Women and Urban Music. Feminisms and Consumer Responsibility before the Music Industry

Urban Music and Women, a cycle of conferences organized by UNAM’s Center for Mexican Studies in Tucson, Arizona, United States, sought to gather points of (dis) encounter around various urban music genres and to address the social phenomena created or developed from them. Three researchers, Turena Souza, Karen Ortiz, and Sofía Manzano, moderated and coordinated by Rita Oznaya, met online to share their studies on reggaeton, heavy metal, and corrido tumbado from a gender perspective.

UNAM-Tucson, together with the Mexican Consulate in that city, and Arizona State University’s School of Social and Behavioral Sciences—reached through Mexico’s Initiatives—organized this cycle in order to analyze the sometimes-controversial characteristics of these musical expressions on August 15, 22, and 29, 2023. The conference cycle ended on September 5 with a collective panel where the specialists discussed various political positions and ideas previously explored in the conferences about practices and imaginaries created and socialized around these musical genres.

REGGAETON
Turena Souza, graduated in Intercultural Development and Management at UNAM’s Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, opened the cycle with a talk titled “Sensual Fanatics. Ethical Dilemmas in Musical Consumerism. A Defense of Female Reggaeton Consumers and Fans”. The first part of the conference’s title quotes the song “Fanática sensual” by Plan B (2014), whose lyrics allude to masturbation and sexual encounters. Summarizing her presentation, Souza writes:
JOURNALISM AND HEAVY METAL
The second talk was given by Karen Ortiz, a graduate of the Social Work program and the Master’s Degree in Education at the National University of Colombia. She presented valuable reflections in her presentation “Gender Perspective and Intersectionality of Musical Journalism about Heavy Metal”; she summarizes her work:
CORRIDO TUMBADO
The last talk, by Sofía Manzano, who pursued the bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts at UNAM’s Faculty of Arts and Design, presented “Patriarchy Established in Corridos. ‘And Don’t Forget to Bring Some Bimbos for We to Enjoy Them Well’”. The title cites a line from the song “El taquicardio” (El Komander, 2012):
IN CONCLUSION
Like many other genres of popular music, reggaeton, metal, and corridos tumbados have included in some of their songs sexual and violent themes, mainly against women. Some extreme styles of metal have represented women as objects that are tortured, raped, and mutilated, even to the extent of describing, in some cases, sexual acts performed on a dead body, which means these songs allude to femicide and necrophilia. The question is: Is it necessary for a given music genre to deal with lewd, crude, and brutal themes? If that is the case: Is censoring this music genres an alternative to fighting against gender-based violence? As musical expressions: Do they remain only in the song, or can they impact the people who consume the music?

While music has poured hate speeches, it has also built bridges of dialogue and a network of interconnections where enthusiastic and interested people have established discussions and shared knowledge beyond territorial and ideological borders, as was the case of the cycle Urban Music and Women. It is important to develop interconnected analyses between different geographical regions on the gender and intersectional perspective in urban music because this allows us to broaden the research perspective, learn about new sources that enrich theoretical and methodological frameworks, and, above all, keep up to date with new reflections that the feminist and gender perspectives can provide for analyzing urban music and expressions.

Being able to question these music genres, the understanding of their aesthetic stakes, and the analysis from diverse feminist currents, leads to questioning other issues, such as the responsibility in musical consumption, the economic system that sustains the market and the music industry, the responsibility of the media in the formation of audiences, the capacity for entertainment, or the development of critical thinking of those who consume the products. This is the reason why UNAM-Tucson developed this cycle of conferences.

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