Review: Tigers of a Different Stripe: Performing Gender in Dominican Music, by Sydney Hutchinson

Abstract

Tigers of a Different Stripe: Performing Gender in Dominican Music , by Sydney Hutchinson. Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. xii, 279 pp. In Tigers of a Different Stripe , Sydney Hutchinson places gender at the center of the most salient issues in Latin American musicology and ethnomusicology: race, class, transnationalism, and the tensions between modernity and tradition. As she explains, the Spanish word “genero” means both “gender” and “genre,” illustrating their intertwined relationship. Citing the heavily influential work of scholars such as Susan McClary, Ellen Koskoff, and Jane Sugarman, Hutchinson notes that feminist scholarship and gender studies have permeated the field to the extent that most writers now commonly include chapters or sections on gender. She also claims, however, that “very few ethnographies have considered gender more broadly” and that “in-depth studies that consider gender as a principal foundation for all music making (not just that of women) remain rare” (p. 11). In-depth, gender-focused ethnographies within Latin Americanist music scholarship specifically are even more rare. Hutchinson frames Tigers not as a feminist study or compensatory narrative about Dominican female musicians, but as a study of “how Dominican musical performance contributes to the stability, variation, or transformation of Dominican gender identities” (p. 9). Hutchinson focuses on Dominican popular music, particularly merengue tipico , a form of merengue also known as perico ripiao that developed in the Cibao valley during the early twentieth century. It is a “traditional, accordion-based genre that has undergone great change since the 1960s as a result of …