Sounding and musicking in the Carnaval de Barranquilla: perpetuating and challenging gender and sexuality normativities through performance
Date
2025
DOI
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Version
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
This dissertation explores the mutual influence between gender and sexuality, music-making and sonic practices in the Carnaval de Barranquilla, the Carnaval Gay de Barranquilla, and the feminist collective Raras no tan Raras. I show that heteronormativity, macho attitudes, and homophobia are reified in music-making and sonic practices in Barranquilla and its carnival expressions. Nevertheless, I also argue that music-making and sonic practices can alter how gender and sexuality are experienced. Through ethnographical observations, I show how exclusion and gender roles can be transferred into music and sonic practices and how music and sound have helped women and LGTBIQ+ people in Barranquilla fight against these systems of oppression. In this way, this dissertation studies how gender and sexuality intersect one of the most important genres in the Carnaval de Barranquilla, Cumbia. Carnaval Gay de Barranquilla practitioners dance to cumbia by playing it in stereos or hiring millo ensembles. Contrarily, Raras no tan Raras play and compose their own music despite not being experienced musicians. In these two cases, I suggest that both forms of musicality can serve to reshape gender and sexuality relationality. To understand the interrelationality between music and sound, and gender and sexuality, I analyze three aspects of Barranquilla and its Carnival expressions: the normativities that govern gender and sexuality, the pre-subjective and subjective effects of music and sound, and the spontaneous and ephemeral relationships that emerge during performances. For this reason, the theoretical perspectives that serve to analyze such aspects are homonormativity (a recurring concept that offers some critical lenses to uncover the adaptations with which heteronormativity is perpetuated), music affect theory (the notion that sound and music are affective forces that have pre-subjective effects on people) and the social production of space (space not as a physical void waiting to be filled but as the product of relations between social entities).Ultimately, this dissertation posits that analyzing the interrelationality between gender and sexuality and music and sound offers different insights into how systems of oppression are perpetuated and how they can be challenged.
Description
2025