Tigers of a Different Stripe

Book excerpt: In Tigers of a Different Stripe, ethnomusicologist Sydney Hutchinson examines a variety of music genres in the Dominician Republic, and its diasporic communities, to shed light on how gender is performed through music, especially merengue tipico, a traditional, accordion-based genre that has undergone great change since the 1960s. Hutchinson goes beyond looking at just the music itself, to how dancing and listening, as well as viewing and discussing music, all play a part in gender performance and construction. Dominican gender roles are usually defined by a binary understanding of gender that is at its worst sexist and patriarchal, with macho men and subservient women. Hutchinson shows how wrong this is in musical performance, where musicians like Rita Indiana bend both gender and genre. The discussion naturally expands to movement, migration, race, class, and notions of tradition and modernity. In the end, Tigers shows how music can either reinforce entrenched gender roles or help to open up possibilities by imagining new roles and identities for all."