Colloquium: Dr Fiorella Montero-Diaz (Keele University)

Sounding a Queer Rebellion: LGBTI Musical Resistances in Lima, Peru

This talk will introduce my most recent interdisciplinary project on Latin American LGBTI artivism and will share insights from my latest article on music, dissidence and protest. I aim to discuss how Peruvian studies on music and gender fit into the broader academic map. I will focus on the relationship between sex/gender diversity and Peruvian popular music, specifically in emerging LGBTI scenes. There you find examples of impactful artivism that open spaces for new masculinities and femininities that transgress the traditional gender imaginary. Through direct testimonies from LGBTI artists and a section of their followers, I will discuss subversion, innovation, visibility, resistance and artivism in the contemporary LGBTI scene, documenting the meaning and impact of music especially within Lima’s transgender community. These views, together with the testimony of vernacular singer Wendy Sulca, reveal intersectional dynamics and the convergence of pro-LGBTI rights, feminist and anti-racist agendas, which coalesce around the organization of musical events and urban interventions. I hope that this contribution will support the visibilisation of diverse LGBTI musical resistances as political life, as well as a tool to secure equal rights in Peru. It is also my hope that it may encourage more researchers to notice and document the role played by dissident voices in the social organization of a country like Peru. 

Fiorella Montero-Diaz is head of the department of music and Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at Keele University, UK. She specializes in urban hybrid music, and the use of music as a social nexus in post-conflict contexts, with an emphasis on youth identity, upper classes, gender, and whiteness. She has published ethnomusicological articles in specialised magazines and books such as Ethnomusicology Forum, Musiké, Popular Music and Anthropologica, among others. Currently, thanks to a Global Challenges Research Fund grant awarded by the British Academy of Medical Sciences, she leads the project ‘Sounding a Queer Rebellion: LGBTI Musical Resistances in Latin America’ together with musicologist Luis Gabriel Mesa Martínez (Javeriana University, Colombia).