Uttering Sonic Dominicanidad: Women and Queer Performers of Música Urbana Verónica Dávila Ellis What meanings are ascribed to the voices and sonic compositions of Caribbean and Latinx women and queer performers? What do their sounds tell us about Caribbean identity, gender, sexuality, and race? This dissertation centers the work of seven Dominican women and queer artists of música urbana to analyze how their sonic production and bodily performances negotiate with the hegemonic scripts of identity, race, and gender through sound. I focus on sound and performance to expand on our knowledge of how Caribbean and Latinx popular music reflects on discourses around identity, race, and gender. I conceptualize these artists works as utterances of sonic Dominicanidad, that is, as ongoing negotiations with the regulations that inform the meanings we derive from popular music’s sound and performances. Sonic Dominicanidad functions as the accumulation of competing scripts, images, prejudices, fears, erasures, narratives, and impositions that provide listeners with a particular definition and association between the hegemonic identity of Dominicanidad and sound. They resist the capturing sense of the listening ear, through their navigation of the politics of consumption and the production of sound, what I understand as uttering. Through the sonic and performative work of pioneering Dominican dembow artists like La Insuperable, La Materialista, and queer performers La Delfi, and La Pajarita La Paul, urban alternative music groups Rita Indiana y Los Misterios and Mula, and trap superstar Cardi B, I showcase how utterances are strategically deployed to visibilize the sounds, bodies, concerns, struggles, and histories of Dominican, Queer, Black, Femme, migrant, and working-class communities. By coalescing interdisciplinary methodologies I locate this work within Latinx Studies and propose an understanding of popular music criticism that traverses various locales, genres, genders, and epistemologies.

Creator

• Dávila Ellis, Verónica Enid

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-3tk9-gf60

Subject

• Caribbean studies
• Ethnic studies
• Latin American studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15299
• etdadmin_upload_765285

Keyword

• Women and Gender
• Latinx
• Dominican Music
• Queer
• Caribbean
• Performance

Date created

• 2020-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright