Gabrielle Messeder, City, University of London
Abstract for the 13th Symposium of the ICTM Mediterranean Music Studies Group:
Music, Power, and Space: A Mediterranean Perspective
Leila Khoury [pseudonum] is a São Paulo-born Lebanese-Brazilian singer and dancer who lives and works in Beirut. Due to the close transnational relationship between the two countries and the international commodification of samba, Brazilian musicians and dancers are in high demand in Lebanon: they are hired to entertain at weddings and nightclubs, and to teach dance classes. Yet, foreign female dancers visiting Lebanon are legally obliged to apply for an ‘Artist Visa’, which enforces bodily surveillance via regular medical tests, and categorises foreign dancers as sex workers. It is also part of the exploitative kafala (“sponsorship”) legislative framework. The conflation of foreign dancers – artistes – with sex workers was first legally enforced by colonial officials during the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon (1923−1946). This law has arguably contributed to long-held discriminatory attitudes towards performing women (and women of colour) in Lebanon, and has stifled the growth of Beirut’s music and dance scene.
In this paper, I will outline how the sociolegal repercussions from these colonial-era laws are in dialogue with Portuguese colonial constructions of Brazilian women as hypersexual and exotic in the production and promotion of Brazilian music and dance in Lebanon. Tropicalist and erotic representations of samba dancers and musicians are commonplace, and thus, working as a performer in Beirut, Leila must navigate shifting priorities and dangers in her day-to-day working life: codeswitching between autoexoticising herself in order to obtain work as “authentic” samba dancer, and trying to “pass” as Lebanese to avoid hassle from security forces.
Mediterranean Music Studies 