Les Voice in Rap as Art to Promote Rights and Gender in Vietnam

Proceedings of The 4th Global Conference on Women’s Studies

Year: 2022

DOI:

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Les Voice in Rap as Art to Promote Rights and Gender in Vietnam

Ly Quyet Tien

 

ABSTRACT: 

In recent years, Vietnam has witnessed the striking appearance of Les music into the local entertainment activities. A series of songwriters as M.E.O, Diby, Ken By, Trang only, Lil’s, etc., have written and sung rap songs which express their fight for visibility, identity and sensibility. Their lyrics are largely about girls’ love: intimate feeling, a sense of lesbian destiny, unashamed sexuality, utmost indignance, and power of love. These songs encompass all human feelings such as passion, sorrow, anger, frustration and happiness. Composed for the lesbian community, this music is typically Vietnamese in the way the music flows and styles thereby paving the way to the coming out of an unnoticed and forgetting gender in society. The paper examines the background into which Vietnamese Lesbian rapping was born and develops: its styles, themes as well as its own particular and similar features with world LGBT hip hop music. The paper also studies its identity, diversity in the local culture and its revolutionary role in the promotion of the welfare of the native queer citizens by furthering the LGBT rights movement.

keywords: art, culture, lesbian, music, rap