The University of Southampton
University of Southampton Institutional Repository

Contesting resistance, protesting violence: women, war and hip hop in Mexico

Contesting resistance, protesting violence: women, war and hip hop in Mexico
Contesting resistance, protesting violence: women, war and hip hop in Mexico
This article endeavours to push scholarship away from analysing resistance from a universalist (white, liberal, masculinist, global northern) perspective by exploring how an intersectional framework facilitates taking an anti-essentialist approach to both resistance and resistant subjects. By examining how young women protest against the high numbers of homicides, systematic violence and widespread impunity in Mexico through rap music, this article argues that a focus on activist discourses has tended to result in essentialising resistance, thereby erasing certain tensions, marginalised experiences and oppositional voices. The article centres around ethnographic encounters with two rappers: Oaxaca-based activist, Mare Advertencia Lírika, and Torreón-based non-activist, Rabia Rivera. It provides a detailed analysis of their participation in a written rap battle on the theme of ‘war’. It reveals that rap songs encouraging introspection can be as political as explicitly activist songs, and that the aim of both can be to shift people’s understandings and promote change. This is significant because it is only by attending to distinct actors’ positionalities, to their similarities and differences, that negotiation can be collectively enabled to fight violence in Mexico.
rap music, violence, resistance, women, Mexico
46-63
Malcomson, Hettie
d8a28a18-c129-4a08-8805-3365d51d253c
Malcomson, Hettie
d8a28a18-c129-4a08-8805-3365d51d253c

Malcomson, Hettie (2019) Contesting resistance, protesting violence: women, war and hip hop in Mexico. Music and Arts in Action, 7 (1), 46-63.

Record type: Article

Abstract

This article endeavours to push scholarship away from analysing resistance from a universalist (white, liberal, masculinist, global northern) perspective by exploring how an intersectional framework facilitates taking an anti-essentialist approach to both resistance and resistant subjects. By examining how young women protest against the high numbers of homicides, systematic violence and widespread impunity in Mexico through rap music, this article argues that a focus on activist discourses has tended to result in essentialising resistance, thereby erasing certain tensions, marginalised experiences and oppositional voices. The article centres around ethnographic encounters with two rappers: Oaxaca-based activist, Mare Advertencia Lírika, and Torreón-based non-activist, Rabia Rivera. It provides a detailed analysis of their participation in a written rap battle on the theme of ‘war’. It reveals that rap songs encouraging introspection can be as political as explicitly activist songs, and that the aim of both can be to shift people’s understandings and promote change. This is significant because it is only by attending to distinct actors’ positionalities, to their similarities and differences, that negotiation can be collectively enabled to fight violence in Mexico.

Text
Malcomson Contesting resistance - Version of Record
Download (475kB)

More information

Submitted date: 2019
Accepted/In Press date: 1 January 2019
e-pub ahead of print date: 20 December 2019
Published date: 23 December 2019
Keywords: rap music, violence, resistance, women, Mexico

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 435816
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/435816
PURE UUID: 0a3cce37-321a-40cf-a0a1-ed78ecd10ffb

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 21 Nov 2019 17:30
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 05:06

Export record

Download statistics

Downloads from ePrints over the past year. Other digital versions may also be available to download e.g. from the publisher's website.

View more statistics

Atom RSS 1.0 RSS 2.0

Contact ePrints Soton: eprints@soton.ac.uk

ePrints Soton supports OAI 2.0 with a base URL of http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/cgi/oai2

This repository has been built using EPrints software, developed at the University of Southampton, but available to everyone to use.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we will assume that you are happy to receive cookies on the University of Southampton website.

×