Doing Murga,Undoing Gender: Feminist Carnival in Argentina

Argentine Women’s, Feminist, and Trans Movements

Argentina has a long history of women mobilizing politically. Spaces and organizations run exclusively by and for women have been a key part of this history. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and their iconic white kerchief are familiar to anyone who follows global human rights issues. This group of mothers organized and marched during the country’s military dictatorship in the late 1970s, demanding the return of their children who had been “disappeared” by the junta. The role and performance of “mother” was central to the Madres’ mobilization, as they took to the streets, subverting traditional images of women as homebound, at great personal risk under a violent authoritarian regime. The Madres were not feminists by definition, since their movement did not politicize the subordinate status of women in society (Taylor 1994). Yet the Madres paved the way for future women’s mobilizations in Argentina, including the contemporary feminist movement, which has made the legalization of abortion its central demand.

Since the return to democracy in the 1980s, Argentina’s Encuentros Nacionales de Mujeres (National Women’s Meetings) have constituted a key women-only space for political organizing. Every year the Encuentro welcomes women from all over the country to attend as individuals or as part of political or community groups. These Encuentros were not initially conceived as explicitly feminist, but their open, participatory, and sometimes intransigent style of debate helped construct what has sometimes been described as “unruly” Latin American feminism (Phillips and Cole 2009). It was through the Encuentros and the political and social foment that followed Argentina’s economic crisis of 2001 that a uniquely Latin American “popular feminism” came to be the norm in Argentina, centering on issues of social class and inequality (Di Marco 2010). The demand for legal abortion has become one of the most prominent demands of Argentina’s feminist movement, in part through these Encuentros (Sutton and Borland 2013).

In Argentina the social construction of gender has become prominent in political discourse recently, especially in urban centers such as the city of Buenos Aires. In 2012, two years after legalizing same-sex marriage, Argentina passed a gender identity law that is one of the most comprehensive in the world (Schmall 2012), granting trans individuals both the right to identify by the gender of their choice on official documents, and access to gender-affirming treatments and procedures through both private insurance and the public health system. The government of Buenos Aires even passed a trans quota law in 2015, designating 1% of all public sector jobs for trans individuals (LEY 14783 2015). As trans rights have gained visibility in Argentina, the Encuentros Nacionales de Mujeres have shifted to be inclusive of trans individuals and trans rights demands (Chaco 2017 | 34^o Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres 2019). The abortion rights movement, too, reflected this change, with the language shifting from calls for abortion rights for “women” to calls for “people who gestate” (Socorristas en Red 2018).

More recently, two key moments have resulted in increased visibility for feminist politics in Argentina. In June 2015, hundreds of thousands of people in Argentina marched under the slogan #niunamenos (“not one [woman] less”). More than a year before the #metoo movement went viral in the United States, #niunamenos called for the end of gender violence and femicide, a call that spread throughout Latin America (Bidaseca 2015). In 2018, the Argentine legislature debated a bill to legalize abortion. This made reproductive rights the central political question for much of 2018 and inspired several massive mobilizations in support of abortion rights. The bill was ultimately rejected by the senate in August of that year. The recent visibility of the feminist movement, trans rights, and the social construction of gender identity have led to issues of gender violence, patriarchy, misogyny, and reproductive rights becoming topics of daily conversation in political and community spaces that were previously not explicitly feminist. This is the political context in which murgueras began to organize to march together, bringing murga traditions to feminist marches, and also taking feminist politics back to their individual murgas.

Murga’s Gendered Norms

Murga porteña is a form of street theater traditionally associated with the working class of Buenos Aires and performed during each year’s Carnival. Murga is a “heterogeneous genre complex” (Canale 2005), including song, dancing, costumes and props, the recitation of poetry, and ensemble drumming, particularly using the iconic bass drum with a mounted cymbal known locally as bombo con platillo, or simply bombo.

Contemporary murgas (the term refers both to the genre and the ensembles that perform it) are typically neighborhood-based, open organizations. Most murgas perform with between 20 and 90 members, although some groups boast several hundred. Murgas as a general rule accept into their ranks anyone willing to come to rehearsals, although degrees of participation and roles vary within each group. Each murga has a small number of directors responsible for designing each of the individual components of the performance (choreography, lyrics, percussion, costumes) and for making decisions regarding transportation, finances, and other logistics. Rehearsals generally take place once per week in open public spaces, and are relaxed, hours-long affairs with family members and other onlookers welcome. Some murgas rehearse year-round, though most begin their activities some time between July and November, and rehearse more regularly and intensely in the final month before the February Carnival season. Many murgas also organize other kinds of community activities in the off-season, such as indoor performances, food drives, fundraisers for the murga itself or for members facing financial distress, and in some cases political activities such as attending or performing at rallies and marches. Thus, the murga functions as not only a performing ensemble but also a social institution and an important source of social capital for its members, especially in the working-class neighborhoods where murgas are most often based.

Although people of all ages participate in murgas, leadership positions are often held by middle-aged men who have spent years playing bombo, learning poetry recitation, and gaining respect in their murga through participation. But the largest mass of murga participants, especially among the often dozens of dancers and percussionists in any given murga, are young people, in their late teens or early 20s. Unsurprisingly, like other patriarchal organizations full of young people, murgas are also often sites of sexual harassment and sometimes sexual or intimate partner violence.

The genre conventions of murga consolidated toward the middle of the twentieth century, combining two earlier carnival traditions. They combined the parading ensembles known as comparsas, which were commonly practiced by costumed Afro-Argentine and European immigrant groups during the mid-nineteenth century and the small vocal ensembles known as chirigotas, a tradition developed in Cádiz, Spain, and brought to Argentina in the early twentieth century. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when Argentina was experiencing unprecedented immigration, Carnival performing groups in Buenos Aires typically coalesced around the common bonds of friendship and ethnic and class solidarity. Murga emerged as a social institution in the 1930s, when the barrio (neighborhood) identity became a determining factor in shaping the emergent social institutions including the social club and professional soccer team (Martín 1997). Midcentury murgas formalized this local identity, typically adopting a name associated with their barrio. Membership in murgas was neighborhood-based, working-class, and exclusively male through the 1950s (Cirio 2001; Vainer 2005).

By the mid-1970s—a time of declining participation in murgas due in part to a series of repressive military governments—murgas began to encourage women to participate to fill the shrinking ranks. But this hardly meant that the space became less patriarchal or that women were full and equal participants. Often, women were invited only as dancers, required to wear short skirts, and to do less athletic and virtuosic dances than those of men’s choreography. Some of the more “traditionally” oriented murgas maintain this division today, with women primarily or exclusively dancing in short skirts, playing a largely sexualized and objectified role, while men do the more meaningful work of writing and reciting poetry. Men also do the more corporeally impressive work of athletic dance moves and playing instruments, especially percussion, which requires both skill and strength.

Carnival has often been marked by a suspension of the typical rules of social order and a permissiveness for performing and celebrating the marginal and the grotesque (Bakhtin 1984; Eco, Ivanov, and Rector 2011; Puccia 1974). This permissiveness has often included serving as a space where participants can engage in transgressive behavior vis-à-vis sexual and gendered norms. Retrograde ideas about gender relations have been a frequent source of humor in murga “critique” songs (Martín 1997, 71–77). Puerile puns and sexual double entendres have been common, and women’s sexual behavior has been a frequent target of criticism.

As early as the 1950s, murgas offered a rare opportunity for travestis ² to appear in public as women without fear of police repression. In a recent oral history of travestis and trans women, one participant characterized her experience of performing in Carnival as “like a diva’s dream.” Another compared the difference between her socially accepted role as a trans performer during Carnival and her criminalized identity during the rest of the year as “six days of freedom and three-hundred and fifty [sic] in prison” (Bistagnino 2019). But travestis’ participation in murgas hardly signaled a full and uncomplicated acceptance of their role, even by other murguerxs. Travestis were not permitted to perform at the biggest stages (Vainer 2005), and their presence was seen as a source of humor. Even in the rarified and permissive atmosphere of Carnival, cis women were not offered the same opportunities to perform; women’s presence in murga was strictly a punch line.

After Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983, murgas experienced something of a revival, attracting a new generation of murguerxs that included far more middle-class participants and many more women (Morel 2005; Romero 2011). As of the 2020 Carnival season, the government of Buenos Aires reported that there were 111 active murgas in the city, with a combined participation of 10,500 murguerxs (Buenos Aires Ciudad 2020). But this official count ignores the “independent circuit” of murgas that don’t qualify for—or refuse to participate in—officially sanctioned activities, along with dozens of murgas that function outside of city limits and perform in parades organized through the Province of Buenos Aires’s dozens of municipalities. We estimate that the latter involve at least as many participants again as the official circuit, if not more.

Since the late 1990s, women’s participation in murga has been far more prevalent in a variety of roles: they are frequently not only dancers but singers, instrumentalists, and reciters. The most resistant space to women’s incursion, though, has been in the percussion section. Women bombistas (performers on the bombo con platillo) remain a rarity in most murgas, although this is changing.

Gendered Musical Spaces

Musical performance is a social space in which gender is performed and embodied. Gender norms are established and policed in a wide variety of musical contexts through the association of gender stereotypes with different instruments (O’Neill and Boultona 1996; Valdez and Halley 1996; Walker 2004). Research in other musical genres in Latin America has shown how traditionally masculine musical spaces are effectively closed against incursions by women, as in the case of Mexican-American conjunto (Valdez and Halley 1996). Percussion is one area of musical practice that has been an exclusively or almost exclusively masculine space across many contexts, including European classical music and other traditions around the world such as Balinese gamelan (Downing 2010) and Japanese/North American taiko drumming (Ahlgren 2016). As recently as 2013 the trade publication Percussive Notes published a celebratory 9-page piece on the “Women Pioneers of Percussion in the United States” (Aube 2013). In recognition of the difficulties girls face attempting to participate in patriarchal music spaces, girls-only music spaces have been created in a variety of contexts (Björck 2013; Giffort 2011).

Women and girls have also made forays into traditionally masculine musical spaces over the last several decades in popular music. Ethnographic research has explored the roles of women bass players in alternative rock (Clawson 1999), women in local rock bands (Groce and Cooper 1990; McCarthy 2006), and all-women salsa bands in Colombia (Waxer 2001). This research demonstrates how women’s entry into certain instruments or musical spaces can be explained in part by loosening gender scripts and women’s increased access to both professional and recreational music practice. Yet women’s participation in these musical spaces often “simultaneously work[s] to reconstruct a gendered division of labor and reproduce dominant gender ideologies” (Clawson 1999) in a process parallel to what has been described in other workplaces and institutional settings. Additionally, women’s musical participation is often commercialized in sexually objectifying ways that undermine women musicians’ autonomy and respect.

Other authors have explored more explicitly feminist projects in women’s music, such as feminist hip hop (Durham, Cooper, and Morris 2013) and Riot Grrrl (Schilt 2003). In these projects, women are both literally and figuratively taking center stage, taking ownership of musical practice in explicitly political ways. Yet the commercialization and consumption of this music creates opportunities for producers and audiences to objectify and sexualize musicians in ways that are not always within the musicians’ control, especially when the means of musical production and distribution remain largely controlled by corporate and usually male-dominated elites. In comparison with these cases, murgueras’ experiences are unique insofar as murga is street carnival, and thus minimally commercialized and mass mediated.

Feminist murgueras are disrupting gender norms by taking up instruments traditionally understood as masculine, most importantly the bombo. But they are also creating women-only murga spaces that are disrupting the gender inequality in their home murgas in several ways.

Creating Feminist Spaces for Murga

Feminist murgueras are using a multipronged feminist strategy. They are creating women-only spaces for murga and mobilizing as murgueras at political marches. Furthermore, they are using murga performance as a space from which to impart feminist messages to a broader audience and are using murgas as community spaces through which to do feminist politics.

As the feminist movement has gained prominence in recent years in Argentina and women have begun to question patriarchal practices in murga and in society, murgueras have also created explicitly women-only spaces for murga. Two of these initiatives are Murgueras Independientes, an organization where murgueras meet separately from their murgas, and Las Bombas, a drumming workshop where women teach other women to play the bombo.

Murgueras Independientes began in 2017 when feminist activists who participate in murga decided to create a dedicated space for those who shared both of these identities. This group organized to attend feminist marches, but also shared ideas for handling patriarchal and misogynist practices in participants’ home murgas. They meet up for a series of yearly feminist mobilizations, among them March 8 International Women’s Day and the #niunamenos march on June 4. In June 2018 they mobilized for a massive march and overnight vigil outside the Congress building when the lower house was debating a bill legalizing abortion. It is common at these marches for groups to travel and march together, including youth wings of leftist political parties, labor unions, or community organizations. Through Murgueras Independientes, murgueras had the option to travel and march with fellow murgueras, bringing the music, dancing, and joy of murga to feminist mobilizations. Some of this coordination is done through Facebook and other social media sites. As of February 2020, the Murgueras Independientes de Buenos Aires Facebook group had 3,457 members. One of our interviewees estimated that at the 2019 Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres, between 600 and 1,000 women participated as Murgueras Independientes, marching as a block, playing bombos and dancing Carnival steps.

Las Bombas is a drum workshop run exclusively by and for women who want to learn to play the bombo con platillo. Las Bombas has overlapping membership with Murgueras Independientes, but is a percussion workshop rather than a political mobilization group. In the course of our research, we learned that Las Bombas met every Wednesday evening in a large, centrally located park in Buenos Aires. Initially, O’Brien became aware of the workshop and inquired about attending as an observer. But he was told that this was a space exclusively for women, and that as a cis man if he wanted to attend the organizers would need to discuss this with attendees and gain their approval. Instead, McReynolds-Pérez, a cis woman, attended, and was able both to participate in the workshop as a beginning bombista and to interview one of the key organizers of the workshop, whom we will call Paz.

In the interview it became clear why the organizers felt it was necessary to police this gender-exclusive space. Paz, who is a professionally trained percussionist with a degree in music therapy and a cis woman, described the often aggressive and unpleasant responses from men to women’s interest in playing the bombo con platillo in particular, which is seen as the iconic instrument of murga. Some murgas have explicit rules against women playing percussion, claiming that this is because of a commitment to “tradition.” But more often women who wish to learn the bombo con platillo are met with subtle forms of resistance. Paz described the range of responses that women interested in learning the bombo might face from the men in their murgas:

In some cases, it’s said very explicitly, “No, women don’t play [bombo] here.” Or else [it goes something like this, men say:] “OK, fine, play.” [Woman:] “OK, can I borrow a bombo?” [Man:] “No.” [Woman:] “Can you teach me?” [Man:] “No.” The majority of cases are like that. It’s all, “Oh, yeah, you [women] can play [the bombo].” But it’s not an instrument that’s easy to pick up on your own without instruction, well, like any other instrument.

Paz also described how a women’s wing of a labor union had purchased bombos in order to use them in their labor marches, only to find that their male colleagues destroyed their instruments while they were stored in a common area. As a result of these kinds of incidents, it became clear that women who were interested in playing the bombo would need to create an exclusive space.

Paz and three other women bombistas posted a flyer on social media inviting women to participate in an inaugural meeting of Las Bombas in early 2018. They posted the flyer with great trepidation because a year and a half before the creation of Las Bombas, a woman bombista had advertised a women’s only bombo workshop and was roundly ridiculed and attacked on social media. But the sea change wrought by the feminist mobilization between 2017 and 2018 related to the abortion debate was such that Paz’s flyer was celebrated on social media, with many encouraging responses of “That’s great, girls! We give you a big hand! [¡Chicas, que bueno! ¡Aplausos!].”

Holding the workshop in a centrally located, prominent park meant that this project was also about claiming public space specifically for women. Paz was explicit about their intention to train women to play in murgas with men, not to create a separate space for women to play bombo:

Lots [of women] play [bombo], it’s not that they don’t play. But they don’t want to play in front of men. Because men’s gaze is so tough when it comes to this [lo duro que es la mirada de los varones en relación a esto]. So, we have to work to, to play. . . . That is, we [nosotras] can make a feminist murga and isolate ourselves in a ghetto. But . . . then you’ve got to fortify yourself, and go to those [non-feminist] spaces, and occupy them.

But entering public spaces as women playing percussion was not without problems. Women in the workshop encountered catcalling. Paz described men calling out, “Yeah, play, come on, come on, play it brown girl! Come on, come on! [¡Eh, tocá, dale, dale, tocá morocha! ¡Dale! ¡Dale!]” A male passerby had gone so far as to take an instrument from a woman, helpfully offering, “Hand it over, I want to teach you something.” Paz had to intervene to get the instrument returned to its owner. Recent feminist interventions had changed women’s attitudes when they approached the playing of the bombo, according to Paz:

Now it’s not (in a soft voice), “Excuse me, I wanted to play the bombo . . . so . . . ” Rather, it’s more, “OK, now I’m playing the bombo, and . . . ” And that works at a collective level. That is to say, I register that [women] going [to play the bombo] individually, . . . [it] works a certain way, but as part of a collective, that is, within the mass [of people] that is Las Bombas, we generate a growth medium for that [change in attitude] to happen.

As these interview excerpts show, women face resistance to playing the bombo from men both in mixed-gender contexts and when they attempt to create a women-only space. Through both organizational and interactionist strategies, men communicate to women that their interest in percussion is not welcome or appropriate and that their ability to master the instrument is doubtful. Importantly, both Murgueras Independientes and Las Bombas create women-only spaces, but they do not create separate women’s murgas. The women who participate in these spaces still have mixed-gender home murgas that constitute their primary identities within the murga community. The women-only spaces create an organizational, interactional, and musical performance space somewhat apart from men and male-dominated spaces. The confidence, capability, and sharing of ideas that occur in these spaces then influence gender dynamics in the participants’ home murgas, as we show below.

Evidence shows that these spaces are changing the gender composition of bombo playing in numerous murgas. O’Brien recalled seeing only two women bombo players among the dozens of murgas he saw perform during six months of intermittent field work between 2012 and 2015. In 2018, the organizers of Las Bombas circulated a survey which gathered data from 39 murgas. They found that of these, 29 murgas reported at least one woman playing percussion, with a total of 48 women playing bombo. This sample was small, and likely biased because the most feminist murgas may have been most eager to respond to a request for information about women percussionists circulated by prominent feminists within the murga scene. But these numbers are striking in comparison with a few years earlier.

O’Brien (2018) analyzed the bombo’s historical association with other male-dominated spaces such as the soccer stadium and labor union protests, and its function as a way to sonically occupy public space, either as a proxy for or prologue to other forms of violent provocation. The bodily habitus required for its conventional performance technique emphasizes dramatic, strong gestures, particularly with the mallet arm, in ways that are conventionally associated with masculinity in Argentine culture. Thus, murgueras are already transgressing patriarchal norms simply by playing the instrument competently in public space.

Women who play the bombo experience the bodily joy of agency and sonic presence while transgressing gender boundaries by occupying the street both physically and sonically in traditionally masculine-exclusive ways. This contrasts with the silent, somber protests of the Madres four decades earlier. The Madres emphasized their gender conformity—motherhood, silence, seriousness, and sacrifice—as a necessary cover for their transgression of protesting at all under a murderous military regime. Murgueras subvert gender by exhibiting forms of bodily excess usually reserved for men: loud and forceful drumming, frenetic but not sexualized dancing. These forms of gender disruption are facilitated by women-only spaces but function most effectively when these new skills and changed attitudes are brought back to mixed-gender spaces.

Performing Feminism in Murga

The emergence of new, explicitly feminist spaces for learning and practicing murga has clearly been influential, but just as striking are the ways that the language and ideology of the feminist movement have begun to transform practices within murgas that were not formed as explicitly feminist. During field research in February 2019, nearly all of the murgas’ Carnival performances that O’Brien witnessed had adopted at least some of the language and iconography of the feminist movement. Women and girls prominently wore or displayed the green kerchief of the abortion rights movement and other women’s movement symbols, and groups sang songs and recited poems that called for the legalization of abortion and for an end to sexual and domestic violence. Beyond the symbolic and discursive level, some murgas have begun to rethink the ways that they share leadership roles, and are seeking to remedy the persistent exclusion of women and girls from leadership positions and key roles in performance. One such murga, Suerte Loca, has since its founding in 2013 embraced a socially progressive ideology: Their home is a cultural center that was a secret prison during the military dictatorship, and they regularly participate in human rights marches and political events commemorating the victims of state-sponsored violence. They have espoused a horizontal, assembly-based decision-making process since their founding, and do not recognize formal leadership roles.

Yet one of the older and most prominent male members of the group explained that despite this ideal, in practice those members who have more experience and more skill as musicians and lyricists end up as de facto leaders. In a system where women’s exclusion from these roles has long gone unquestioned, the individuals with those skills and experiences are overwhelmingly men. In the 2019 Carnival season, Suerte Loca’s male leadership opted to step aside, inviting the young women in the murga to write the critique song—the centerpiece of the murga performance. The performance of this critique song that O’Brien observed in February 2019 began with three male vocalists at center stage, one on guitar, and two female vocalists at stage left. Together these five vocalists sang the critique song calling out gender violence, demanding access to abortion and sex education, and predicting the fall of the patriarchy. Over the course of the song, the male vocalists quietly stepped back and were replaced by three new vocalists, teenage girls. The men ceded the microphones as the young women performed the verse, and following poem, that they wrote. Speaking in the first person collectively as women, the vocalists powerfully declaimed that they will tear down the patriarchy.

In this performance, Suerte Loca moved from an earlier practice of surface-level feminism: decrying patriarchy through lyrics written primarily by men, in performances led by men, to a more genuine form of feminism. The men ceded control over the lyrics, and literally handed over the microphones in a powerful symbolic gesture validating the voices of the murga’s women.

Doing Feminism and Undoing Gender through Murga

Murgas have long been politicized and political spaces where satirical poetry addresses the social issues of the day, as well as spaces for enacting neighborhood identities and organizing community life. Recently, we have begun to see murgas functioning as explicitly feminist community spaces, where the formerly uninitiated may learn about feminist political concerns, and where members ultimately disseminate these concerns beyond the murga. Feminist influence has resulted in murgas that function as spaces through which women’s health knowledge is shared and strategies are developed for responding to sexual violence. Feminist murguerxs have even begun questioning and changing patriarchal power structures within the murga.

Ironically, one of the things that makes murga a potent space for feminist organizing is that people come together in murgas for reasons that are not primarily about feminist ideals or political mobilizing. Young people join murga because it is fun, to meet and connect with people from their neighborhood, to sing and play music and dance, and to gather socially, especially during their summer vacation in January and February. Because the primary concerns of the group are focused on performance and leisure enjoyment, feminist politics in murga has the ability to reach individuals who would otherwise not have encountered these ideas. It is as though feminist murgueras are following Giffort’s (2011) suggestion that the “next major feminist project should involve figuring out how to engage young people in dialogues about power, privilege, and structure . . . while still staying relevant, and even, fun.”

One interviewee described how her murga had served as a space through which feminist knowledge and sexual health information circulates among groups of young women. As she described:

I have a group of four friends [amigas], we’re all murgueras. . . . Seven or 8 years ago we had no idea how to have an abortion safely. In these last few years, because of our ties to other murgueras who were part of the Socorristas network ³ . . . in this group of friends some have had safe abortions—with advice from the Socorristas, knowing which public hospitals will provide care without judging you or turning you in. . . . All that information . . . we had access to it because of our contacts among murgueras.

Murgas function in ways that are similar to women’s health groups or other community organizations and neighborhood groups around the world where women come together to share knowledge of safe birth control and abortion practices.

More recently, as the feminist movement and the fight for the legalization of abortion have gained prominence, many murgas have included song lyrics related to these topical issues in their performances. In this way, an attitude of support for the legalization of abortion is shared with spectators at murga events, but more importantly this can open discussions of these issues among members of the murga. One interviewee described how though her murga had long sung about abortion, the murgueras only recently started using these lyrics as a starting point for broader discussions:

[We said:] “We’re singing this [lyrics in favor of legalizing abortion], is everybody in favor of legalizing abortion, or are you singing just to sing?” [Folks said] “Well, actually. . . .” And in that way a couple of people spoke up who had doubts. But it was really tough, like, let’s talk about it, because if not what are you singing? Lots of ignorance. . . . We try to have meetings where we discuss gender pretty regularly, sometimes mixed [gender], sometimes separately. In a mixed meeting, a guy said, “I’m not sure I’m convinced . . . why do you think [abortion] should be legal in all cases?” And from there we had a great debate. Now that guy has gone on to argue with other people who don’t agree with legalization.

As this interview excerpt shows, singing songs with feminist lyrics alone doesn’t necessarily result in a deeper feminist commitment from murga members. With the advent of feminist praxis in murga in recent years, murgueras have shifted practices from surface-level discursive gestures to feminism through lyrics to a deeper feminist practice reminiscent of feminist consciousness-raising groups (Reger 2004), but with some important differences. Because members of the murga have come together for reasons other than their commitment to feminist ideals, these conversations are able to reach people whose opinions on these issues are still unformed and malleable, open to being influenced. The interviewee describes a man who appears to have been converted from ambivalence to outspoken allyship for abortion rights. Given how polarizing the abortion issue is typically understood to be, this suggests that murga can provide a powerful political and interpersonal process of engagement with feminist politics.

Through their participation in the feminist movement and the support of women-only murga spaces, murgueras have also been empowered to effectively respond to patriarchal practices and instances of violence within their murgas. Like many other community spaces, murgas sometimes experience problems with sexual harassment or intimate partner violence. The issue of harassment can be especially difficult because there are some serial harassers or abusers who move from one murga to another as a way to avoid accountability.

One recent response to these issues of sexual violence is the social media escrache. The escrache is a form of public shaming developed starting in the 1990s by HIJOS, an organization of the children of the victims of state-sponsored terror in Argentina (Kaiser 2002). When legal avenues for holding military officials responsible for crimes committed during the dictatorship were blocked, young activists took to picketing and painting graffiti around the homes of these military officials to publicly shame them. This practice has moved online and is now being employed by feminist activists to publicly shame rapists and sexual harassers in the absence of effective legal action. In groups on Facebook and other social media, people post images of the harassers to warn other potential victims to avoid these individuals and to prevent the harassers from joining new murgas, where they may hope to outrun their reputations and find new victims. In a context where legal prosecution is difficult and can be traumatic, this public shaming can be an effective approach, especially among dense social networks of murgueras connected with a broader murga community online. The Murgueras Independientes organization played a key role in bringing women together and emboldening them to take action against predators in their murgas.

With the advent of feminist discourse and practice, murgas are finding new ways to respond to intra-group sexual violence and harassment. One interviewee described how her murga had finally dealt with longstanding issues of harassment. She said:

Last year [2017] we went through a pretty difficult process, where we made it known that a member of the murga beat up his ex and had also abused other women in the murga. This came out because the victim had the courage to speak up. . . . Now we talk about everything, and if a woman says that someone makes her uncomfortable, the woman is taken seriously. That didn’t use to happen. There were women who during 3, 4, 5, 6 years were saying that this guy was violent. But there were 3 of them. Nobody listened to them. They were the “crazy feminists who were making trouble.” When we were 10, 15, in 2017, we managed to have our voices heard.

Here we see feminist practice moving from the discursive to the material, and from men ceding power in the context of performance to women making demands for fundamental changes in leadership and recognition of their voices on issues of personal safety and harassment. This murguera went on to say that one of the harassers who was removed from the murga had been the self-appointed manager of the group. Though the murga was ostensibly run democratically through horizontal decision making, in practice this man ran the murga, making decisions unilaterally with only minor gestures at seeking consensus. He also had material control—owning the truck in which instruments were transported and the storage space where they were kept, and managing communications about performance dates and participation in different venues. Once this member was removed, the murga shifted to a more authentic and gender-equitable form of democratic and participatory management.