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اجراگری مردانگی توسط زنان هنرمند در موسیقی لاله‌زاری / The Performance of Female Masculinity in Lalehzari Music

The Arabic-infused Iranian popular musical genre, Lalehzari (or Kucheh-Bazari), was well liked amongst Iran’s underclass in the sixties and seventies. During that time, the taste for Lalehzari music clearly indicated a lower social class and was associated with debauchery, even criminality, and a lack of social consciousness. This project explores ways that the female Lalehzari performers rejected the features of conventional femininity imposed on women through their performances of female masculinity. In so doing, they claimed their presence in the underclass and underworld male urban spaces previously inaccessible to women. This project treats music as performance and explores the ways in which the Lalehzari female singers treated their songs as scripts and staged them in pre-1979 Revolution commercial cinema (Film Farsi). It also investigates how Film Farsi scripts and fans reacted to the separation of masculinity from the male body. It asks, in what ways did female Lalehzari singers’ performance of female masculinity cite, valorize, and also mock and destabilize the masculinity of their male counterparts? How, in other words, did musicians, performers, and their audiences construct and construe the fictions of gender in the Lalehzari music scene?

May 15, 2022 11:30 AM in Pacific Time (US and Canada)