the 3 side of the timeline known as son, or salsa clave—to New Orleans jazz, Bo Diddley, Trinidadian soca, or the music of the Afro-Dominican congos brotherhood.

Figure 1.1. Tresillo rhythm. Transcription by author.

El tigeraso (sic; tiguerazo in Spanish orthography) was Maluca’s first single, released in 2009. As this example shows, the music refers on the one hand to a sort of global Afro-Caribbeanness in its use of the widely dispersed tresillo, familiar far beyond the region through the travels of popular Caribbean sounds, as it reaches out to a broader audience through its electronic danceability. On the other hand, the lyrics and imagery are far more local in their references and meanings: they derive directly from New York Dominican life, even though women in many locations can empathize with the protagonist’s half-amused, half-exasperated dealings with the men around her.

The song’s title refers to a specifically Dominican kind of masculine figure: the tíguere or street-corner tiger, a principal figure in this book, which in the video is embodied in both the male flirts and the plastic leopard. The tíguere is known for (among other things) his amorous successes, at least according to his own estimation; his mastery of the urban environment; and his tricksterish ability to come out on top of any situation, whatever it takes. The -azo is an augmentative suffix indicating that the song’s subject is the maximal tíguere, with a twist of irony. Indeed, the rest of the song lyrics, and especially Maluca’s appearance and actions in the video, show that she is poking fun at Dominican gender stereotypes for both men and women: the men flirting ineptly and posturing as they try to appear to be suave bacanos (see Chapter 2), the women wearing curlers and flip-flops all day long. Maluca’s exaggerated grimaces are a wink that lets us know she is taking none of this too seriously, and that she is the true master of this particular street.

These clues show that Maluca’s performance of gender is a local one. Yet it has a broader resonance for non-Dominican viewers, and these resonances suggest that the cases my book discusses have a significance beyond their Dominican home context. Her avant-garde fashion and exaggerated bodily performances have been termed drag queeny and compared to Lady Gaga. Gaga is also known for experimenting with various forms of drag, including hyperfeminine performances as a form of bio-drag (Davisson 2013, 55), but instead of Maluca drawing from Gaga, the influence may have traveled the other way: Maluca’s look appears to have inspired Gaga’s use of beer can rollers in her nine-and-a-half-minute 2010 video, Telephone, also featuring Beyoncé. Some Latino viewers slammed this as a white, first-world appropriation of an unknown Latina’s creativity, though Maluca has refused to assign blame. Whatever the case, Maluca’s unusual performance of gender—hyperfeminine in appearance, but with an assertiveness more typically coded as masculine—may draw on historical Caribbean models more than on contemporary Northern pop stars. One could easily draw parallels to the 1960s Cuban bolero and salsa diva La Lupe, particularly when viewing Maluca’s live performances, where she may lie down and writhe on stage as if taken over by the music—much as La Lupe once did (see Chapters 4 and 7, this book; Maluca 2011a and 2011b). Yet there are precursors even closer to home.

In response to a New York Times interviewer’s question about what was Dominican about her music, Maluca responded, I think Dominicans don’t hold back. We’re very vocal, we’re loud, passionate and I think that comes out not only on stage, but also in my everyday life. I’m very honest and I say what I feel. We’re very feisty people (Chang 2011). In claiming her feistiness, this Dominican American woman is not only creating a stage persona that can further her music career but also contesting gender stereotypes that circulate widely among the general public and even in academia—those that present normal Latin American men as excessively macho and women, conversely, as subservient. More than that, she is claiming for herself a deeply rooted Dominican femininity that by its very existence demonstrates the limits of such a depiction: the tíguera,⁴ the assertive, sensual, and often surprising female tiger. The Dominicanness of Maluca’s music thus comes through clearly, but only to an audience already in the know: those who have hung with the tígueres, responded to their catcalls (or tiger calls), or been tígueres or tígueras themselves. My book’s title pays homage to these tigers, both male and female.

This opening scene is a brief example of what I seek to demonstrate in this book. As a whole, Tigers of a Different Stripe is about how gender is performed through music: not only by playing on stage but also through dancing, listening, viewing, and discussing. While my findings should have relevance beyond the specific cases I describe, I limit my discussion to a particular cultural context, that of the Dominican Republic and its diasporic outposts in New York. I look at a variety of Dominican musical genres—and beyond them to dance, music video, literature, and the visual arts—relating these examples to forms of expressive and gendered culture elsewhere in the Caribbean and Latin America. My focus on gender also leads me to explore how that facet of identity is linked to musical genre, movement, migration, race, class, and notions of tradition and modernity. All these concepts are brought together by the principal musical style I discuss: merengue típico, a traditional, accordion-based genre that has undergone great change since the 1960s as a result of the rapid urbanization and migration that occurred after dictator Rafael Trujillo’s assassination in 1961. This musical culture has constituted the main focus of my fieldwork for the past fourteen years.

Merengue típico is close to the heart of many Dominicans, particularly those from the northern Cibao region. It is constantly linked to ideas about national and regional identity, and through them Dominican ideas about race, class, and gender also come to the fore. Even Maluca’s video refers to this musical genre, in spite of the fact that the sound of El tigeraso is quite distant from that of traditional merengue: one of the men on the street pulls on a child’s toy accordion near the beginning, and in the final scene, set in a nightclub, one of her backup musicians is depicted playing a button accordion. Although the accordion is never heard in this song, its silent presence in the video serves to remind knowledgeable viewers of merengue típico and all it stands for.⁵

I first became fascinated with merengue típico after hearing it performed live at the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife in 2001, and soon thereafter I began regularly attending típico gigs all over Brooklyn, my home at the time. From the beginning, my intention was to learn to play this music on accordion as well, so I began visiting accordionists at their homes to pick up tunes; I also incorporated my new interest into my job as staff ethnomusicologist at Long Island Traditions, a nonprofit folklore organization, for instance, by organizing a merengue típico concert and workshop series.

My project therefore began as a diasporic one, looking at merengue típico in New York, but soon expanded to include the music’s homeland, beginning with my first trip to Santiago de los Caballeros, the Cibao’s largest city, in 2004. There, I studied accordion under master musician Rafaelito Román; attended numerous live performances of típico and other musics; initiated research, education, and preservation projects with the Centro León, a museum and cultural center; and even conducted research on carnival while participating in the barrio masquerade group Los Confraternos de Pueblo Nuevo. While I no longer live in either of my field sites, I continue to be in touch with my fellow típico fans in New York City through email, Facebook, and the occasional visit, and with musicians, culture workers, and other friends in Santiago through visits, occasional telephone calls, and, in some cases, social media.

As this personal history suggests, it was my interest in típico as a musical style that led me to research gender, rather than the other way around. As with many other researchers, my first attempts to analyze the topic of gender centered on a study of women in music. Contrary to my initial expectations, I found a number of other women playing típico soon after becoming involved in the music myself. Their presence and general acceptance in this scene surprised me because academic literature, media portrayals, and popular perceptions had led me to believe that Dominicans were quite machista—sexist and patriarchal. While such a view was not wholly inaccurate, the general mismatch between mainstream perceptions and my experience in the típico world inspired me to investigate women musicians and their experiences further. My exploration of women’s roles in Dominican music eventually led me to look more broadly at how gender is performed in the Dominican Republic, since I realized I could not understand Dominican femininities, or consider the possibility of a Dominican feminism, without also grasping Dominican constructions of masculinity and other gender categories.

On a more personal level, my research helped me to engage with questions I had long had about gender identity in general, and my own in particular. Why, for instance, did I detest all things pink from early childhood? Why had I performed mainly male roles in high school plays and insisted upon singing tenor in college, even though I had never doubted my own femininity or heterosexuality? Upon reflection, I realized that these had been gut reactions to societal expectations of women in the United States and meanings of the feminine with which I did not identify. I identified with many of the Dominican female musicians I met precisely because of how they performed critiques I felt to be similar to my own early efforts, principally through tigueraje or the domain of the tíguere (tiger), a key concept in this work that I explain further below.

In this book, I aim to explore new ways of analyzing gender and music, dance and movement without engaging in academic wordplay. I do employ some social sciences terms whose meanings are explained in this introduction. I hope this approach to style makes my work accessible to a broader audience, including Dominican music fans and the musicians who appear in these pages. I also believe it better fits my topic: gender is an everyday fact of life that all of us have and perform, all the time; we should thus be able to analyze it using everyday language. Even more broadly, this approach fits with my most basic assumption in studying culture, which is that everything is connected: gender, genre, sexuality, race, nation, tradition, modernity, music, movement, ethnography, biography, research, and writing all feed off and influence one another in all of our lives. I hope to reveal a bit of that complexity in this book.

Gender and Performance

Gender is a topic that affects every person, all the time, everywhere: attached as it is to our bodies, it is fundamental to our identities and our interactions with society. One of the most basic assumptions on which this book is based is that gender is performed, not inborn. This viewpoint is frequently encountered in the social sciences today, but perhaps requires further explanation for an interdisciplinary audience.

To say that gender is a performance means that the categories we use to describe this facet of an individual’s identity are created through the repetition of acts: behaviors, habits, words of proscription or approval. Another way of saying this is that we become female by imitating how feminine people walk, act, talk, sing, dance; as women we eventually learn to do what is considered feminine based on what we see other women doing and how others react to what we do. Fundamentally, gender is an exchange between the individual and society aimed at creating societal order. If we feel uncomfortable with what is required of us in this exchange, at the very least we run the risk of feeling ostracized; at worst we may become victims of violence. Far from being natural, or based on laws largely outside of human control, gender is cultural, created by people to regulate individuals’ places in society. This is true even though we attach gender categories like female and male to what we call biological sex, the particular anatomical features of a given person. Thus, this book is not simply about bodies performing music but also about their representation in music, as well as music’s contribution to and influence on a broader discourse about gender, the lives of particular musicians, and how fans deal with all of these things.

This shift in perspective—viewing gender as something that we learn to enact according to the demands of the culture into which we are born, rather than as something we are born with—has been quite influential in the social sciences, including ethnomusicology, and is generally attributed to the work of philosopher Judith Butler, even though her work drew heavily on precursors like anthropologist Esther Newton. In her study of female impersonators, Newton found that drag’s theatricality was important for how it brought into question the naturalness of the entire system of gender and sex roles, thus showing that these were superficial and manipulable (see Rubin 2002, 48). Further focusing on the analysis of gender as performance, Butler proposed that what we think of as female does not automatically follow from the particularities of the bodies we describe as female: "I think for a woman to identify as a woman is a culturally enforced effect. I don’t think that it’s a given that on the basis of a given anatomy, an identification will follow. I think that ‘coherent identification’ has to be cultivated, policed, and enforced; and that the violation of that has to be punished, usually through shame" (in Kotz 1992, 88). The diversity of femininities (ways of being female) in history and other cultures is one piece of evidence suggesting the rather arbitrary relationship between anatomy, masculinities, and femininities. Butler even suggests that so-called biological sex is itself cultural, because it does not exist apart from discourse about it: sex categories are ideals that few material bodies can live up to (Butler 1993, 1–2).

This view of gender is also connected to a feminist turn in the social sciences, upon which my work builds. Feminist thinkers from the global South, like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1987) and Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), criticized Northern feminists for presuming to speak for women everywhere and assuming that women in every culture were interested in following an agenda set mainly by white, heterosexual women from the global North. They showed that women’s experiences, even definitions of women, varied widely from place to place, so that trying to speak for women as a unitary group was presumptuous. Butler’s Gender Trouble was in part a reaction against the kind of feminist thought that presupposed women as a monolithic category and, in presupposing the global North as the originating source of feminism (and modernity) and hence of all progress in gender relations, unwittingly devalued the efforts of women in the global South (Butler [1990] 2006, 5) like those I describe here. Instead of examining feminism as a woman’s concern, in that book Butler pointed to the wider-reaching problems created by defining gender as inborn and always binary, of presuming to decide, for instance, who is or is not a woman based on some criteria external to the subject being thus defined. In addition, if feminist theory is always centered only on women, it is already exclusionary and cannot represent everyone (not only men are excluded but so, for instance, are transgender or intersex persons who identify as women or as female); for this reason, even trying to define woman as a category may actually be an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations (7).

How can those who do not identify with mainstream, binary gender categories make sense of themselves and become valued members of society in the system Butler, Newton, and others describe? Is feminism salvageable in the face of these problems? I believe it is, particularly if we accept the way forward offered by Butler: to understand and accept what she terms the performativity of gender. Performativity does not simply mean performance-like but refers rather to the creative property of a speech or corporeal act—the capacity of a performance, broadly understood, to bring something like gender into being through its repetition (see Butler [1990] 2006, xiv–xv; 1993, 2). Accepting that gender is performed means accepting that gender does not exist on its own. Even the interiority of gender—what one feels and experiences as one’s gender—is created through acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires rather than existing a priori ([1990] 2006, 185). We need some rules and norms to live together in a society, Butler says, but at the same time we need to distance ourselves from them or suspend them in order to consider and articulate other versions of those norms that enable minorities (including gender minorities) to have an identity and a voice in society (2004, 3).

Music is one way of doing just that, as I will show, but it is one that Butler did not investigate. Instead, much as Newton had done earlier (though in different terms), Butler examined drag as a particularly important, potentially transformative kind of gender performance precisely because of how it reveals gender’s performativity. In Gender Trouble, she showed that drag was not simply copying an original gender, because there was no original to turn to; drag made clear that all genders were equally performed. In a later book, Undoing Gender, she further explained: Through performativity, dominant and nondominant gender norms are equalized. But some of those performative accomplishments claim the place of nature or claim the place of symbolic necessity, and they do this only by occluding the ways in which they are performatively established (2004, 209). In other words, drag shows that all genders are created equal, because they are all created in the same way—through performative acts. The fact that some genders, and usually only two of them—the normative male and female ones—are considered natural is fairly arbitrary, and they are only accepted as natural because of how they hide their origins. For example, as adults at least, we do not normally consider the way a seated woman crosses her legs at the knee to be a performance, much less one that actually creates what we construe as feminine. But when a person with a male body sits in that feminine way, we see that that is just what it is.

Butler’s views on gender, from which my own derive, clearly draw from performance studies. This field grew out of theater studies and anthropology, and it helps us to focus on process rather than product. In the words of Richard Schechner, one of the founders of performance studies, whatever is being studied is regarded as practices, events, and behaviors, not as ‘objects’ or ‘things’ (2013, 2). My book fits with this perspective: it asks how Dominican musical performance contributes to the stability, variation, or transformation of Dominican gender identities in national and transnational contexts.

Many of the performers I analyze in this book, particularly in Chapter 6, are engaged in processes of empowerment by reconstructing or reconfiguring meaning out of preexisting messages in performance. José Esteban Muñoz termed these processes disidentifications in his 1999 book of the same title, a study of queer Latino and Latin American performance artists of color. Disidentification, Muñoz says, is a way of rereading and reinterpreting pop culture in a political way precisely because one does not identify with its images or the relations they portray, even if those items are otherwise appealing. It is a survival strategy that works within and outside the dominant public sphere simultaneously (1999, 5).⁶ More specifically, disidentification is a process through which queer subjects engage in oppositional reading, breaking down dominant codes and transforming meanings. However, as I show, disidentification is not for queer subjects only: many Dominicans of all sorts disidentify with the Dominican national project, musically symbolized by mainstream (i.e., orquesta or popular) merengue, and that disidentification can result in adherence to other musical genres that better encapsulate nonmainstream gender, racial, or regional identities, including merengue típico, palos, Afro-Dominican fusions, and merengue de calle, to mention just a few (see Appendix A for descriptions of these genres, and Díaz 2013 for an example of how salsa fans build an alternative Dominican identity).

I deal with cross-dressing in just one chapter (Chapter 6), but both Butler’s and Muñoz’s ideas about drag nonetheless influence my analyses throughout the book. Muñoz too sees drag as a transformative performance, one that disidentifies with the a priori relationship of woman and femininity that is a tenet of gender-normative thinking (Muñoz 1999, 108). In other words, drag shows how queer performers are unable or unwilling to identify with the usual binary gender categories and thus offers a critique of the truths of binary gender categories. Questioning these categories lays the foundations for a wider public to see the constructed nature of those supposed truths and possibly oppose them; in this way, drag performances can actually change the world (195–96). While neither Butler nor Muñoz deal with music or dance specifically, I believe they would agree with the importance I assign to these expressions as spaces of imaginative play. For Muñoz, fiction is a technology of the self in that it brings a self into being, blurring lines between the real and the fictional—it is itself a contested field of self-production (20). For Butler, fantasy allows us to move beyond what is merely actual and present into a realm of possibility, thus laying the groundwork for future change (2004, 28–29). The potential of creative work to change our ideas about what is possible can actually place artistic performance at the forefront of cultural change.⁷ Feminist ethnomusicology also has a role to play here. For instance, I work to mainstream the analysis of women’s musicking by discussing it as an integral part of a system that also includes other genders. And particularly given the location of my study, I additionally aim to organize my work around local ways of thinking about gender and to value the critiques made locally as a kind of indigenous feminism, different from but just as valuable as mainstream, Northern, or academic feminisms. In fact, I believe ethnomusicology is ideally positioned to counteract some of the problems of feminist thought precisely because of its commitment to hearing and analyzing the voices of Others.⁸

My book both converges and diverges from prior scholarship in ethnomusicology and musicology, in which the lion’s share of research on gender has been written by and about women, often from a feminist perspective. While I too am a woman writing about gender and drawing from feminism, men are also a focus of this book, because my aim is to consider gender as a whole system. Feminist theory began to impact music studies in the 1980s, so that by 1990 gender was a topic of interest for many researchers, both ethnomusicologists and historical musicologists. In historical musicology, the work of Susan McClary (especially [1991] 2002), Suzanne Cusick (1999), and others have been broadly influential. In ethnomusicology, gender has appeared as the focus of several important edited collections (Koskoff 1987; Herndon and Ziegler 1990; Moisala and Diamond 2000; Magrini 2003), though mainly in the form of documenting women’s musical activities in various musical cultures. Only a few book-length musical ethnographies have dealt with gender as a primary topic. The most influential is likely Jane Sugarman’s 1997 Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings, which showed how differential singing styles helped not only to reinforce but actually to create Prespa notions of masculinity and femininity. Other ethnographies have followed the lead of the early edited collections and focused on women’s musical activities (e.g., Gilman 2011; Chuse 2013); monographs on music and masculinity are much rarer (a notable exception is Spiller 2010). Very few ethnographies have considered gender more broadly as an identity, performance, or a meaningful system of cultural organization; it is still unusual to analyze gender in music relationally, placing the performances of those identified as male, female, or another gender side by side.⁹ Two exceptions are Sarah Weiss’s (2006) study of female and male ways of playing Indonesian gamelan music and Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamusuza’s (2005) look at the array of varied gender identities performed in Ugandan music and dance. While it is now common to include a section or chapter dealing with gender in musical ethnographies, in-depth studies that consider gender as a principal foundation for all music making (not just that of women) remain rare.

Clearly, I also draw from performance studies in my analysis, and I hope that in doing so I can contribute a somewhat unique example of how we can understand gender to be built through music. While music might seem to be an obvious topic of study for performance theorists, and indeed musical research into performance long predates the birth