Vargas will discuss the ways in which Chicana singers push the heteronormative limits of what she refers to as the sonic imaginaries of borderlands (or Mexican-descended) music. Based on critical race feminist and queer of culture studies, Vargas’ analysis of Chicana singers moves beyond simply recovering and commemorating highly disregarded musical lives of Chicana singers to draw our attention to, for example, how silences and historical gaps sustain gender normative musical historiographies; how ephemera impacts our listening and analysis of music; and how the narrative projects of genres are unsettled by Chicana gender and sexuality.
Deborah R. Vargas is associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Vargas is the author of Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), and her publications have appeared in Feminist Studies, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory; Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies; Social Text; and the edited collection Latina/o Sexualities: Probing Powers, Passions, Practices, and Policies. Vargas is the recipient of numerous fellowships awarded by the Ford Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the UC Office of the President. Currently Vargas is a member of the editorial boards of Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies and the Journal of Popular Music Studies.
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