GENDER PERFORMANCE IN A FINNISH DANCE RESTAURANT: REFLECTIONS ON A MULTICULTURAL FIELDWORK EXPERIMENT

Sa？etak The article contributes to reflexive ethnomusicology, gender studies of music, and performance studies. It is a report of a fieldwork experiment, which set out to study gender performance in a Finnish dance restaurant. The particular aim of the fieldwork was to examine the impact of scholars' gender identities and previous experiences on the observations made in the field. The experiment was made by ten members of the Music and Gender Study Group of the International Council for Traditional Music, in 1999. The analysis reveals how past experiences and histories as well as the current identity factors — such as age, ethnicity, race, world view and feminism — affected each of the visitors' observations and how they negotiated their gender in the dance restaurant. The article concludes that while performing ourselves, we construct multiple performance events. That is how we imaginatively create the world and its events. In this process, the boundaries between insiders and outsiders are blurred: we relate to the events through our identities and past experiences and create our own, different readings of an event