Gender, Borders and Feminism: Gata Cattana's Banzai in Contemporary Rap

Abstract

This article presents and analyzes three key phenomena to understand the Spanish feminist rap boom in the last decade of the 21st century: the eclosion of a new school built on the enlightened and radical roots of Gata Cattana’s thought (Córdoba, 1991-Madrid, 2017), the re-reading of the "marginal masculinities" which constitute the archetypes of rap and the transcendence of the concept of banzai for feminism. This opens new reformulations in a changing social, cultural and political context in which her successors innovate with the joint construction of their peculiar subaltern epic, either from the escapism of Las Ninyas del Corro, in Onna Bugeisha (2021), through which the materialization of Gata Cattana as a heroic warrior was projected; or, from the introspection of Carmen Xía in La Herida (2022), which puts forth rage and historical memory as the germ of the revolution.