Claiming feminist performance spaces within Brazilian música popular: The poetic promenade Dita Curva

A twofold ethnographic examination, this article gathers narrative accounts from a particular group of women who coalesced in 2017 on the coastal city of the Brazilian north-east, Recife. Described as a ‘poetic promenade’ between women songwriters and poets, ‘A Dita Curva’ came, indeed, as a poetic response during a wave of strong conservatism in Brazil. Three questions summarize the inquiries brought forward in this article: In which ways are the ditas questioning gender performativity within gender roles? How do they adapt and adopt feminist creative processes? How can these processes be applied to formal settings of music education? The article also situates Brazilian popular music within the country’s different regions as an attempt to challenge global notions of what Brazilian popular music constitutes. In this article, the term ‘women’ relate to persons self-identified as such, independently of how they were assigned at birth; analyses of behaviours of women are not linked to biology but to societal contexts, and gender is understood as neither binary, static nor fixed. Lastly, the discussion of gender is one seen through the lens of intersectionality, meaning that analyses of gender, race and class do not happen in an isolated manner but as inseparable categories. To write about the dita curvas is, in a way, to write about me. I share in many ways their existence within popular music and this field. I was born and raised in the same city where they have convened, and as a female artist and creator myself I have encountered similar barriers they have sought to identify and rebel against.