The self-representation of Galician identity in contemporary popular music: deperipheralization, gender subversion, and extractivist critique

Abstract

We try to analyse the self-representation of national or gender identity among current offers in galician music, between ludic and serious, between antagonisms and stereotypes. At the neotraditional tendency can be observed a self-representation from a heteronomous perspective, nearly a subordinate looking, following Bhabha, as it was conformed under the hegemonic subject look. It seems an exotic, mysterious incarnation of an archaic Galician stereotype or beside the image promoted abroad by institutional advertisement. Galicia, as a mixture between tradition and progress, understood as an anthropological comfort.  Beside the comfortableness from the modern issues, from a kind of possibility of domestication that it implies, the epic element is there, focusing the elements on the territory to discover or domain. Opposite this, we can see other post-ironic proposals. 

We try to analyse the self-representation of national or gender identity among some offers from popular Galician music during the last two decades, finding some spaces between stereotype and antagonism. The selection is focused over a more alternative or underground sphere, where the will for self-representation seems to exist and where the individual or collective subject, conformed by different stratifications or sections, seeks to imagine itself. We understand that the deconstruction implies, on a more or less explicit way, the destabilization of that reality that was called deperipheralization.