ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes how Chicana musicians of different social and historical backgrounds have used music to challenge power relations and gender stereotypes. It argues that an analysis of ethnicity/race or nation cannot be fully achieved without an account of power relations structured by gender, sexuality, and desire. The chapter explores the ways in which Chicana diasporic performances and resignifications of the subject-citizen and noncitizen reproduce and/or alter national identities. It explains alternative tactics of the female cultural producers who create and perform Chicana music. The chapter also explores the possibilities of self-definition by pointing to the feminist philosophy called relational autonomy and presents selected musicians as examples of different strategies of sonic Xicanistas. Chicana musicians – from early examples like Lydia Mendoza in the mid-20th century to today’s artists – have used the possibilities of appropriation, decontextualizing, and recontextualizing as well as reflexivity and exaggeration as a resource of control against underlying patriarchal and normative notions.
