How does listening to the details of Latinx music fandom provide us new insights to theorize the erotic hapticality of Latinx sexualities?
This presentation engages this question through the phenomenon of late MeXicana singer Jenni Rivera. Born and raised in Southern California, Rivera was the first female singer to achieve international stardom in the genre of Mexican regional music, particularly Banda Sinaloense. In 2012, she tragically died in an airplane crash at age 43. Rivera’s fans admired her not only for her music, but also for being a single mother who took ownership of her sexuality, survived domestic violence, and fought for the rights of immigrants and poor women. In this presentation, I examine the musical subculture Rivera and her fans were a part of—how this space allowed them to craft sonic identities in a transnational Latinx context—but also the cultural meanings expressed and generated by the sexually explicit behavior of Latina fans in relation to Rivera’s performances. I argue that Rivera and the social elements of her fan gatherings created an intergenerational women-centered space that transmitted sonic pedagogies of deviance—lessons that center erotic sovereignty and a refusal of heteronormative respectable femininity. Moreover, I show that the radical deviance in Jenni’s music lead to the space of pirujeria, an intoxicated temporality that allowed fans to embrace atrevida (slutty) rituals for/with each other. Since sex-positive environments are rarely received without moral panics, I end the presentation exploring how sonic pedagogies of deviance ruptured what I am calling a sexual respectable ambivalence, a mode of respectability that uses logics of surrogation to shame and police the pleasures of pirujeria.
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