Raras al mando/queer women command: Alternative Spanish-speaking Caribbean femininities on the global stage
This project documents current artistic projects led by queer Caribbean women performers who disrupt and reframe traditional Cuban, Dominican and Puerto Rican femininities through performance and media. Through words, images and sounds I narrate the multimedia tales and epiphanic moments that served as turning points in my exploration of the different modalities of feminist art and media in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. I focus on the work of Las Krudas from La Habana, Cuba and the impact of Rita Indiana Hernandez in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic as well as in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Because of the scarcity of empowering representations of queer women in the popular culture in each of the Islands, a large-scale comparative approach to the Spanish-speaking Caribbean is particularly important. I highlight the moments in which these embody alternative femininities to speak truth to power through critical perspectives that reject class exploitation, racism, xenophobia and homophobia across three countries that share similar histories of colonization and multiple linguistic and cultural crossings. Through the Appendixes of this dissertation, which I have completed as videos, I exemplify the ways in which audiovisual knowledge can advance written scholarly formulations and arguments about aesthetic work, and vice versa. I utilized filmmaking to explore how ethnographic processes can create stories of feminism, agency and decolonization around Caribbean women’s agency and art.
Caribbean, women, queer, media, hip hop, Las Krudas, Rita Indiana, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Caribbean women, LGBTQ, femininities, contemporary, Feminism
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign