“Dissident Vibrations” builds on existing literature within the Black Radical Tradition, Chicana feminisms, and Sound Studies to propose that Chicanas have developed methods of sonic political dissidence that, while varied in their style, delivery, and scale of impact, are woven together through a radical political imaginary. This imaginary resists containment by national borders, racial divides or gendered conscriptions, and advances visions of transformative, intersectional liberation.
This work expands upon Deborah Vargas' concept of dissonance--an aberration from hegemonic gendered norms, regardless of the performer in question's political commitments--by centering a commitment to radical political world-making through sound. I refer to this sonic world-making as dissident vibrations. I argue that Chicana sonic producers use their bodies and voices to manipulate political vibrations such as soapbox oratory, indigenous storytelling, and punk music. In effect, these women become literal instruments toward insurrectionary world-making politics.
The project spans two centuries and focuses on key dissident Chicana political and sonic theorists, each of whom ground a chapter. In chapter one, I engage Lucy Parsons' oratorical career and its impact on national labor organizing efforts. Chapter two focuses on Josefina Fierro de Bright's career as a lounge pianist and performer contemporaneous to her organizing efforts with El Congreso. Chapter three elaborates on Patricia Wells-Solorzano's compositional scoring and playwrighting in which she honors radical Chicanx histories. Chapter four explores Alice Bag's oratorial and musical repertoire addressing gendered inequality and sexual violence, with an eye and ear toward her contemporary performance practices. Finally, Chapter five examines intergenerational story-telling as an organizing tradition for environmental justice within the Lopez family of East LA--a tradition that I know well as a former youth organizer. Taken together, these figures give us a more robust maneuverability as we assemble new methodological efforts in the study of political worlds. Each does a particular type of dissident sonic work, through a distinct type of practice that develops alternative listening publics. In examining a plurality of sonic mediums for the articulation and dispersion of dissident vibrations, I aim to delineate what each medium uniquely contributes to the practice of materializing radical political change.
Beyond this central contribution, I intend for this project to contribute to interdisciplinary conversations as well. Through analyses of the performance networks and migration histories of each woman in this dissertation, I will expand literatures on Chicanx diasporas as an embodied political reality and add to the literatures on migration and dislocation as an affective state of fracture. In listening across sonic mediums, I aim to open the disciplinary conversations on what counts as musical performance, much like Nina Eidsheim's invocation to “sense sound.” This sensorial register centers Chicanas’ bodies and the vibrational means by which they attune themselves to the bodies and spirits of their listening publics. This contribution will assist in expanding our understanding of racialized bodies as intermaterial organologies for radical political mobilization.