Ambigua (Dec 2016)
Feminismos activistas en el rap latinoamericano: Mare (Advertencia Lírika) y Caye Cayejera
Abstract
This paper makes a first mapping of Latin American feminist rap from Cultural Studies and Gender Studies. It aims to visualize and analyse the subversive potential that crosses the hip-hop movement from its beginnings until the present time. More and more women are feeling part of a protest movement and they are adding their feminist demands to it. Taking as a starting point several studies concerned with the hip hop in the United States, the paper offers the analysis of four lyrics of two rappers, Mare (Advertencia Lírika), a Mexican artist, and Caye Cayejera, from Ecuador. Both define themselves as feminists and so are their creations and their ideology. They use the power of interpolating of hip-hop as an expressive non-institutionalized channel of autonomous feminist discourses. His criticisms focus on the corruption of the political system, romantic love as numbing for women, as well as the claim of identity and the multiple genders. Beginning from the analysis of some rap lyrics involves a process of reviewing the concepts of text and canon and an opening to oral texts. Scholars should match oral texts to written texts, especially when the former ones are registered and are not exposed to time. This is a post-colonial claim that opens unsuspected ways to Latin American Cultural Studies. This work aims to set a reference. As for the findings, we have advocated the inclusion of these cultural practices in a feminist alternative canon, suggesting the need to map, in a subsequent study, the landscape of feminist rap in all Latin American countries, according to their different historical and cultural contexts.
