| Summary: | The growing interest in gender equality at festivals contrasts with the relative lack of scholarly attention given to festivals as sites of gender politics. Organized by a Senegalese association which promotes urban cultures, the example of Urban Women Week – a Senegalese festival which aims to promote women in hip hop, including rap music – leads me to revisit a gendered perspective on festivals while tackling the neglected issue of women’s presence in a rap music scene dominated by the “patriarchal impulses of the Senegalese hip hop establishment” (Neff 2015: 460). How are we to understand the adoption of a focus on women by the organizers of the festival in Senegal? Is rap music a specific place where women are empowered in the Senegalese context? Based on fieldwork carried out on the rap music scene in Senegal, I situate the establishment and evolution of the festival as a way for the association to respond to local claims for the inclusion of women in rap music while benefiting from a global agenda of gender mainstreaming, thereby exploring the glocal intricacies of gender politics in music.
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