Doctorado en Artes y Humanidades · 2026

El perreo en Medellín y su función social en la (re)definición de la identidad en las mujeres

This doctoral dissertation analyzes the social function of perreo in Medellín as a performative event that enables processes of identity (re)definition among women. Through an interdisciplinary, qualitative, and situated approach, I seek to understand how perreo articulates norms, knowledges, and ritualized practices that allow women to embody ways of being and relating that are usually sanctioned in everyday life. In this study, I develop an original methodology that I call Ethnoperreo. Within the framework of focused ethnographies of dance practices, this methodology includes six participant observations in four nightclubs, interviews with DJs, and six focus groups with women who practice perreo. Through its implementation, I identified two main forms of interaction: playful perreo, which is freer and more spontaneous, and serious perreo, which constitutes a form of performativity. In the latter, the leading role—occupied by women—becomes a position of sensual knowledge/power, from which the interaction is directed and an eroticism distributed across multiple zones of the body is made visible. Although perreo reproduces heteronormative frameworks, it also operates as a space of fertile ambivalence, where women resignify their femininity and experience the body as a medium of shared pleasure, rather than solely as an object of control or commodification. In this sense, perreo in Medellín allows for a temporary dislocation of certain normative mandates, enabling situated forms of freedom and recognition that complicate conventional notions of empowerment from a situated and decolonial perspective.

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