Ritual Transgression and Grotesque Realism in 1990s Rock Music. An ethnographer among the Bersuit

CITRO, SILVIA

Youth Identities and Argentine Popular Music: Beyond Tango

Palgrave Macmillan.

Lugar: New York; Año: 2012; p. 19 - 40

The hypothesis underlying this work is that in the Bersuit concerts, a peculiar sexed body close to the esthetics of the popular festivals Bajtín (1987 [1930]) called "grotesque realism", became one of the prevalent means to incarnate the difference and transgressions of both the rules of bourgeois morals of the adult world and the neoliberal policies of the 1990s. Although several authors have analyzed the role of the grotesque in central countries (Kohl 1993; Halnon 2004, 2006), my point here is that in the case of Bersuit and their fans, this style took distinctive elements from the local culture and used them in their confrontation with the establishment by means of a provocative language of gender and sex.