Dr Donna Hope Marquis - Contributed

When Dr Donna Hope Marquis, University of West the Indies, Mona lecturer, was asked to speak at the Tuesday, March 31, opening of Ebony Patterson's 'Gangstaz, Disciplez and the Doiley Boyz', she said "yes" enthusiastically.

Patterson's work for the exhibition, at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts' CAGE Gallery, was not totally new to Hope Marquis, as she had read about it previously in a Vibe magazine article. "I was intrigued first by the title and then by the fact that it was talking about art that dealt with Jamaican masculinity in conversation with contemporary popular music and culture," she told THE STAR.

Hope Marquis had been gathering material for the course 'Culture, Gender and Sexuality in Jamaican Popular Music', which she lectures, and told the audience at the opening "to say my students were intrigued is an understatement".

gender mix

"The gender mix is about two-thirds female and one-third male, which is a little above the overall gender mix at UWI. This is a new course which I created in 2007 and which was first offered in Semester 2/January of 2008," Hope Marquis told THE STAR.

She said that Patterson is from the "dancehall generation" and, as such, "her work resonates with dancehall's debates on the masculine self". Hope Marquis defines the 'dancehall generation' as "those people born under the shadow of dancehall, those born 1980 and after. Of course there is also the earlier generation, which would include those people who came to a sense of self with dancehall as the soundtrack of their youth - those people born after independence in the 1960s and 1970s".

dancehall generation

That 'dancehall generation' and Jamaica on a whole have now reached the stage where "we are in a transformative mode that is rich with possibility. And in this tangled web of intense possibility, identities are dynamic, sexualities challenged and masculinities are highly transgressive"

THE STAR asked Hope Marquis if the boundaries that Jamaican masculinity are breaking and resetting are tending towards the hyper-macho or the subtly feminine - or both. "The boundaries are a mixture of both. The male dancer is a good reflection of this mixture," Hope Marquis said.

And the "hardcore gangsters posing with decorated bodies, coiffed topes and bejewelled costumes" do "contradict notions of mindless, blind and violently homophobic dancehall".

"Like Jamaican society, dancehall is a very paradoxical space where many things that are said to be directly opposed to each other actually live in a kind of balanced understanding," Hope told THE STAR.

One of the contradictions is "celebrating capitalist materialism and the uplifting potential of fetishised material products" and Hope Marquis told THE STAR "some young men do aspire to become materially empowered and to achieve a home, a car and live a good life and do work towards these goals. Others become trapped in the rituals of poverty that are a part of life in Jamaica and engage in empty posturing with name-brand clothes, cellphones and hype lifestyles that swallow their incomes in a flash but have no long-term relevance or value to their lives".

At the launch, Hope Marquis told the audience that Patterson's work is "evocative of male lives lived in search of meanings, questioning the very essence of the masculine self. And they move us to question these imaged identities".

"Who are we? Who we are inna Lexus, superstar wid all DSS inna wi cyar? Celebrating capitalist materialism and the uplifting potential of fetishised material products. Draped in pretty pretty shine an kris. Are we that man?" she asked.

And she thanked the artist for her effort. "I also wish to extend my personal thanks to you Ebony for your graphic and effective renderings of the interplay of these contemporary ideas of the male self in Jamaica, while hinting at dancehall's sensibilities of the extreme," Hope Marquis said.

Another provocative piece from Patterson's collection

A portrayal of a 'Disciple' from Ebony G Patterson's collection - Gansters+Disciplez+Doiley Boyz.