This article examines musical genre as an anonymous collectivity's discourse. According to this understanding, music powerfully participates in gendering and its contestations by non-hegemonic social groups. Considering socially attached connotations to certain rock subgenres, feminine challenge strategies to the positions assigned to women are implemented through women's appropriation of roles traditionally performed by men. Such procedures are illuminated by the confrontation of Brazilian singers Marina Lima and Erasmo Carlos' renderings for Mesmo que seja eu [Even if it's me], a song by Roberto Carlos and Erasmo Carlos. Relativizing the notion of authorial autonomy, the article subscribes to the poststructuralist perspective that the artists themselves are discourses of a collectivity, and concludes with a consideration of the role of music as a social discourse in the production of new subjectivities, and in the restructuring of social order.
musical discourse and gendering; subjectivity and cultural criticism; poststructuralism in music