Ojos Así: Shakira and Fused Identity

Abstract

On February 2, 2020, Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripol performed on stage at the National Football League’s LIV Super Bowl. Her fusion of Lebanese, Colombian, and African music and dance sparked outrage and jubilation among viewers. While some insisted her dance was proof of dangerous, subaltern hypersexuality, others argued it was evidence of Latinidad’s thrivance in spite of ongoing colonization and U.S. imperialism. Still other audience members argued her use of African and hip-hop styles occupied space in a long history of white and Latine appropriation of Black cultural artifacts. Disparate audience members then aired disagreements via the internet. Shakira’s performance and subsequent audience responses provide rich material for analyzing how differently situated audience members decode visual culture texts produced by racialized women whose identities refuse simplistic racial categorization. I argue dominant-hegemonic viewers attempt to bolster existing power structures by disciplining Shakira’s body via decoding strategies that reproduce white supremacy. Through cross-cultural, networked socialities, subalternized, diasporic audience members emphasize interpretations that directly contradict dominant-hegemonic interpretations. By doing so, they disrupt dominant-hegemonic control over encoding and decoding strategies, subverting white supremacy.