"Women will be truly sexually free only when we reach a point where we can perceive ourselves as having sexual value and autonomy, independent of the male gaze."
— bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000)
There is a scene that anyone who has attended a shatta concert in Martinique will recognize instantly. A female artist walks on stage. She sings, she dances, she occupies the space with a confidence that asks no one's permission. In the crowd, reactions split: admiration, jubilation, discomfort, sometimes outrage. This split is not trivial. It reveals something that music, precisely, makes visible: the boundaries of gender in postcolonial Martinican society — where they hold firm, where they give way, where they reinvent themselves.
Shatta is often reduced to its festive dimension, or to a supposed provocation. That is a misreading. Since its emergence at the turn of the 2000s, at the crossroads of Jamaican dancehall and Antillean urban cultures, it has constituted a space of social performativity where gender norms are expressed, clash, and transform. It is not a musical genre that talks about society. It is a musical genre that does something to society, that sets it in motion, that reveals its deepest tensions.
The male shatta body: virility, survival, and the staging of power
Understanding male shatta requires resisting the simplest reading. When artists like Kalash, Naza, or figures from shatta's first generation perform strength, material success, mastery of the stage, and symbolic domination, it can be tempting to see nothing more than the reproduction of ordinary misogyny. That reading falls short.
What male shatta stages, first, is an economy of visibility. In a context of economic and social marginalization where young Black Martinican men are structurally devalued, the performance of virility functions as a strategy of symbolic self-assertion. Erving Goffman, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), showed that every social interaction is a performance, a way of presenting a self that restores or maintains status. In shatta, this performance is pushed to its highest degree: the body, the voice, the clothes, the gestures — everything works together to produce an image of power that compensates, symbolically, for what society denies economically.
This logic connects to what Raewyn Connell calls hegemonic masculinity in Masculinities (2005): the dominant form of masculinity in a given society, one that establishes itself as the norm even though most men do not actually embody it, but to which everyone refers. In Martinican shatta, the figure of the badman, inherited from 1990s Jamaican dancehall, embodies this hegemonic masculinity. It is performed, staged, claimed. But it is also, precisely because it is a performance, unstable — something to be won over and over again.
It would be dishonest to stop there. This shatta virility also carries a real violence, directed at women, at female bodies, at female autonomy. Some lyrics in the genre objectify, instrumentalize, sometimes degrade. Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of male domination (La domination masculine, 1998) remains relevant here: symbolic structures of domination are no less real for being expressed in a song. Recognizing the logic of survival underlying shatta virilism does not amount to absolving it of its effects.
Female shatta: turning the stigma around
It is precisely against these effects that female shatta builds its strength. Artists like Maureen, Shaydee's, Sage, or Ivy Jalta do not simply exist within a musical space that men have defined. They reconfigure it. Their aesthetic — gestures, clothing, language — constitutes a counter-aesthetic: one of reclaiming the Black female body.
This reversal has a long history. Since the era of slavery, the Antillean woman's body has been a territory of control: sexualized by the colonizer, disciplined by the colonial school, held in check by injunctions to respectability that have run through Martinican society up to today. Clara Palmiste has shown how early-20th-century school discourse imposed on Creole girls an erasure of their corporeality, a toning-down of attributes deemed too "African," an internalization of shame. What female shatta artists do is break with this injunction — not out of ignorance of history, but in full awareness of what they are shifting.
bell hooks, in Black Looks (1992), analyzed the moment when Black women refuse to be defined by the male and white gaze, and produce their own gaze upon themselves. Female shatta belongs to this lineage. When Maureen or Sage stage their bodies in wine or shake choreographies, they are not illustrating colonial sexualization. They are turning it around. What was shame becomes affirmation. What was judged unworthy becomes a claim. The body stops being the object of a gaze that classifies and condemns it, and becomes the subject of its own staging.
This is what Françoise Vergès calls a decolonial feminism in Un féminisme décolonial (2019): a feminism that is born not from political slogans or imported theoretical frameworks, but from the very practice of the body, of song, of dance — a feminism rooted in struggles of the Global South, centered on the concrete experiences of racialized women and their strategies of symbolic resistance. Female shatta artists have not necessarily read Vergès. But they practice exactly what she describes: a politics of the body that undoes the racial and gendered hierarchies inherited from colonization by turning sexuality — historically a site of control — into a site of creative freedom.
The violence this stance draws is revealing. The slut-shaming these artists face, the accusations of vulgarity, the moral judgments heaped on their art, are not random reactions. They mark the exact spot where something is shifting. As Judith Butler noted in Gender Trouble (1990), gender norms reveal themselves precisely where they are transgressed: the sanction signals the threat. If female shatta disturbs this much, it is precisely because it changes something in the Martinican symbolic order, in the map of the legitimate and illegitimate body, the visible and the invisible.
Porous boundaries: inclusive masculinities and gender hybridities
It would be reductive to oppose a liberating female shatta to a regressive male shatta. Reality is more complex, and more interesting. The boundaries between these two poles are porous, and it is in that porosity that some of the most significant dynamics of gender play out.
Some male shatta artists adopt aesthetic or discursive postures that move away from the dominant virilism. Collaborations between male and female artists, staging that values sensuality without turning it into domination, lyrics that grant agency to female characters: these elements, still a minority but growing within shatta production of the 2020s, signal an evolution. Connell calls this movement inclusive masculinities: forms of male identity that are no longer built against the feminine, but with it, that integrate codes traditionally associated with femininity without experiencing them as a threat.
This evolution is not disconnected from broader transformations in Martinican society. The rise of Antillean feminisms since the 2010s, the growing visibility of struggles for gender equality, the spread of social media, which lets female artists build an audience outside traditional circuits of legitimation — all of these factors weigh on gender representations in shatta and shift them, slowly, in unpredictable directions.
Paul Gilroy, in The Black Atlantic (1993), analyzed diasporic Black culture as a space of permanent hybridization, where forms circulated between continents and constantly recomposed themselves. Shatta fits this logic: it absorbs Jamaican dancehall, Afro-Caribbean rhythms, the visual codes of American hip-hop, and Martinican social realities, and produces from them something that cannot be reduced to any single source. This hybridity holds for gender too: shatta does not simply reproduce the norms of masculinity and femininity it inherits — it transforms them by putting them in tension, making them dialogue, sometimes turning them around.
What shatta reveals
Shatta, understood as a laboratory of gender, reveals two things at once. It reveals, first, the persistence of structures of domination inherited from colonization: the control of the Black female body, the hierarchy of legitimate and illegitimate sexualities, virility as a response to social marginalization. These structures do not disappear because a musical genre stages them. They reproduce themselves, sometimes reinforced by that very staging.
But it also reveals, with a force that institutional cultural forms struggle to match, the dynamics of resistance and reinvention at work in postcolonial Martinican society. Female shatta artists build, song after song, video after video, an aesthetics of bodily sovereignty that did not exist before them. They create a language. And languages, once created, do not disappear easily.
This is not a reassuring conclusion. Shatta is not a space of pure freedom, and its contradictions are real. But it is a living space, crossed by tensions that belong to the whole of society. Seeing it is already a way of better understanding what contemporary Martinique is made of.
Further reading
Bourdieu, Pierre. La domination masculine. Paris: Seuil, 1998.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Connell, Raewyn W. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil, 1952.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993.
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.
Vergès, Françoise. Un féminisme décolonial. Paris: La Fabrique, 2019.
© Noor-Sharina Grondin, 2025. This text is protected by copyright. Any reproduction or use without authorization is prohibited. For any request, contact: norahdoctorante@gmail.com