‘Caro’: Bad Bunny and the symbolic rupture of gender

Abstract

In early 2019, Bad Bunny, a leading urbano latino artist, released the music video to his song ‘Caro’. As a musical track, the song can easily be heard as standard Latin trap fare that centres the ostentatious masculinity of its protagonist. The video, however, definitively disrupts gendered/generic norms by layering the performances of Bad Bunny and Jazmyne Joy, a model featured in the role of Bad Bunny. Their dual performance of a single persona, deploying both drag and ventriloquism, challenges the perceived boundedness of gender and genre by calling into question the boundaries of the body itself. Gender and genre are treated here as conceptual sisters that afford the rupture of their respective boundaries in the elaborative act of performance. Thus, in ‘Caro’, the theories of Judith Butler and Georgina Born are generatively exemplified and mutually illuminated, affirming the contingency and performativity at the centre of both.