UC Berkeley

This dissertation engages the concept of resonance in order to explore how Chilean feminist activists, musicians, industry leaders, and audiences have used popular musical practices to create space for themselves and their communities. Centrally, this study asks, how are feminist organizers in Chile engaging music to mobilize artists, audiences, and industries to end patterns of patriarchal oppression? To what extent do feminist musical practices allow participants to navigate, re-sound, and re-envision the physical, social, industrial, and virtual spaces of which they are a part? By examining a diversity of feminist musical practices from the mid-twentieth century to the present, I explain how musical and interpersonal resonances shape feminist coalition-building while also reconfiguring the gender politics of social and geophysical space.

Each chapter in this dissertation makes audible distinct feminist understandings of Chilean music history, spatial politics, and the patriarchal systems that shape these. In Chapters Two and Three, I examine the role of cantautoras (women singer-songwriters) across generations of political movements, specifically addressing the feminist legacies, activism, and travels of folklorist Violeta Parra (b. 1917) and singer Pascuala Ilabaca (b. 1985). The latter two chapters examine two highly distinct community music practices. Chapter Four draws on my participant observation in women’s community cueca classes in Santiago to analyze the process of “sacando la voz” (raising, drawing out, or finding one’s voice) within the urban folk music tradition, cueca brava. Chapter Five examines the history of countercultural arts collective Coordinadora Femfest and their collaboration with trans performer Hija de Perra. I explain how members have used peripheral venues and DIY performance practices to develop a transfeminist coalition building based on “sounding from under”–outside mainstream institutions and in solidarity with marginalized communities.

Each case, I argue, represents a different enactment of feminist worldmaking in which sound is made into a reclamation of space, an amplification of voices, or a mobilization of power. I define feminist worldmaking as the performative means through which musicians and musical collectives practice modes of existence and envision human futurity outside the strictures of sexism, classism, and xenophobia. Based on this perspective, I locate feminist worldmaking possibilities in these practices not only in the way their artistic imaginings envision new futures, but also in the very real ways that their organizing, production, and performance actively transform gender and sexual politics within their social context.