“Who's the Crack Whore at the End?” Performance, Violence, and Sonic Borderlands in the Music of Yva las Vegass

Abstract

This essay amplifies sonic borderlands as a sonic lens for the intersections of performance and violence in the music of Yva las Vegass. Foregrounding voice, sonic borderlands is a theoretical and experiential marker for identities and bodies that occupy geographic and discursive borderlands. The research intervenes in a genealogy of the utopic in queer performance, demonstrating that it is precisely in performance that some subjects encounter the most physical and psychical violence. Extending queer and transgender of color critique into the fields of ethnomusicology and performance studies, the discussion conversely brings theoretical frameworks in voice, performance, and music, into Latino/a studies, Black feminisms, disability studies, and queer and transgender of color critique.