¡Se Viene El Estallido!: Chilean Political Music and Gender-Bending as Resistance to Authoritarianism: 1973-1990

Paul Ruffner, University of Arizona

Culture and particularly music during the Chilean military dictatorship of 1973-1990 is the subject of much recent interest. Specifically, as musicological attention expands its field of analysis beyond the music and lyrics as text, scholars have begun to scrutinize the ways in which audience members or musicians themselves make their identities known to the observing public: this is extremely useful when studying periods such as this, when censorship and other pressures forced musicians to resort to less direct forms of messaging than they had used in the past. This paper investigates both the military regime’s cultural policy as it applies to gender, and the means by which certain musicians and their publics intentionally bent traditionally held notions of both masculinity and femininity in order to signify and manifest their resistance to authoritarian government.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 85. Histories of Gender, Resistance, and Women's Empowerment in the Americas