Video Light: How Jamaica’s Women Find Sexual Empowerment in Dancehall In this special essay for Sell Off week,

Video Light: How Jamaica’s Women Find Sexual Empowerment in Dancehall

In this special essay for Sell Off week, The FADER explores how language and the body play crucial roles in redefining female sexuality in dancehall

In the late aughts, a party trend emerged in street dances in Jamaica that followed a “uniform party” theme in which attendees—mostly between the ages of 17 and 25—would arrive in some exaggerated variation of a school uniform. I attended such a party in the summer of 2010 while hosting friends in Montego Bay who had come from overseas. We followed a local friend of mine to a small uniform party taking place in the bend of a road near downtown. My American friends, sticking out in their plain shorts and tees, stood by and enjoyed the music and even more so, the dancing. In the middle of the road, where the bravest ventured, dancers showed off their styles, dancing with one another or by themselves in highly playful and often sexual ways. 

Midway through the night, a woman emerged from the top of the road, dressed down in a tank top and leggings, but clearly more experienced in the ways of body language than her younger counterparts. She entered the center confidently and began to perform, bending and gyrating and taking on overzealous young men who misleadingly believed they could conquer her. Much to one of my American friends’ dismay, this commanding mystery woman began to call him out to challenge her, to see if he could “manage” it, or in more literal terms, satisfy her sexual desire through dance.   

The theme of satisfying a woman, or the question of whether a man can satisfy her, is a long standing storyline in dancehall music: “Female entertainers like Spice, or Lady Saw have used sex as a kind of power stick,” says Ebony G. Patterson, a visual artist who draws on the sexual and gender contradictions of dancehall in her art forms. “If you think about [Beenie Man's] song ‘Nuff Gyal,' to be a man you have to have enough women, and in order to have these women you have to be able to service them—and not just give them money, but to satisfy them sexually," continues Patterson. "If you’re not able to do that then you are a wutless bwoy.” Patterson is referring to the song “Wutless Bwoy” by the often irritable and culturally pervasive deejay Bounty Killer. In the song, Bounty Killer relays the stories told by local women about a man deemed to be worthless for his inability to pleasure the women he lays with. Action—such as the dance moves used by the mystery woman who challenged my American friend—as well as language, lyrics or otherwise, can publicly unveil a man’s sexual shortcomings. Women in the dancehall are distinctly aware of their ability to disempower a man in the heat of the moment on the dancefloor and these challenges are commonplace

However, to challenge a man’s sexual prowess doesn’t come without animosity from the socially conservative. “Slackness” is a term that is widely used in Jamaica to pass judgement on this type of behaviour from women. “In Jamaican culture, ‘slackness’ definitely has negative connotations of sexual looseness,” says Jamaican literary scholar Carolyn Cooper. “It’s largely sexual, and it means improper behavior, particularly for women who are supposed to still accept the fundamentalist Christian values of Jamaican society. Women should  be nurturing and, yes, sexual, but not in an overt way.” In this way, slackness, or behaviour that is considered slack, poses a challenge to the patriarchal paradigm. “I think what is interesting about dancehall is that it is a space where that kind of ‘slackness’ is celebrated,” Cooper continues. “Women claim their sexuality and dance in ways that some would consider not respectable.”

An empowered female sexuality in dancehall emerged at a time when American pop music was also exploring its own sexual identity. As Madonna’s “Justify My Love” delved into female empowerment through sexual ownership over one’s body and its desires, Jamaican dancehall artist Lady Saw was celebrating her own sexuality and challenging conventional determinations of women as either virgin, mother or whore. While Madonna challenged this Judeo Christian dichotomy through religious imagery and lyrics in her “Justify My Love” video [I don’t want to be your mother / I don’t want to be your sister / I just want to be your lover], Lady Saw was asserting herself outside of the conservative family dynamic in “Wife and Sweetheart” [You are di wife / Me a the sweetheart / Me a deal with your husband, gyal, after dark].

“The flamboyantly exhibitionist DJ Lady Saw epitomizes the sexual liberation of many African Jamaican working-class women from airy-fairy Judeo-Christian definitions of appropriate female behaviour,” wrote Cooper in Lady Saw Cuts Loose: Female Fertility Rituals in the Dancehall (Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture At Large, 2004). Born Marion Hall, Lady Saw used her self-created dancehall persona to start a socially challenging conversation on the power of pleasure—specifically, female pleasure.

Bizarrely, despite the clear correlations to themes in American pop music that artists like Madonna were exploring, foreign critics deemed Lady Saw’s explicit sexuality as exemplary of male misogyny in dancehall. Cooper discusses the contradictory assessments of the song, “Stab Out Mi Meat,” by foreign critics such as American anthropologist Obiagele Lake who denounced Lady Saw as “one such songstress who plays herself and by association, all other women.” In the song Lady Saw plays with dagger imagery, using Jamaican colloquial metaphors for tenderizing one’s meat in food preparation [you have me siddung long time / me a starve] to allude to highly anticipatory orgasmic stimulation from vigorous sex. The dagger/holster and food/sex metaphor is commonly used in dancehall, just as Cooper notes, “conventional associations of orgasm and death” are commonly used in American pop music to arrive at a sexual metaphor.