Doing Murga, Undoing Gender: Feminist Carnival in Argentina

Abstract

Murga porteña, the satirical street theatre tradition associated with Carnival in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is historically a strongly patriarchal institution. Prominent roles such as reciting poetry, singing, and playing percussion instruments have been reserved exclusively for men. As the feminist movement in Argentina has grown in visibility and importance in recent years, feminist murga participants disrupted these patriarchal patterns. Women murga performers (murgueras) have begun to use murga as a space for feminist practice, both by creating women-only organizations to learn murga skills and by bringing feminist perspectives into mixed-gender murgas. Murgueras are engaged in a multifaceted feminist project that disrupts gendered patterns by building women-only spaces to develop competence in the performance of historically masculine skills such as percussion. Drawing on ethnographic participant-observation of murga events as well as in-depth interviews with key organizers at the confluence of murga and feminism, we explore the ways in which murga has provided the spaces and strategies for collective feminist engagement. Murgas have become important social institutions in which women are “undoing gender” and disseminating feminist perspectives, even as most members join them not as explicitly feminist institutions.

“El viento arrollador”: la irrupción de las jóvenes en la protesta del Ni Una Menos de Argentina

“…De esta forma, la protesta de num resultó un ejemplo de creación de sentido y formación de identidad mediante procesos colectivos al compartirse en el espacio público diferentes formas de expresión subjetiva. Las participantes concurrieron con sus propios carteles escritos a mano, contando sus historias personales y denunciando una enorme gama de situaciones (Annunziata et al, 2016;Mcreynolds-Pérez & O'Brien, 2020). Las jóvenes fueron con carteles que aludían al hashtag o a la consigna, los grupos artísticos y musicales actuaban en las calles y aceras, y algunas mujeres semidesnudas habían pintado sus cuerpos.…”