Masculinity, Violence, and Deindividuation in Argentine Soccer Chants: The Sonic Potentials of Participatory Sounding-in-Synchrony

Eduardo Herrera specializes in Latino American and Latin musical practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Herrera is currently working on a book titled Elite Art Worlds: Philanthropy, Latin Americanism, and Avant-Garde Music. In this work, Herrera explores the history of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (1962–71) as a meeting point for local and transnational philanthropy, the framing of panregional discourses of Latin Americanism, and the aesthetics and desires of high modernity. Herrera’s coedited volume with Alejandro Madrid and Ana Alonso-Minutti, titled Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America, came out in 2018 with Oxford University Press. This volume discusses a wide variety of artistic and musical traditions from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latinos/as in the United States conceived and/or perceived as experimental. Herrera is currently working on an ethnographic project that studies collective chanting in Argentine soccer stadiums. His fieldwork with fans of several teams pays attention to the way that moving-and-sounding-in-synchrony might frame the interpretation of symbolic and physical violence. Herrera’s work shows how the participatory nature of stadium chanting contributes to the construction of masculinities that are heteronormative, homophobic, and aggressive, often generating a cognitive dissonance with the individual beliefs of many of the fans.