“In Salsa, it’s okay to be a woman”: Legitimating heteronormativity in a culturally ‘other’ environment

This article introduces discourses of heteronormativity in Western Salsa contexts. In these, gender discourses from different cultural backgrounds come into contact. Heteronormative structures are a constitutive component of many Western Salsa communities and are here analysed with the help of ethnographic data and qualitative interviews. The observations show that informants display a strong appeal to ‘traditional Latin’ gender performance. This, however, is not understood as natural but justified explicitly in interview data. Yet, despite a conscious negotiation of different discourses on gender, dichotomous gender categories are not destabilised. In the final section, potential motivations for establishing ‘traditional’ gender identity are discussed. This discussion links Salsa discourse to contemporary discourses on gender, emancipation, capitalism, the globalisation of culture and current developments of modernity.