"Soundtracks of an Afterlife: Performing Pop Music, Feminicide, and Radical Geographies of Survival"

Christina Baker, PhD (Department of Spanish and Portuguese)
CHAT Faculty Fellow 2022–2023

Abstract: Eleven women are murdered every day in Mexico. This bone chilling number should give us pause, cause us discomfort, provoke rage, and prompt action. In this talk, I explore two teatro-cabaret pieces that use performance as a mechanism to respond to urgent and much needed conversations about violence perpetrated against women. Resisting official discursive mechanisms that seek to make missing or dead female citizens unthinkable, Ni una menos (2019) and La Prietty Guoman (2017) are creative initiatives that firmly situate the victims of feminicide and trans feminicide within Mexican history and geography. Inspired by Rita Laura Segato’s notion of the body as territory and Melissa Wright’s work on geographies of resistance, I analyze the way these works formulate and reconfigure space in the present, past, and imagined futures in order to offer security and safety. Concretely, I argue that by way of musical selection, the performers and their onstage characters destabilize chronologies of life and death, manifesting what I am calling radical geographies of hope and survival.

Please contact chat@temple.edu with questions.