Queer Music Protest

The network Sounding a Queer Rebellion: LGBTI Musical Resistances in Latin America" gathers musicians, artists, activists and experts in ethnomusicology, visual and gender anthropology, religion sociology, clinical and social psychology, and law, among other related fields, to develop answers to violence against the LGBTI community in Latin American countries. Initially the members of this network will hail from Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, but the aim is to grow and broaden the regional network.

This interdisciplinary and transregional network seeks to benefit the LGBTI community and Latin American society in general, by exposing violence, promoting social policy changes and amplifying the voices of people silenced by oppressive systems.

Between 2014 and 2019 in Latin America and the Caribbean, an average of four LGBTI people were murdered each day (Sin Violencia LGBTI, 2019), a terrifying toll that reveals the violent backlash to progress in LGBTI rights in the region. In parallel, misinformed anti-rights campaigns have emerged, focused on attacking an alleged "gay agenda’ and so-called ‘gender ideology.’ Such campaigns have found support in conservative governments, which in turn are backed by Evangelical and Pentecostal movements that perpetuate the discrimination and marginalization of the LGBTI community.

LGBTI youth use music to counter violence and discrimination. Their compositions, audio-visual creations, protest music and sound interventions in political demonstrations serve to represent, make visible and build communities and identities that fight for their rights. Here musical spaces are born that later become communities of psychological healing, where dissident voices find themselves and each other and draw strength from unity to confront the violence of society.

Objectives and ideals

1. Promote interdisciplinary and transregional collaborations to study the challenges and resistance of the LGBTI community in Latin America.
2. Create equal and inclusive conversations that go beyond academia. We consider it vital to exchange knowledge and experiences between LGBTI activists and groups, musicians, artists, researchers and allies.
3. Establish democratic collaborations between Europe and South America to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and generate local solutions, in order to halt contemporary fundamentalisms that breed violence and aggression towards LGBTI individuals and groups.
4. Bring together LGBTI diversity and allies to challenge the intolerance prevalent in the region and reinforce the principles of resilience, unity and knowledge.

Relevance and innovation

This project stands out as a pioneering initiative in the study of musical manifestations of our LGBTI community in Latin America, highlighting its social, political, media and legal impacts. The network is composed mostly of LGBTI artists, activists and academics, as well as allies who are representatives of this fight against violence.

We are fostering encounters between several branches of art and academic disciplines from five Latin American countries to exchange ideas, propose sustainable solutions to gender-based violence and generate scientific information on LGBTI issues related to music. People with artistic and research histories passionate about the cause will in this network find a space for dialogue, to share their experiences, and contribute to the generation and dissemination of knowledge - from Latin America to the rest of the world.