Cornell University

Dept of Music, 101 Lincoln Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-4101, USA

http://music.cornell.edu
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From the New Spain Inquisition’s prohibition of the chuchumbé to the criminalization of Brazilian funk in the contemporary news media, the politics of obscenity have persistently marked the reception of music deemed vulgar both inside and outside Black and mestizo working-class communities in Latin America. What social grounds shape the consumption and prohibition of so-called vulgar music? What kind of work does obscenity perform as a category of judgment, and in which spaces do sounds become intelligible as obscene? These questions serve as the departure point for a transhistorical study of the stakes involved in the obscene rendering of sonic cultures. Drawing from archival research and interviews conducted in Brazil and Mexico, I argue that obscenity acts as a mechanism of social distinction that produces and legitimizes social hierarchies.

Several studies have examined obscenity as a legal complement to pornography, noting the importance that juridical censorship acquires in discursive constructions of the obscene (Hunt 1993; DeJean 2002). In my research, I have found that the questions I pose are better addressed by examining how historical modes of listening actualize power, which undergirds a rationality that cannot be understood simply as coming from above. Looking through and beyond the juridical foundations of the obscene, this study expands the scope of inquiry beyond top-down systems of control to consider how everyday listening practices regulate sonic and sexual propriety. In this talk, I offer an overview of this dissertation project and subsequently focus on its first case study, an exploration of the New Spain Inquisition’s prohibition of sexually transgressive music during the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I present this case study to offer insight into the enduring coloniality of specific listening modes and the lines of flight that have unsettled these practices.

Cibele Moura is a doctoral candidate in music and sound studies at Cornell University. Much of her current research examines power struggles at the intersection of popular music-making, listening practices, and knowledge production in Latin America. Her dissertation, titled “Listening to the Obscene: The Sexual Politics of Music and Sound in Latin America,” interrogates obscenity as a category of racialized sexuality in Latin American music cultures. This project has received awards and financial support from various institutions, including the Society for American Music and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. She recently co-edited and co-translated A luta pelo nacional popular na Bolívia (Editora da PUCRS, 2024), which introduces the heterodox Marxist work of René Zavaleta Mercado, one of Bolivia’s foremost political theorists, to Lusophone audiences.

 

 
 

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