Bruk Out Feminism in the Intercultural Dancehall Queen Scene

The focus of this thesis is the intercultural Dancehall Queen (DHQ) scene, as manifested between Jamaica and Europe, within the broader culture of dancehall. Dancehall is a performance culture that first developed as a resistant expression toward a postcolonial Jamaican climate in the late 1970s (Cooper, 2004). According to several dancehall scholars including Carolyn Cooper, dancehall articulates the condition of a working-class black Jamaican population. As such, much of the academic research on dancehall to date has focused on its relationship to its Jamaican socioeconomic and cultural context. Dancehall has also been found to be relevant to women outside Jamaica (Bakare-Yusuf, 2006b), but very little of the literature looks specifically at this dimension. This thesis sets out to examine the practices of Jamaican and European women in dancehall from an intercultural perspective, looking at the connectivities and tensions within this diversely positioned collective. The research, which used a reflexive physical/digital multi-sited ethnographic methodology, offers a model for conducting research into intercultural black feminist phenomena that span transnational sites and virtual/physical embodiment and connectivity. The methodology recognises the ethnographic encounter as a performative space between researcher and participant, and develops accountable strategies for reading silence and embodied expressivity, in dialogue with verbal, textual and visual research materials in intercultural research settings. It reveals that in this study juxtapositions between hypervisibility and silence by certain black Jamaican and black European dancers amount to a decolonial articulation of the right to opacity (Glissant, 1990). The study finds that the women in the Jamaican/European DHQ scene engage in various forms of creative, embodied and digital labour practices in the construction of their dancehall identities. It argues that this labour is underscored by a black epistemology centred on the vernacular Jamaican notion of bruk out, which put simply means to break out. The research argues that bruk out is performatively enacted within DHQ performances that engage black feminist Caribbean aesthetics that centre on the pleasure taken in performative dares that break social respectability rules. The study subsequently introduces the concept of ‘bruk out feminism’, which it argues is a performative world view that focuses on the expressivity of pleasure and pain through the construction of digital visual cultures, forms of materialist self-determination and decolonial self-preservation. The research studies how these cultural specificities are negotiated in the intercultural exchanges between white and black, Jamaican and European, dancers. It argues that reflexive interculturalism, which centralises and empowers the practices of black women in dancehall and uses exchange, friction and dialogue to de-centre a privileged position of whiteness, enables forms of coalitional solidarity to take shape. It concludes that the scene reflects an agonistic (Mouffé, 2012) status quo, where exploitative and socially progressive predilections co-exist

Screening subjects : transnational dancehall culture in a social media age

Dancehall, a popular dance style originating from downtown Kingston Jamaica, now circulates across transnational spaces through digital media and postcolonial consumption systems. This presentation will study dancehall in the twenty-first century as an information age space for transcultural production, with a focus on female participation. It will interrogate the authoritative role of the video camera in the scene, and the impact that the use of screens has on the practitioners' cultural, phenomenological and economic experience. The discussion will analyse the engagement of diversely situated females in relation to questions of mobility, visibility and power

Pussy power and batty riders : performances of material and erotic pleasure at International Dancehall Queen Competitions

This presentation will explore, in the context of the researcher's recent fieldwork at the International Dancehall Queen Competition in Jamaica, the body, and particularly the 'batty', as site of embodied pleasure. It will look at the competition participants' motivations to engage with their bodies and take part in this cultural phenomena by mining the significance of the corporeal and visceral experience of pleasure when investing in the act of dancehall movement. At the competition the all-female competitors celebrate their kinaesthetic sense and revel in corporeal pleasure. They visualise the dynamism of dancehall music as they vibrate, beat, shake and rotate the invaluable expressive tool of their buttocks. They perform for short, intense moments like an electric guitarist's solo, during which they treat themselves to and share with the audience their expertise; allowing artist and audience alike to experience pleasure in artistic form. The Dancehall Queen's art form stimulates an aesthetic appreciation for the materiality of her existence. Further, primarily for the performer, there is also the inner-experience of kinaesthetic pleasure, when she "finds [herself] in a physically amplified state that has a certain pleasurable 'feel' [or]... 'groove'" (Matthias, 2014). Often, when critically analysing erotic performance, interpretations sit on the side of the viewer and in the age of the hyper-pornographic global economy; female erotica is perceived rather reductively as denigrating sexual objectification. She is assumed a mere object to the active patriarchal gaze. Although there is weight to such arguments, to what extent is her own experience of the performative moment valued when we critically engage with such performances? Is the phenomenological experience of her involvement appreciated in her depiction as subject/object