‘Gangstas for Life’ explores the fashionable practice of skin bleaching within Dancehall culture.
The images raises questions about perceptions of masculinity within Jamaican dancehall culture.  
The images are deconstructed into stereotypical homosexual beauties, with bleached faces, red
glossed lips, glitter and feminine motifs. These images challenge practices of the emasculation  
of young black males and question stereotypical standards of beauty amongst genders .The
dancehall has become a place of major cultural significance amongst young working class
Jamaicans.  It is the community waterhole where one learns about the latest slangs, songs,
dances, fashion and social gender practices. The Dancehall is the belly of Jamaican society that
reaffirms, reflects and assigns labels as it relates to social norms or behaviors deemed deviant
with Jamaican society, such as homosexual stereotypes This body of work explores contemporary
notions of beauty within a Jamaican context. Exploring the grotesque as the sought after beauty.
It seeks to examine the dichotomy between Jamaican stereotypical ideologies of homosexual
practices and its parallels within dancehall culture, where skin bleaching (whitening) has become
trendy and fashionable primarily among young black males. This work raises questions about
body politics and gender, gender and beauty, beauty and stereotyping, race and beauty, beauty
and the grotesque