Sharina Maíllo-Pozo – författare

How music depicted in literature shapes Dominican and Dominican New Yorkers’ identities and links the homeland to the diaspora.Music has played a large role in recent Dominican literature, whether of the island or the diaspora. Bridging Sonic Borders explores this sonic connection linking the homeland and far-flung locales-especially New York, the center of Dominican cultural production in the United States. Sharina MaÍllo-Pozo argues that literary representations of popular music delineate a shared aesthetic territory for US and Caribbean Dominicans, fostering an inclusive and transnational Dominicanidad. Examining works written in Spanish, English, and Dominicanish, MaÍllo-Pozo focuses on Dominican/Dominicanyork writings that have nurtured a borderless aesthetics through their shared investment in hip-hop, jazz, blues, pop, rock, and merengue. For Dominican writers, popular music has become a way of exploring memory and nostalgia and a means of centering people rejected from hegemonic identity formation-the working class, those of African descent, rural and queer people. For example, many works focused on the life of rocker Luis “Terror” DÍas have emphasized the in-between identity of being both Dominican and a New Yorker. Collectively, these writings have created a space in which boundaries of nation and diaspora are revealed for their fundamental porosity.

Beauty embodiment and representations of beauty are crafted by legitimised hierarchies of power in popular culture, including across fashion, sports, media and social media outlets, and the arts. Informed and guided by an intersectional lens with a focus on underrepresented communities, this volume of Advances in Gender Research foregrounds gender and sexuality to engage with beauty as a site of knowledge creation.Interrogating its very definition, chapters take a revolutionary, intersectional approach to explore beauty as an avenue to create alternative knowledge as well as a conduit to engage in critical conversations on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, illness, and fitness. Emphasizing that beauty definitions and standards in any given society closely reflect the distribution of power within it, contributors think critically about the role of institutions such as the hair industry, workplaces, the visual arts, and classical dance in how beauty is socially construed and conceptualized.Grounded in a more open-ended conception that goes beyond aesthetics, Embodiment and Representations of Beauty celebrates beauty’s capacity as a source of liberation, agency, social justice, decolonization, and survival for marginalized communities, as well as an emancipatory path to feminist liberation.