Creating from the Body: Gendered Agency in Contemporary Music Performance
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33871/vortex.2026.14.11231Palavras-chave:
Music performance practice, contemporary music, gender and music, music and body, feminist theory in music performance, decolonial and situated knowledge, electroacoustic and audiovisual practiceResumo
This article explores how practices led by female performers can offer a situated model for challenging two deeply entrenched conventions in Western concert music: the ideal of fidelity to the composer’s score and the paradigm of the disciplined yet ostensibly “neutral” performer’s body. Grounded in my artistic practice as a Brazilian-Mexican performer-creator I present four electroacoustic audiovisual works for five-string electric cello developed in collaboration with visual artists Adela Marín and Jessica Rodríguez as part of the collective Féminas Sonoras. Drawing on feminist theory, decolonial thought, and a practice-as-research methodology I explore how aesthetic choices can function as critical tools for reclaiming artistic agency. I introduce the concept of the female sonic body as a situated, culturally inscribed site of authorship and knowledge production. Rather than reproducing dominant paradigms of concert music, the performer-creator practice seeks to re-signify the act of performance as both a feminist and epistemological intervention.
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