In Troubling Gender, Pablo Vila and Pablo Semán examine the dynamic and interrelated realms of sexuality, class and identity in the cumbia dance scene among working-class adolescents in urban Argentina. Noting a dearth of studies that focus on Argentina's cumbia dance scene on one hand, and the changing culture of sexuality among lower-class youth on the other, the authors provide a brief history of changing attitudes towards sexuality within Argentina's specific social, political and cultural contexts. Political repression from the late 1960s through the early 1980s excluded Argentina from the cultural and sexual revolutions that arose in other countries during that time. After the establishment of a democratic rule of law in 1983, public discourse flourished on topics such as individual and national identity, social practices and women's sexuality. Women, once viewed as passive vehicles for male sexual satisfaction, actively sought pleasure from sexual encounters and openly spoke of sexual experiences. Male partners, for their part, adapted to accommodate these new mores.

Popular culture in the form of mass media, radio, television and magazines served as a guide for Argentinian youth to navigate these changing cultural contexts, but Vila and Semán note correctly that these venues communicated the sensibilities of the wealthier classes. Troubling Gender seeks instead to understand the changing cultural contexts of members of the working poor during the economically unstable 1990s and 2000s. They focus specifically on cumbia villera, a style of cumbia that became popular in Argentina in the 1990s among the pibes, or economically displaced youth. Cumbia villera lyrics appear to contradict any positive advances of the sexual revolution through their focus on sexual violence, rape and the objectification and denigration of women. Analysing interviews with young men and women who frequent the bailantas, or cumbia villera dance halls, the researchers identify a discursive space between the derogatory linguistic terms and the physical body of the dancers. The literal message of the cumbia villera lyrics is appropriated by the people they are meant to malign through a dialectic between literal text and physical dance. The interviewees in this study appropriated the misogynistic lyrics in ways that reflected their comfort level with their own personal sexual liberty. The study concludes that the young women distanced themselves further from the violent and misogynistic messages of cumbia villera lyrics than did the young men, who were more willing to accept their literal meaning. The authors provided critical details on historical context and theoretical framework in additional chapters by Eloísa Martín, whose introduction outlines the history of cumbia in Argentina, and María Julia Carozzi, whose postscript re-centres the authors' insights around the female body and the semantics of dance.

This study's strength lies in the remarkable way in which the authors approach the complex relationship between a musical style, song lyrics, social circumstances and the physical performance of dance. Vila and Semán relied on young researchers to enter the world of the bailantes to observe, dance, interact and establish rapport with the young men and women who frequent the clubs. Although the authors noted trends among the responses, they ultimately retained the voice of each interviewee, teasing out the complexities of individual identity construction in response to mass messaging from a popular media source. They delved into the deep cultural meanings elicited by the lyrics, exploring the relationship between language and situation, then faced the difficult task not only of translating their work across languages, but also across the realms of class and academics. They identified, defined and translated essential elements of the interviewees' discourse, then used them throughout the text in ways that communicated both subtle nuances and intentional word-play across linguistic, class and cultural systems.

While Vila and Semán demonstrated exemplary skills in translation, they fell short linguistically when they selected the term ‘sexual activation’ to describe the process of sexual awakening and identity creation by Argentinian women. They acknowledge that the word ‘activation … can imply that women are passively acted upon by someone or something else’ rather than their intended definition of ‘a complex process through which new sexual discourses … encounter newly defined gender narrative identities’ (pp. 179–80), yet they disregard their own instincts and continue to utilise a term whose definition contradicts the concept it is meant to represent. The means by which women actively seek discursive spaces to articulate their stance in this new cultural realm is a challenging process more reminiscent of a Maslovian progression towards sexual ‘actualization’ (Maslow Reference Maslow1943) than simply turning on a sexual switch, as the term ‘activation’ implies. While recognising the irony of voicing this critique of a monograph that purports to construct meaning beyond verbal semantics, the authors could have employed a term that more accurately communicated the involved struggle for emerging identities they wished to portray. Finally, although the authors seek to explore a discursive space beyond song lyrics, their strength as linguists betrays them and their analysis remains principally verbal. Additional insight from studies that firmly centre the body as an interpretive space, such as Helen Thomas (Reference Thomas2003), could expand their analysis beyond written and spoken words and provide new avenues for research.

Like all robust ethnographies, Troubling Gender unearths more questions than it answers. Vila and Semán have only begun to explore the questions of sexuality and identity in a marginalised economic class whose younger generations are still finding their voice after decades of social and political repression. The scope of these lyrics and interviews focuses on young cisgender men and women seeking heterosexual encounters, yet, as the authors acknowledge in their introduction, many non-heteronormative identities, preferences and behaviours remain to be explored that would add insight into the evolution of Argentina's unique sexual revolution. Ultimately, Troubling Gender leaves the reader with a captivating glimpse into the cultural expressions of displaced and marginalised youth who craft their own meanings, interpretations and identities via, and sometimes in spite of, the messages circulating in the mass media and the lyrics of the cumbia villera dance halls.