ABSTRACT
Released in 2006 as the second single from the album Oral Fixation Vol. 2, the song “My Hips Don’t Lie” was performed by Shakira with Haitian singer Wyclef Jean in a video directed by Sophie Muller and filmed in Los Angeles, California. 1 In this video, Shakira presents herself in diverse ways, each one appealing to different pop-music markets. In this chapter I will address the ways in which her body creates and re-creates her persona to address and enter the United States’ English-speaking market and, at the same time, asserts her identity as exotic, non-white Latina in order to keep her space in the Latin American music market. Each body presented in this video creates a new layer of significance that makes the singer’s corporeality an overflow of meaning, and each body presents itself as “authentic.” This corporeal multiplicity speaks about how the interconnected, fluid, and relational identities circulate in the public sphere.
