Gender and Perreo Debates in Reggaeton

Perreo is the hip-driven, pelvis-forward partner dance most closely identified with reggaeton, and it sits at the center of the genre's gender debates. Danced in close contact, its grinding vocabulary overlaps with the movements of erotic contact dances such as the lap dance (baile de regazo), and educators and institutions have repeatedly singled out sexualized dancing to reggaeton — and to related styles such as cumbia — as a practice that reproduces gender inequality and what critics call a culture of sexual violence. That condemnation, however, is not the whole story: in Argentina in particular, women performers have advanced a counter-reading that defends perreo and the globalized pelvic technique of twerk as choreographies of female participation, framing them through rhetorics of reclaimed pleasure and sexual sovereignty rather than subordination.

This contention sharpened as reggaeton moved from the margins toward the mainstream. The music had circulated through low-budget television slots and underground circuits in the early 1990s — one scholar recalls watching the performer El General on Telemundo and Univisión broadcasts in New York and Boston in those years — well before its commercial breakthrough around 2005 and its conspicuous presence in Havana's clubs that same summer.^[1] A form so widely consumed, and so heavily marketed to adolescents, carried a correspondingly broad social influence, and it was that ubiquity that turned the genre's lyrical content into a subject of sustained public and academic scrutiny.

The sharpest scholarly criticism has fastened on the genre's words rather than its rhythms. A thematic analysis of sixty-five of the most commercially successful reggaetón songs of 2020, conducted with the qualitative software MAXQDA, concluded that the most heavily marketed material continues to reproduce traditional masculine stereotypes associated with machismo.^[2] That finding sits within a broader tradition of content analysis: a study of fifty of the most-listened-to music videos across 2009 and 2019, read through a post-feminist critical lens, found that gender binarism persists over the decade — a hegemonic femininity tied to romantic narratives in the earlier period giving way to more overtly sexualized imagery by 2019, while a hegemonic masculinity bound up with rap and hip-hop held constant across both years. On the strength of such evidence, the author of the reggaetón study argues that educational spaces ought to adopt a critical, consciousness-raising posture toward the genre, given the powerful influence it exerts on young people's perception of sexual stereotypes.^[2]

A complementary investigation shifted attention from the songs to their adolescent listeners. Drawing on two focus groups in secondary schools (2nd and 3rd ESO) in the province of Huelva, in southern Spain, researchers examined how young people interpret the discriminatory messages toward women that recur in many reggaeton lyrics.^[3] The discussions suggested that such messages are seldom clearly recognized or questioned by the audience and instead help to normalize discriminatory conduct toward women while entrenching machista attitudes among young men.^[3] The study proceeds from the premise that music is never a simple pastime — that it helps construct identities, fosters cultural development, and forges affective bonds among those who share the same tastes — and on that basis it urges schools to cultivate a musical culture in which young listeners critically assess the songs they encounter every day.^[3]

The picture is complicated, however, by the prominence of women within the genre's commercial ascent. Shakira — the best-selling Latin female artist of all time and a figure widely called the Queen of Latin Music — has been credited with carrying Spanish-language music to a global audience and with opening international doors for a later generation of artists, among them Karol G and Bad Bunny.^[4] The Brazilian singer Anitta, who turned toward Spanish-language Latin and reggaeton styles after her 2017 single "Paradinha," built a versatile catalogue spanning pop, funk, reggaeton, and electronic music and has paired her public image as a sex symbol with open advocacy for women's and LGBT rights.^[5] Such careers echo the reappropriation defended by perreo's feminist champions: female stardom and the critique of lyrical machismo occupy the same commercial space, so the genre's gender politics read as contested rather than settled.

Across these strands a shared premise recurs: reggaeton functions not as a neutral diversion but as a vehicle of identity and socialization, capable of shaping as much as reflecting how its listeners understand gender.^[3] From that premise the content analyses treat the music as a potential reinforcement of machista attitudes, and both converge on critical media education as the most plausible response.^[2] Even so, the scholarship weighs contrasting positions rather than issuing a single verdict; whether the genre chiefly transmits inequality or largely mirrors social attitudes that precede it — and how far the dancefloor reappropriations of perreo and twerk shift that balance — remains an open question.^[2]