Ska, a popular music genre originating in Jamaica, has idealistically served as a genre that creates spaces for inclusivity and unity. However, researchers have noted that these perceived utopian spaces did not prioritize the inclusion of women (Augustyn 2020, 2023; Black 2011; Sangaline 2022; Stratton, 2011). To further complicate ideas of utopia and unity, these studies of inclusion often exclude ska scenes outside of Jamaica, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Ska music has garnered immense popularity throughout the world, significantly in Mexico. In this paper, I investigate Mexican ska music festivals as a gendered space to address current questions in ethnomusicology regarding intersectionality and gender. I ask: to what extent are ska festivals in Mexico City and Tijuana designed to be inclusive or exclusive gendered environments? Is creating a safe environment a priority for festival organizers? Who is performing? Who is not? How are notions of masculinity like machismo reinforced to serve as barriers? How do women circumvent or operate within such structures of aggressive masculinity? Drawing from digital ethnography and fieldwork in Mexico City and Tijuana, I use these questions as a starting point to examine the similarities and differences of various festivals as they relate to issues of creating gender-inclusive spaces.

Leonard Feather (1914-1994) was one of the first (and only) prominent jazz critics to recognize gender discrimination within jazz and attempt to redress the issue. But even by the 1950s, Feather grew frustrated with his inability to effect meaningful change for women musicians. He could not understand why women like Beryl Booker, Melba Liston, Vi Redd, and others did not receive more attention, even after he arranged tours and produced record dates for them (Feather 1987). The privileged position he held within the music industry—a position he had cultivated and leveraged in support of other musicians he felt had been unfairly discriminated against—ultimately seemed to do little for many of the women he championed.

Feather’s reputation and experience as a critic and record producer made him a consummate jazz connoisseur—a title that suggests the combined knowledge and power to create exclusive canons of greatness, and a title that had long been dominated by men (Straw 1997, Gabbard 2004). In this paper, I investigate Feather’s attempts to leverage his power of aesthetic judgment to advocate for women within jazz. However, these attempts ran up against a fundamental tenet of jazz connoisseurship; namely, that jazz connoisseurs consider themselves to be “objective” observers, as opposed to active participants, in the specialized curation of jazz history. Using Feather’s allyship as a backdrop, I demonstrate how the seeming objectivity and passivity cultivated by jazz connoisseurs both contributed to and was informed by a broader jazz patriarchy.

“Seudati will not survive with women dancing it.” A male choreographer in Aceh, Indonesia, made this startling comment to me. These words speak to the friction among Acehnese dance practitioners caused by female dancers’ recent participation in seudati. Seudati is Acehnese traditional dance in which dancers stand to dance and playfully improvise in singing and movements. Contrastingly, the choreographies of most Acehnese dance forms are pre-determined and performed sitting down. I hypothesize that it is the particular characteristics in seudati–the freedom of improvisation through female bodies and voices–that are seen as dangerous to keeping the cohesive and male-dominant nature of Aceh’s Muslim community today. As most dances in Aceh are practiced by both men and women, this rejection of female practice of seudati is peculiar.

The province of Aceh has gone through thirty years of violent political and ideological conflict with the central government of Indonesia (1970s–2004) and experienced a devastating tsunami in 2004. In this new era, society and religion in Aceh have become increasingly conservative (2004–present) due to the complex interplay between global Islamic revivalism and national policies that promoted patriarchy to Aceh’s traditionally matrifocal society. This contestation to female dancers’ engagement with seudati illuminates one of many cases where the increasingly firm socio-religious opposition that female Muslim dancers experience in Aceh in its “peaceful” era in the past 20 years. I investigate the changing relationship between the Acehnese performing arts, gendered aesthetics and localized forms of Islam within the Acehnese society.