1 Published in: Journal of Black Masculinity: The Philosophical Underpinnings of Gender Identity, vol. 1, no. 3 (Summer 2011) www.blackmasculinity.com Swagga: Fashion, Kinaesthetics and Gender in Dancehall and Hip-Hop Lena Delgado de Torres, Ph.D. Kean University Abstract: Gender constructs in Jamaican society have undergone significant transformations over the last two decades. The post-1980s in this peripheral nation-state have been characterized by hegemonic dissolution stemming in part from changes in the world-system. The shifts in gender constructs are defined by class-based conflicts over the norms, values and aesthetics associated with the traditional bourgeois classes. The fulcrum for investigation is Jamaica’s Dancehall culture. Transformations in gender are seen most clearly in the field of Dancehall’s masculinities, taking form in clashes over the body. These conflicts center around dress, gendered dancing styles and adornment. Furthermore, clashes occur within the Dancehall between conservative and counter-hegemonic elements, and outside of the Dancehall, in terms of a confrontation with the conservative norms of the wider society, played out in the arena of sexual morality and aesthetics. By placing Dancehall in its African Diasporic context, Dancehall dress and movement are linked to discursive nodes on the continent and in the Americas in order to arrive at a discourse of Pan-African gender, dress and dance. Research consisted of extensive interviews with dancers and intellectuals, in order to reach a qualitative analysis of the problem. The study concluded that while dancers are challenging the hegemonic norms of Jamaican masculinity, sets of rules are simultaneously evolving as a backlash against the perceived loosening of gender strictures. Introduction: Sociologists suggest that post-1980s Jamaica has been marked by a process of hegemonic dissolution (Meeks, 2000, p. 124-43). Western markers of culture, morality and aesthetics, prescribed as “norms” and “status-bearing” by the bourgeois, brown and white middle classes are gradually being swept away, replaced by an alternative ethos emerging from the massive, the urban and rural Black working classes. It has also been suggested that certain repressed and supressed elements of Black massive culture, in particular men’s fashion and dancing, are rememerging and coming to the fore within popular culture. These