Language is profoundly important in dancehall, just as much as the body

Language is profoundly important in dancehall, just as much as the body

—and arguably the cloth that covers or uncovers the body—is. The female deejay's lyrical prowess asserts her power over her own body and her right to experience sexual pleasure through the body. In Spice’s “So Mi Like It,” arguably one of the summer’s catchiest dancehall songs, the artist talks in dance and bike riding metaphors about being on top during sex, a seemingly powerful sexual position [Yes a so mi like it / Bring yo buddy come yuh meck mi ride it / Ride it like a bike it / Cock up and sit down and wine it]. Buddy is a colloquial term for the penis and in “So Mi Like It,” Spice invites pleasure by saying skin out mi pum pum, a graphic term for spreading your legs over your head in a V-shape during sex, a position that is also reenacted in the dance. There are contestations for giving the body away as well. A female deejay may write about using the temptation of the body and the sexual power of withholding to con a man who boasts too much about his own virility. This power play reminds the man of the weakness in his connectivity to his 

It’s not just women who are pushing the boundaries of sexual expression within the dancehall space. Vybz Kartel was not in any way the first to utilize slackness in his music, but the volume in which he created and the manner in which he aggressively expressed it arguably altered sexuality in dancehall. Fellatio was taboo prior to Kartel’s exploration of it in his music because of its cultural associations with homosexuality. Few artists admitted that they received it prior to Kartel. In songs like “Freaky Gal,” Kartel unabashedly celebrates receiving fellatio and the woman who gives it: Gal wah go down, you me love, love, love / Every time me fuck, my cocky get suck. However, as Patterson reminds us, a double standard still remains in the public sphere: “More (male) entertainers started to come out and sing more openly about what they like and what they don’t like and what they want and what the girls do, but [they say] ‘I not returning it.'” However, what happens behind closed doors may be pushing the envelope as exemplified through female artists like Tiana who responded to Kartel’s “Freaky Gal” with her own “Freaky Man” track about receiving oral sex from her partner: Di tip a yuh tongue wild like tsunami / Nuh worry baby mi nah tell nobody / Lick yuh lips dem come satisfy mi.

Where language still has battles to fight in unpicking culturally constructed heteronormative behaviors, dance has the power to push through. It can wage complicated hegemonic conversations without saying a single word—remember my friend and the dancing woman? Never is that more apparent than in the dance known as “daggering.” A vigorous movement involving the thrusting of a man’s pelvis to a woman’s, it has been widely typified in global conversations as an example of exaggerated exchanges of sex in dancehall. Interestingly, however, the dance inserted new exchanges of sexual power between men and women. While a woman may not be the dagger-er because she does not own a “dagger,” there are exceptions to the situation. “There have been instances where a woman grabs the man to dagger him, but the way she has pulled him in, it is a seemingly masculine thing to do,” recalls Patterson. “The idea of you thrusting a man could be seen as emasculating, but it depends on who the partner is. If it is a man who is sure of his power, and isn’t shy because his male friends are seeing this woman handle him a certain way, he may very well take it back to her.” Through such unspoken negotiations of when to touch and when not to touch, the dance continues to be a space in which conversations about sexual power dynamics flow freely.

Saturday nights, near the Crossroads Bus Terminal in Kingston, the sounds of the popular street party named Container Satdazs thump heavily off the walls of the Gee Wee Car Park. On occasion, the deejay will invite women from the crowd to “wine pon head top” to receive a free bottle of Magnum, a local tonic wine advertised widely in dancehall and branded as a sexual stimulant. While in the starkness of the daylight, this place may seem like an unremarkable parking lot, at night it becomes a myriad of sounds, textures and movement—the Gee Wee Car Park becomes a playground for women. As the ladies step into place and buss a “wine,” the DJ shouts, “Big up my ladies who know it nah the clothes make you look good, a you make the clothes look good.” It is in this momentary spectacle, a temporary escape from mundanity, that women are empowered by their defiant sensuality.