In 2019, a video of a Chilean feminist collective’s performance, “Un violador en tu camino” (“A Rapist in Your Path”) went viral; soon after, LasTesis’ performance was re-staged in different parts of the world. In each place, aspects of this performance, including the lyrics, musical elements, or bodily movements were altered to better conform with local practices. During the Women Life Freedom movement in Iran (from 2022), the collective feminists4jina, performed “Motajavez To Hasti,” (“The Rapist is You”) a Farsi version of this performance; notably, the group was made up of Iranian women in diaspora, although it was viewed in Iran through social media. Videos shot in Berlin, New York, London, and other cities in Europe and North America were uploaded and shared widely through global social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter, as well as more intimate Telegram chats and text chains. In this paper, I will analyze how the changes in these performances reflected protesters' demands in Iran. Through a close reading of this network of videos, I explore the performative aspects of words, music and movements and the two-way dialogue of the Women Life Freedom movement with transnational feminisms. In an interview, the cofounders of LasTesis stated how shared stories can bring both empowerment and sadness (Larsson Piñeda, 2023). In my paper, I highlight the situated knowledges that Iranian women’s voices bring to the layers of stories of the performance, showing how storytelling within a women-led movement can become an empowering act of resistance.

Even when our ethnographic work is aligned methodologically and theoretically with ethically framed, locally-grounded projects, our research texts can have unintended consequences, perhaps even outcomes we cannot predict. Based on long-term ethnographic research among Dagara women along the northwestern border of Ghana, West Africa, I discuss the afterlives of several published articles within the community in which the research was conducted. The research itself is grounded in indigenous feminist praxis, and serves to explore and amplify the local feminist projects and modes of empowerment, justice, and solidarity-building that Dagara women utilize. Here, I discuss how this feminist-oriented research was taken up after publication by a male community member who sought to cause harm and disruption to me and to his wife, a research collaborator. I attend to Fassin’s call to “attend to the public afterlife of ethnography,” (2015) by thinking through how research is received by different publics and actors, its purposes in the public sphere, and potential material consequences of research projects. I’m particularly interested in grappling with the dissonance between the feminist methodologies of collaboration and vulnerability, and potential public consequences that cause harm or peril to those same values. Finally, I discuss the ways that gendered violence and regulatory tactics control ethnographic knowledge production. This work opens up conversation about the kinds of violences inflicted upon ethnographers doing feminist research, and upon those with whom we work.

With its propulsive, bass-heavy grooves, emphatic voices singing in call-and-response, and lively choreography, the music of maracatu is a sonic energy that has become a cultural phenomenon throughout Brazil in the last two decades. Primarily heard during Carnival, maracatu is an Afro-Brazilian drumming ensemble that traditionally constituted a male-dominated space, with women’s roles restricted to dancing. I seek to understand how maracatu has recently become a force for social change in the hands of women, physically playing instruments previously prohibited to them while occupying public spaces and taking control of how they want to live. Through an ethnographic case study of Baque de Mina, an all-women maracatu group based in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, I explore how feminine empowerment and resistência (resistance, endurance) is fostered through the music of maracatu. Most scholarship to date has centered on the traditional maracatu communities in Recife and their significance as symbols of Black resistance. More recently, Brazilian anthropologists have highlighted the gradual inclusion of women in Recife’s maracatu groups. My research is a departure from those studies focusing on the uprooted and re-signified meanings of this drumming style. Based on fieldwork conducted from 2022-2023, I investigate 1) how Baque de Mina’s music-making empowers women living in one of Brazil’s most conservative states; 2) what pushbacks are located in these spaces and how women cultivate resistance toward these strains; and 3) how maracatu’s music shifts meaning as it is heard outside of its traditional context.

In 1986, acclaimed female Pakistani singer, Iqbal Bano, sang leftist poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s Urdu poem-song “Hum-Dekhenge”("That day will come") to rousing crowds in Lahore, Pakistan. The performance was secretly recorded, and a smuggled copy circulated in South Asia, bringing it into popular culture as a protest song. Bano’s affective expression was magnified by her subversive signs: She wore a saree and sang Faiz’s poems, both banned in Pakistan during General Zia-ul-Haq's authoritarian rule (1978-1988). The audience’s response was raucous: Shouting, “Inquilab-Zindabad” (long-live-revolution) and cheering for the lines “Every crown will be flung, Each throne brought down” while also keeping time, signaling the audience's participatory role in expressive culture and protest.

This paper is a feminist social biography of the poem turned protest-song, as it crosses geographies partitioned by colonialism, nation-state formation, and inter-state war: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. As a circulating symbol in popular culture, the poem-song has become a sign of affective expression infused with and without subversive politics in South Asia. All translations of ‘Hum-Dekhenge’ into South-Indian languages Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam, and popular renditions were by women poets/performers, with each topical rendition involving conscious literary, political, and musical choices. The performances of the translated song at pivotal political moments managed to mobilize publics and destabilize dictatorial governments. Thinking with scholars, José Esteban Muñoz, and Jill Dolan’s ‘Utopian Performative,’ this paper argues how Bano’s octave jump in performance, stages an aural utopia, as if, pulling us from the dystopian present to the utopian future.