Participants
Language is a social action in which we produce meanings that negotiate our place in the world. Just as we can participate in any other action, we are participants in language. However, as participants, we can be present or represented (when others talk about us or when we talk about others). The same happens in the lyrics and the video. Here we describe the participants of the video/lyrics as linguistic action.
A central participant we find is Rebeca Lane. She sings the lyrics and participates with her voice, and we know her voice indexes her as “Ni Una Menos” is her song. This is a very important detail as we analyze words with an acoustic materiality that is created by the voice (we won’t analyze the music, as we only take the words from the lyrics, but the music adds to the meaning).
In the lyrics, Rebeca mentions several identities that we can identify as represented participants. With the lyrics, we see how she establishes sameness and differentiation with different groups by semiotic processes of indexicality and ideology. She represents herself (“no soy pacifista”, “agresiva”, “soy … valiente”) aligned with two groups: women and feminists. Within those groups, women includes different identities that are iconized in the song, such as victims (“20 mujeres violadas”, “las otras hartas de andar con miedo”, “la otra que fue abandonada con un hijo”), ancestors (“bisabuelas”), healers (“curandera”), children (“la niña de 9 años”, “una niña sin derechos”), and sisters (“todas mis hermanas”). In her identification with women she indexes feminist subjects (“somos miles”, “no tenemos miedo”, “estamos en resistencia”, “ya no somos indefensas”,“estamos enojadas”, “estamos preparadas”).
In the lyrics, there is differentiation in relationship to “macho” men. The lyrics index specific men who are abusers (“el hombre que la amaba realmente la odiaba”, “un delincuente me dejó el pezón marcado”, “la violó su hermano”) and then iconizes them as “macho” (“ningún macho de esos”). There is also differentiation concerning the religious elite (“el clero”) as they do not defend the rights of raped children by not allowing them to get an abortion and thus obligue them to become mothers. The lyrics also mention humanity in general (“ningún humano se hizo presente”) but in differentiation with feminists, as these humans didn’t act to protect women’s rights.
The last participant of the lyrics is a plural “you” addresee (ustedes, which appears only in the morphemes of the verbs: “díganme loca histérica y exagerada”, “no nos acusen de violentas”). The song addresses “you” as a possible group of participants external to the lyrics that do not align with the feminist identity performed in the song.
Moving to the video, one would expect to see Rebeca; however, her body is not present at all. We only have one written reference to her: her name appears at the end of the video, just before the credits (Figure 1).
Instead of Lane, we have other participants. First, we see the bodies of many different women in videos from documented Ni Una Menos demonstrations that appear at the beginning and the end of the video, working as a frame for all the images. We also have images of these events at different moments of the video. We also have images of other feminist demonstrations, that might not consider themselves ni una menos, as we see banners in English. In all these images we see emplacement for the participants of the demonstrations: they are on the street and sometimes other elements help us locate them. In this way, participants index Ni Una Menos demonstrations and become represented participants.
Then, we have 5 participants who lip-sync the song and also develop certain symbolic actions. We also have children in a part of the video (Figure 5), but they do not lip-sync. These participants were recorded specifically for the video of the song and they only have a color background, so there are almost no semiotic elements for emplacement. The video intertwines these participants, with those of the fragments of documented manifestations.
To understand our relationship as viewers with the participants, an important issue to mention is that in the video we generally see the lip-syncers on demand, which means that they are directly interacting with us as viewers and that the distance we have with the represented participants is mostly personal, with close-ups (especially while lip-syncing) or medium shots (such as in Figure 5). For the documented events, we see long shots that allow to see the dimensions of this mass manifestations. In these way there is a mix between the demand of the intimate shots and the offer of the impersonal shots that, still, work as an argument about the collective identity.
Finally, it is important to mention that we do not find men in the video recorded for the song. It would not be possible to know if men are participating in the documented demonstrations. In the same line, we don’t know if there are trans women, people who identify as non-binary or with other identities.
Silvia Rivera Alfaro has created the research and the website. The text and drawings are under the license of Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.
The video is copyright of Rebeca Lane. The Creative Commons license does not apply to the video and images from the video. They are used on this website with the artist’s permission.