 a state of experiencing (mis-)alignment with socially constructed roles, behaviors, expressions, and identities attached to categories of bodies delineated by a culture’s unique criteria. Gender may hinge on visible anatomy (sex), embodied practices, or other characteristics.

Gender is a category of experience that is both uniquely personal and heavily impacted by cultural contexts. It is a way of organizing human beings and bodies into alliances formed around the meanings, social roles, and characteristics (anatomical, hormonal, chromosomal, and behavioral) that attach to and demarcate genders within a particular culture. Gender is one of those slippery, elusive frames of embodied cultural knowledge. The ways we define gender, such as clothing, behaviors, or other means are not innately gendered: We give these symbols gendered meanings within our culture’s norms and belief systems. Though its meaning is thus culturally constructed, gender has profound cultural relevance. How gender is defined thus also varies between cultures.

Gender identity is the experience of gender and how a person makes their own space within or outside the boundaries of a socially legible gender category, such as “male” or “female”; this may involve creating alternate cultural spaces in which their gender identity can be meaningful. In contrast, sex is anatomy, hormones, and chromosomes. Gender may be based around sex characteristics; however, gender identity and sex need not map onto each other. Since the 1970s, gender-focused activists have worked through scholarship, legislation, and community action to dissolve these linkages. For example, my own work on LGBTQ country western cultural forms like dance and rodeo explores how these enable a greater diversity of queer people to create meaningful identities and empowered communities (see Alexander 2019).

Second Wave Feminism and Impacts on Research Methods

In the latter twentieth century, music scholars began devoting sustained attention to the ways that gender impacts musical phenomena and communities. Beginning in the 1970s, music scholars took inspiration from the social justice activism of Second Wave feminists, whose primary goals included greater equity for women in areas such as reproductive rights and pay equity. At the same time, those marginalized in America’s mainstream feminist movement, such as lesbian activists and feminists of color from many ethnic backgrounds, advocated for their own communities’ rights alongside women’s rights. These women faced homophobia and racism in addition to sexism and misogyny. Drawing on these new currents, ethnomusicologists initially sought to reveal how women’s experiences and roles as musicians differed from men’s in various cultures. In the 1980s, North American ethnomusicologists increasingly paid attention to gender (Sugarman 2019:71), and ethnomusicologists also began to recognize that male informants had long framed (male) ethnomusicologists’ understandings of musical cultures. They observed that this resulted in systemically gendered perspectives (Nettl 1983:334). The recognition that a researcher’s gender impacts their research offered opportunities to fill in previously undocumented aspects of gender within music cultures, such as musics performed only by women for women, as is the case of healing rituals in Islamic eastern Africa and the Arabian Gulf, such as Zār ceremonies.

Female ethnomusicologists initially addressed this gap by refocusing on women’s participation in musical cultures (Koskoff 1987; Moore 1988; Abu-Lughod 1990; Doubleday [1988] 2006; Magrini 2003). The scope of this work gradually broadened to consider the impacts of gender more widely, and no longer limited itself to the experiences of women (Roy 2019; Thorn 2019; Spiller 2019). Researchers increasingly highlighted the culturally constructed reality of genders and the systemic nature of gendered experience. For example, Jeff Roy explores third gender categories in India, known as 

(2019). Meanwhile, Henry Spiller’s investigation of cross-dressing performances in West Java examines how these performances reinscribe normative gender roles (2019). Scholars also considered intersectional experiences that include gender, producing a growing body of work that looks at how racial and gender identities together impact musical participation (Gaunt 2006; Keyes 2006; Wong 2006; Hayes 2010). In the 2000s, scholars produced a steady stream of edited collections encompassing a wide range of topics and issues surrounding women’s participation in musical cultures (Moisala and Diamond 2000; Magowan and Wrazen 2013; Bernstein 2014; Koskoff 2014).

Reflexivity and the Role of the Researcher

Ethnography is a key method for generating research data in fields such as anthropology and ethnomusicology. Until the latter 20th century, “good” ethnographic research was marked by its presumed objectivity—meaning that the researcher was impartial in gathering data, something which is valued in the empirical sciences. Social sciences like anthropology attempted to replicate this idea of objectivity as much as possible. One of the most sustained impacts of a feminist approach is the rise of “reflexivity,” meaning the ability to interrogate one’s own subject position, biases, and motivations. Early twentieth century research attempted to remain objective and did not analyze the role of the researcher; however, later scholars questioned whether such research was as impartial as it claimed or whether it instead masked biases rather than acknowledging them. Reflexivity arose in the 1980s and became an expected praxis by the early 2000s (Barz and Cooley 2008:13). Through reflexivity, the fieldworker, or the researcher engaging directly with communities, explicitly recognizes that their body’s identities have cultural meaning. Further, they recognize that these identities impact the community they work in and consequently influence the research they produce. In short, the researching self is always a participant rather than someone separate or apart from the research. Researchers also began to recognize their place as agents of change who could impact the subjects of their research, and how research might in turn impact them (Hahn 2007; Wong 2008, 2019). To capture this complexity, practitioners of autoethnography—an ethnography that centrally includes the researcher’s experiences as a data source—work to thoroughly identify and unpack one’s place in a research site. This dissolves the idea that fieldworkers are neutral and interchangeable: Who we are matters for our work, methods, outcomes, and even safety. Autoethnography is a key method through which gender has become more accessibly documented, defined, discussed, and dissolved (Alexander 2019; Castro 2019).

Gender-focused ethnomusicologists broadly acknowledge the real impacts of gender, both as an analytical lens and embodied identity. Gender impacts epistemology (what we know), methodology (how we come to know it), and ontology (how we make sense of what we know). With these acknowledgements, once-canonical research methods were recognized as dependent on a scholar’s privileged gender identity rather than universally available to anyone. Fieldworkers increasingly acknowledge their gender—what they feel and how they are perceived by others—since ethnomusicology began to acknowledge its colonial background and work towards more ethical research practices and scholarship. For example, ethnomusicologist Veronica Doubleday demonstrates responsiveness to her field site and interlocutors by choosing to veil while working with women in Afghanistan ([1988] 2006). Similarly, Carol Babiracki directly addresses the impact of her gender identity, assigned gender roles, and interlocutors’ expectations of her based on her gender during her field research in India and on her subsequent representation of that research in writing (1997/2008). She ultimately finds gender neutrality impossible, a conclusion that challenges the belief held by earlier generations of predominantly white, male scholars that they were neutral observers. Nicole Beaudry likewise chooses to downplay her “feminine identity” during her field research but questions this decision, recognizing that her belief in equity between men and women—which perhaps undergirded her enforced gender neutrality—is not shared by her interlocutors. This leads her to consider a series of ethical quandaries. Rhetorically, she asks, “is gender a matter than can ever be left aside?” (1997:82; 2008:243). Other authors, like Timothy Rice, note the ways they are distanced from a tradition by their male gender identity, and how their gender is (dis)empowered in particular field research contexts (1997:107; 2008:48). This marks a significant change from earlier generations’ assumptions that the male experience was universal, or at least sufficient to understand a culture’s music making.

Women’s music is still considered in ways that reflect contemporary feminist scholars’ interest in highlighting cultural specifics rather than cross-cultural universals, and showing how large-scale structures like laws or gender norms impact women’s lives. Trying to understand a music within its own cultural norms pushes against the “righteous indignation” (Sarkissian 1999) felt by scholars projecting Western feminism’s empowering, even anti-patriarchal ethos, onto women’s experiences in other cultural contexts. Lila Abu-Lughod (1986, 1993) and Virginia Danielson (1997) laid early groundwork to decenter Western gender expectations of Arab women’s music-making. Similarly, Jessica Roda (2024) identifies the culturally legible protections of women’s agency in some North American Orthodox Jewish communities that, from a mainstream feminist perspective, are overshadowed by patriarchal structures. Structural gender systems and women’s negotiations of them are also considered in Central Asia by Tanya Merchant (2015) and Razia Sultanova (2022). Merchant offers a comprehensive view of Uzbek female musicians’ landscape of musicality, while Sultanova considers the impacts of the Taliban on women’s music-making.

The impacts of queer theory on gender-focused scholarship is growing. Gregory Barz and William Cheng’s collection 

Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology 

includes gender-diverse scholars. Throughout the collection, authors consider gender in myriad forms, including the impacts of gender identity on their production and presentation of knowledge, engagement with field sites and subjects, and constructions of the scholarly self (2019). For example, I use autoethnography and reflexivity to reflect on how my gender identity was frequently misidentified in Cape Breton’s Scottish social dance halls. This gender ambiguity presented challenges for inclusion in the dances, which have clearly defined roles for men and women (2019). A body between the binary was not so easily understood. Queer theorists’ work helps interpret these moments of ambiguity; it highlights how identity is mapped onto bodies, and how both bodies and identity are the product of cultural meaning-making.

In summary, gender-focused ethnomusicologists reveal the ways that gender functions in a wide array of musical cultures, and in the field of ethnomusicology itself. Though the “different social and cultural understandings of gender and music” have not allowed for easy cross-cultural comparison or broader theorizing (Cusick 2014), the enlisting of queer theoretical models to decenter and deconstruct normative and universal ideas of gender, the rise of autoethnography, and an awareness of individual and structural biases may lessen the drive for universals. Instead, these models offer opportunities to decenter Western cultural gender norms.

How does approaching gender as a cultural construction, rather than a biological given, impact your understanding of the world around you?

In what ways might a focus on gender aid your ability to understand new musical contexts?

How do you react to writing in which the author’s bias or perspective is clear? Do you think it is possible for a scholar to have true neutrality on a subject? Do you think reflexivity helps reduce bias in writing?

Butler, Judith. “Judith Butler: Your Behavior Creates Your Gender | Big Think,” YouTube video, 3:00. Posted by “Big Think,” June 6, 2011. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo7o2LYATDc

Spiller, Henry. 2014. “Introduction: Music, Movement, and Masculinities.” 

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­­­——. 1990. “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women.” 

Alexander, Kathryn. 2018. “Politely Different: Queer Presence in Country Dancing and Music.” 

­­­——. 2019. “Straight to the Heart: Heteronormativity, Flirtation, and Autoethnography at Home and Away.” In 

Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology

, edited by Gregory Barz and William Cheng, 291-306. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology

, first edition, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, 121-138. New York: Oxford University Press.

­­­——. 2008. “What’s the Difference? Reflections on Gender and Research in Village India. In 

, second edition, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, 167-182. New York: Oxford University Press.

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, first edition, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, 63-83. New York: Oxford University Press.

­­­——. 2008. The Challenges of Human Relations in Ethnographic Inquiry: Examples from Arctic and Subarctic Fieldwork.” In 

, second edition, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, 224-245. New York: Oxford University Press.

The Hamadsha: A Study of Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry

Cusick, Suzanne. 2014. “Out in Left Field/Left Out of the Field: Postmodern Scholarship, Feminist/Gender Studies, Musicology, and Ethnomusicology, 1990-2005. In 

A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender

, edited by Ellen Koskoff, 168-179. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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, edited by Jennifer C. Post, 109-133. New York: Routledge.

Three Women of Herat: Afghanistan 1973-1977

Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop

Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture Through Japanese Dance

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Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women’s Music

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Moisala, Pirkko and Beverley Diamond, eds. 2000. 

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, first edition, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, 101-120. New York: Oxford University Press.

­­­——. 2008. “Towards a Mediation of Field Methods and field Experience in Ethnomusicology.” In 

, second edition, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, 42-61. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Roy, Jeff. 2019. “Con/Figuring Transgender-

Music and Dance through Queer Ethnomusicological Filmmaking.” In 

, edited by Gregory Barz and William Cheng, 163-184. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sarkissian, Margaret. 1999. “Thoughts on the Study of Gender in Ethnomusicology: A Pedagogical Perspective.” 

Spiller, Henry. 2019. “Going through the Motions: Transgender Performance in 

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, second edition, edited by Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone, 71-98. New York: Routledge.

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This article provides an overview of critical issues and scholarly developments pertaining to music with gender.

The Study of Music and Gender

As an identity category, gender frames our experience of the world. Gender is one of the many overlapping, intersecting identities any individual person holds. But, while we can each define our own gender identity, our cultures have already set the parameters for which genders are possible, what those genders look like anatomically, and how those genders act socially. We can think of gender as something that is built by a culture, rather than a biological given that stems from anatomy, chromosomes, and hormones. That gender is culturally constructed means that the guidelines for how to embody maleness, for example, are culturally specific and mutable, or capable of changing. What maleness means, or how individuals identifying as male are expected to look and act in one culture, differs from how those identifying as male are recognizable in another culture. The meaning, definition, and experience of gender varies substantially and differs across time, geography, ideology, and cultural context.

Broadly, a culture’s gender system is used to organize bodies and behaviors into recognizable and clear categories. In Euro-American derived cultures, for example, gender has historically been understood as a binary: male and female. In a binary system, females are socially women who are expected to adhere to specific behaviors and mannerisms. They also partake in other social activities that are recognized by the larger society as distinguishing them as “women” ––or separate from “men.” Euro-American society expects individuals to adhere to this binary system and creates incentives for individuals to conform to these categories. The often-fulfilled cultural expectation that boys become men is a kind of normativity; in short, it is normal, expected, and routine. Cultures often have gendered expectations of musicians that are based on a culture’s ideas of which behaviors and sounds are appropriate for which gender. For example, there is a persistent association of gender with Western orchestral instruments, leading to the fact that boys more often play brass instruments, while girls are encouraged to play wind instruments (Eros 2008). But this is just one gender system, one set of cultural scripts, that assigns some social and cultural roles to one gender and different roles to the other. The following examples explore various ways that gender influences music and how music reveals a culture’s understandings of gender.

A variety of vocal games exist amongst the different Inuit communities across North America’s Arctic region. Katajjaq, a type of traditional sonic game, is an Inuit practice of Arctic Québec and the south of Baffin Island (Nattiez 2016). It features the sounds of the body, specifically the throat, which is why it is often referred to as “throat singing.” Of the many interpretive lenses through which we could examine katajjaq (including Indigenous sovereignty and settler colonial oppression), gender pertains here in that the vocal games are played almost exclusively by women. In this community, life and culture-sustaining tasks are often gendered male or female, and katajjaq provides an example of this. Two women, standing in close physical proximity and often holding each other by the arms, interlock their voices. The two singers create a specific pattern of intonation as they alternate their breathing in and out, using voiced and unvoiced breath to make sound while inhaling or exhaling. A single sound might be repeated as a motif (a small musical idea). This motif usually consists of low and high-pitched components. The game begins as the motif is slowly varied by the singer who initiated the sound. The second singer must copy her sound in response, and the game usually ends in someone out of breath or laughing.

Two practitioners of katajjaq, Karin and Kathy Kettler of the sister duo Nukariik, report that these were games women played while men were hunting (Anchorage Daily News 2014); Nattiez adds that boys also learn these games but traditionally stop participating when they are old enough to hunt with the adult men (2016). This suggests that the cultural expectations placed on differently gendered people can change as they reach adulthood. In this instance, a behavior formerly appropriate for boys does not typically coincide with the gendered expectations of them as men (see Singh 2002). It also suggests that gender identities and the social roles attached to them are, in this cultural context, clearly defined, and that participation in (or avoidance of) katajjaq permits adults to indicate their gender identity and their social roles.

Hawai’ian hula is a dance and vocal genre in which “gestures of the upper torso and limbs interpret the semantic content of poetic texts called 

 tell stories of places, deities, genealogies, and histories, and are vocally recited while the dance unfolds. “Mood and feeling [are] conveyed through facial expressions, eye contact and with the hands,” and the dance is performed to the accompaniment of rhythms played on a variety of percussive instruments (Smith, with Stillman 2001). While tourism promotion campaigns, film and television, novels and comics, and other popular media have cemented the idea that hula is performed by women, hula is also performed by men. However, several elements distinguish male from female hula, including the movement vocabulary, adornments, facial expressions, and the stories told through dance. The Euro-American settler colonial conception that dance was feminine eroded the position of male hula from the early nineteenth century; however, this belief ignores that fact that the first dancers arriving with voyagers from Polynesia to the Hawai’ian Islands were male. Indeed, male dancers (kāne) were primarily responsible for chronicling historical events and genealogies through hula in traditional Hawai’ian culture (Dimple 2024).

With colonial incursions into Hawai’i, European and Euro-American gender ideologies equating dance with femininity led to the belief that men who performed hula were effeminate. Equating dance with femininity is an example of how one culture imposed its own gender system onto another culture––in this case, Euro-American gender beliefs onto those of Native Hawai’ians (Kānaka Maoli). More troubling still is that this gender bias intersects with racial bias, serving to strengthen a racialized and gendered hierarchy that helped serve the interests of Euro-American colonizers at the expense of Native Hawai’ians. European and Euro-American men could thus be perceived as more “manly” than Hawai’ian men; in short, certain types of masculinity were more privileged than others. Intersectionality, meaning the compounding effects of identities in combination (see Crenshaw 1991), allows us to consider how privilege and its lack operate in fluid, but culturally-aligned ways: Though masculinity is usually privileged cross-culturally, here a particular kind of ethnic masculinity was diminished by Euro-American settlers as they enforced their own cultures’ gender expectations through religious, social, and economic structures.

We can think about these gender roles as “gender performativity,” another tool that can help us assess how gender operates in musical cultures. The idea that we each perform our gender suggests that we build our gender identity out of many signifiers that include mannerisms and clothing to present ourselves to the world on a daily basis. However, gender theorist Judith Butler uses “gender performativity” to mean something else. They suggest that when we perform our gender, that performance produces a series of effects (1990; 2011). Butler argues that we build our gender as we move through the world, and as we do so, others interact with, perceive, and make decisions about our gender. Sometimes these perceptions align with the gender we intend for others to understand, but other times, there are misperceptions. Gender is not inherent and internal: We are producing it constantly in reference to our culture’s implicit and explicit rules about which genders are possible and what these genders look, sound, or act like. Gender, in short, does not exist outside of the cultural scripts, including music, that make it real and relevant.

What does gender mean to you? Where does this understanding come from?

How is gender a factor in musical communities with which you are involved? This might be as a performer or a consumer of music.

Make a list of how your gender identity impacts your lived experience (for example, think through an average day). Considering one of your other identities (such as your ethnic, national, religious, political, or generational identity), how does your gender identity operate in relationship to that identity?

Kettler, Karin, and Kathy Kettler. “Karin and Kathy Kettler – Inuit Throat-Singing Demonstration [Live at First Americans Festival 2004,” YouTube video, 2:40. Posted by Smithsonian Folkways, February 4, 2010. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IqOegVCNKI

National Museum of the American Indian. “The Story of the Lū’au: Hula, an expression of cultural understanding,” YouTube video, 16:13. Posted by SmithsonianNMAI, May 12, 2021.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=525Jn_7M0aA

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “The urgency of intersectionality | Kimberlé Crenshaw | TED,” YouTube video, 18:49. Posted by TED, December 7, 2016. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akOe5-UsQ2o

Woloshyn, Alexa. 2017. “‘Welcome to the Tundra’: Tanya Tagaq’s Creative and Communicative Agency as Political Strategy.” 

. DVD. Lehua Films and PBS Hawaii, 60 minutes.

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” 

Dimple. 2024. “Exploring the Artistry and Tradition of Male Hula Dancers in Hawaii.” 

https://www.hawaiiactivities.com/travelguide/male-hula

Eros, John. 2008. “Instrument Selection and Gender Stereotypes: A Review of Recent Literature.” 

Update: Applications of Research in Music Education

Kettler, Karin and Kathy Kettler. “Inuit throat-singing sisters from Canada,” YouTube video, 3:03. Posted by “Anchorage Daily News,” October 23, 2013. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLMlkjnYe0U&t=1s

Nattiez, Jean-jacques. 2016. “Inuit Vocal Games.” 

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/inuit-vocal-games-emc

The Practice and Performance of Katajjaq: Culture, Identity, and Resistance

. Ph.D. dissertation. Toronto: York University.

Smith, Barbara. Revised by Amy K. Stillman. 2001. “Hula.” 

This chapter provides an overview of key concepts and terms for the study of music and gender.

Music and Gender

This chapter considers how video game music developed and cultural and ethical challenges in creating gameworlds with music.

Introduction

Two Case Studies

Video Game Music

Trance is a pillar of religion and traditional medicine in Morocco and the Maghreb. Embraced with fervor by its many followers, dismissed with scorn or disdain by its critics, and approached with curiosity by tourists, trance has long been a socially 

 Trance has become embedded in a range of cultural domains, as it gathers Moroccans from all walks of life and faiths, including 

 Many Moroccans regard trance as a healing remedy capable of freeing those afflicted by malevolent spirits that cause all types of physical and psychological ailments. Trance is also a fixture in the gatherings of many Sufi brotherhoods, where it is used to communicate with the deity.

Sufism is a “mystical Islamic belief and practice in which Muslims seek to find the truth of divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of God.”

 Through a variety of mystical paths, Sufis aim to ascertain the nature of God and bring its presence to the world. As the numbers of followers of Sufi teachers (

) grew in the beginning of the 12th century, they began to form larger groups known as brotherhoods who saw their leaders as saints. Saints are related by kinship to the Prophet Muhammad and are revered for their austerity, generosity, and good deeds. A 

, seen in a colonial-era image in Figure 1, is a ceremony that uses ritual dance and animal sacrifice to bestow 

 (godly grace, blessing) upon those suffering from physical or mental ailments (Witulski 2019, 84–99; Kapchan 2007; Becker 2020, 123–56).

Despite enjoying wide popularity, trance in Morocco has often been the object of fear, misunderstanding, dismissal, or even scorn. Behind these different responses there has been a good degree of misinformation, affecting particularly the views of foreigners and outsiders to the practice. But ignorance or cultural estrangement alone do not explain the adverse feelings that trance has provoked since at least the late 19th century, and one must look at religious and political factors for an answer. Sufi trance in colonial Morocco (1912-1956) developed under the scrutiny and control of the French, Spanish and Moroccan authorities, and military personnel. It was also treated as a subject of study within a highly racialized system of knowledge that considered trance a characteristic manifestation of the “psychology” of certain ethnic groups –and by “psychology” I mean a preconceived set of mostly negative traits established through (pseudo)scholarly practice. Colonial scholars did not observe and study trance to learn about a cultural practice unknown to them thus far—or at least not only—but rather mostly to confirm their preconceived notions about Moroccans of different ethnic subgroups and classes.

 or godly grace upon those suffering from a particular ailment. It involves the recitation of religious and secular texts alongside music and bodily movement to cast away the spirits that inhabit the sufferer and cause different kinds of physical and psychological ailments. The only accounts of the 

 from this period that are available today were written by external observers, usually colonial Europeans. Their writings on trance were published as part of training manuals for the military officials or within collections of anthropological or musicological studies. These texts aimed to satisfy a growing curiosity about then-unknown practices while presenting ethnographic evidence for their authors’ views that western culture and knowledge were superior to those of non-European lands. This racist intellectual project supported the notion that Morocco needed to be conquered and civilized. 

Their accounts are thus colored by a rhetoric and ideology suited to their pragmatic and oppressive agendas.

In the last few decades, a few scholars have made up for the shortcomings of this problematic legacy of knowledge by sharing their personal experience of a 

 through self-reflective accounts grounded on more self-reflective contemporary anthropology (Kapchan 2007; Jankowsky 2021; Witulski 2019; Becker 2020). Their insights on today’s practices cannot be used to describe a 

 from the early twentieth century without discussion though, because any attempt to extrapolate from them would imply that Sufi ritual trance has remained static and unchanging. In the light of all these caveats, describing a 

 from the colonial period is necessarily an exercise in abstraction that risks offering an incomplete or distorted image of the past.

Using a combination of primary sources from the colonial period and recent fieldwork, I suggest that the following conclusions can be established regarding how the 

 was performed during the colonial era. A 

 can vary in length, lasting up to eight hours. It can be a standalone ritual or take place as part of a seasonal pilgrimage. 

It is a structured ritual in which each stage is defined by specific textual and musical materials and by the use of various recitation techniques and musical textures.

 Testimonies by colonial writers rarely if ever discussed any details of this complex structure. A 

 usually ends with an intensification of pace which may lead one or several participants into 

, the state of trance that captured the attention of most colonial writers and photographers (Figure 2). The music contributes to this increase in pace through repeated musical motives, the addition of instruments, increasing complexity of the repeated patterns, and a gradual increase in volume. Bodily movements that accompany these sounds are closely connected to the recitation and intonation of chants. As a result, the 

 could be considered a kinesthetically-enhanced form of recitation, rather than a “dance.” 

The writings of colonial settlers or personnel read this body language in political terms, attributing meanings of defiance to certain gestures.

Moroccan Trance in the Colonial Imagination

The study of changes in Sufi ritual across time and place raises important questions about the relationship of ritual trance with its historical, social, and political context. This was a period of strife where intense rivalry between the brotherhoods combined with efforts to maintain themselves despite the pressures put on them by the French and Spanish colonial authorities. One of the most pressing questions is the extent to which Sufi trance in colonial Morocco functioned as a political act. The most comprehensive study of music published in colonial Morocco, 

 by the Algeria-born French musicologist Alexis Chottin lays out a taxonomy of music in Morocco (1939). Chottin places the Arab dance music categorically opposite that of Amazigh communities who had been in the region before earlier Arab expansion. Although he does not delve explicitly into political questions, this opposition is closely aligned with the French authorities’ implementation of policies that segregate these two groups in order to weaken a growing Moroccan nationalism (Wyrtzen 2016). The most detailed study of Morocco’s rural dances by a Spanish scholar, Emilio Blanco Izaga’s 

 similarly avoids religious or political questions and limits itself to describing the participants’ bodily movements and the structure of the dances (Blanco Izaga 1946a, 1946b, 1946c). However, the ways in which he depicts Amazigh communities as “primitive” people untainted by civilization, no matter how well-intentioned, evokes the trope of the “noble savage” that had been central in propaganda supporting colonialism since the Early Modern era.

The question of whether the brotherhoods used trance politically is impossible to answer given the lack of unbiased scholarship from the period. Because most writings from the colonial period were written by military personnel who were concerned with security, they generally conflate religious practice and politics as they describe trance dancing as demonic, anti-Christian, and anti-European. Furthermore, they depict trance as fake—a superstition with no proper place in Islam—and a dubious remedy that deprived Moroccans of the benefits of European biomedicine (Padilla 1930, 8; García Figueras 1953, 317). The soldier and scholar Eduardo Maldonado Vázquez’s claim that “superstition and the lack of culture attributes curative power to dance” (Maldonado Vázquez 1932, 41) was representative of the general state of mind among the Spanish and the French. Scholars and the military regarded biomedicine both as a rational counterweight to the frenzy caused by trance among the Moroccan population and as a weapon against anti-colonial resistance. Manuel Nido y Torres’s manual for officials argued that the Spanish doctors in Morocco should not restrict themselves to curing the “ailments of the body,” but should treat those of the “soul” too, in order to cast away any “superstitious practices,” “attract the rebels,” and carry out a “pacific penetration” of the country (Nido y Torres 1925, 187).

The writings of protectorate scholars and military personnel deployed these and similar strategies, emptying trance of religious meaning and political legitimacy. Sufi trance featured recurrently in Spanish scholarship as a stunning activity that numbed the senses of the practitioners and interfered with their perception mechanism. The Spanish described trance as a state that impaired the participants’ cognitive capacities, and in which a wide range of overwhelmingly intense stimuli saturated their senses, reducing the dancers to a half-conscious, unresponsive state. The following examples show that the Spanish in Morocco used their own notions of sonic harmony as indexes of modernity and —as did Europeans (Boutin 2015; Llano 2018a, 2018b)—to formulate ideas of the colonial order that the “noisy” dances threatened to destabilize. Maldonado Vázquez described the 

 as a true cacophony, in which “The noise of cymbals, drums, tabors, and flutes,” mixes with the “stomping of the feet on the floor,” the “shrieks,” and “the smell of incense and sweat,” reducing the participants to a “state of torpor,” in which they “say all sorts of stupid things”’ (Maldonado Vázquez 1932, 18). Enrique Arqués described the 

 as a “loud, barbaric music” whose effect is comparable to “the roaring of a tempest falling upon us” (Arqués 1946, 68).

Such descriptions echo many other comparisons of non-western music with “noise” that are commonplace in European writings about their colonial subjects. Consider however the specific religious connotations of these testimonies, particularly the denial of spiritual depth implicit in portraying trance as chaos—Maldonado Vázquez attributed to “ignorance” the participants’ belief that “they get closer to the Deity” (1932, 18). A condemnatory tone prevailed even in testimonies that did not discuss or dismiss religious aspects and focused instead on formal questions, such as the use of repetition. Blanco Izaga, one of Amazigh culture’s greatest champions, described Rifian dances as an “amorphous mass,” because they “end in the same way that they begin,” and because “there is not a single theme in them to be developed” (1946b).

The scholarship and reports produced by the Spanish military and administration simultaneously blurred and affirmed the distinction between the real and the imaginary, the body and the mind, and the physical and the spiritual. This interplay with boundaries was designed to create epistemological confusion and make it harder to refute views of curative trance as anything other than a superstition that defiled sacred religious beliefs. The interpretation of trance by the Spanish is problematic on at least two counts. First, the brotherhoods do not inhabit a religious realm that is separate from the secular as described by western conventional medicine. For them, all is embedded into a single system of beliefs and practices (Crapanzano 1973, 131). Second, the presence of supernatural images such as “six-legged horses” (Mitjana 1905, 120) in Spanish descriptions of Sufi pilgrimages compromise the veracity of these testimonies, undermining claims that trance was pure superstition.

The skepticism of the Spanish was symptomatic of their inability to understand the nature and purpose of “medicine” in Morocco.

 Morocco’s system of healing draws from a range of traditions, including prophetic medicine, which searches for answers in the Quran; humoral medicine, which is inspired in classic Arab medicine; the knowledge of seers, who use magic; the management of sanctuaries, which administer 

; and biomedicine, which was introduced by Europeans in Morocco from the early twentieth century (Dieste 2010, 171). These different traditions do not exclude each other, but rather coexist within the same medical system, even within the same treatments. European scholars attributed this multiplicity to what they judged to be a lack of systematic thinking in Moroccan society. Europeans failed to appreciate the structural complexity of both the ritual and the music of Sufi trance. Curative trance is a system of therapy that is “a structured set of procedures for the rehabilitation of an incapacitated individual” (Crapanzano 1973, 4). The discharge of tension taking place during trance “is not merely an emotional outburst [...] but a highly structured process” (Crapanzano 1973, 6). Europeans underestimated the complex meaning of repetition in Sufi trance, dismissing it as a manifestation of a “primitive” mentality. Repetition in Sufi trance generates stability and motion at the same time, because the melodic and rhythmic motives that are repeated are not fixed, but rather subject to constant variation and shifting degrees of intensity during the 

The colonial history of Sufi trance in Morocco reveals important details about the ways in which the brotherhoods used dance to negotiate their identity at a critical moment of their history. 

The examples discussed above show that trance was a site of struggle and a tool of identity construction in the face of colonial oppression and persecution.

 The study of trance’s colonial history helps to complicate the genealogy of this cultural practice by casting its colonial and postcolonial history through the lens of shifting encounters with power. The medical history of trance is the history of the body conceived as a site of struggle that has yet to be written into the history of Moroccan trance.

In what ways do you imagine music contributing to the healing of physical and psychological suffering? Consider your own listening experiences. Have you ever felt that music had a physical impact upon your well-being?

Why do you think European colonizers regarded Moroccan trance as a “superstition”? Do you believe they simply misinterpreted the practice, or do you think there could be additional reasons for labeling trance as “superstition”?

In what ways might Moroccan trance be considered a “political” practice? What might the study of Moroccan trance teach us about the relationship between music and politics? In your discussion consider whether “political” has a simple and fixed meaning, or one that is complex and contingent on the circumstances in which we define it.

The only sources that we have documenting earlier practices of Moroccan trance are the testimonies left by Europeans. Considering the degree to which they are biased and rife with prejudice, to what extent do you think they are worthy of our attention? Are there any lessons to be drawn from their study? Why do you think it might be important to consider the history of Moroccan trance during the colonial period rather than focus only on current practices and meanings?

This research was made possible by funding from the European Research Council (ERC), as part of the project "Past and Present Musical Encounters Across the Strait of Gibraltar" (MESG-758221).

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Sufi trance in colonial Morocco developed under strict colonial scrutiny and control and has been the object of fear, misunderstanding, dismissal, and even scorn. This article considers colonialism's impact on the production and perpetuation of negative stereotypes about trance.

Moroccan Trance: Unruly Bodies and the Colonial Imagination

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