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Theoretical Pretexts / 121 Theoretical Pretexts Listening (as) Woman  What follows here and in the fourth part of this book is an exercise both in Listening Woman and in listening as women, concepts based on critical discussions of women as readers informed by the convergence of feminist studies with reader-response theories.1 In the context of popular music, however, reception does not embrace visual or verbal reading practices only but partakes in signifying practices through both individual and collective acts of listening, singing, and dancing. Any approach, then, to the ways in which salsa music textualizes the feminine through song lyrics cannot remain divorced either from real audience responses nor from other aspects of this music as sociocultural praxes. While “reading Woman” provides an initial conceptual framework for this study, it proves insufficient in its exclusively verbal dimension. Thus, it is imperative to translate this term, which emphasizes the verbal and the literary over the sonorous and aural, into a sociomusical act. The conscious, ambiguous ungrammaticalness of Listening Woman—it should read “listening to women”—suggests subtexts not only of previous scholarly discussions of issues of representation and textualizing practices but, moreover, about women as receptors and producers of meaning(s). At first sight Listen(Read)ing Woman evokes the “images of women” methodology, a “resolutely thematical” criticism that, during the 1970s, proved “most forceful as a critique of the phallocentric assumptions that govern literary works.”2 Yet many analyses of this sort were, in practice, based on the simplistic assumption that texts “reflect” reality, thus leading to merely psychological or descriptive commentaries on female characters. In their attempts to uncover women’s treatment as literary objects, many feminist critics implicitly reproduced this treatment, a flaw that was also, unfortunately, quite common in the context of Latin American scholarship on women.3 As recently as 1988, Neyssa Palmer’s analysis of female characters in the Puerto Rican narrative of the 1940s and 1950s exemplifies the dangers of this approach: Todas estas vidas son trágicas, responden al mundo brutal e injusto que encuentran a su paso, sin otra alternativa que la resignación, pero no hay en ellas degradación moral alguna. Por el contrario, el dolor las enaltece. A través del proceder que develan como personajes, percibimos el profundo conocimiento que posee González de la conducta y reacciones que observa la mujer puertorriqueña frente a la adversidad. [All of these women’s lives are tragic; they respond to the brutal and unjust world around them; they have no other choice but to resign themselves, although there is no moral degradation. On the contrary, pain exalts them. Through their behavior as characters, we perceive González’s (the author’s) profound knowledge of the behavior and reactions of Puerto Rican women in the midst of adversity.] (my emphasis)4 The emphasized statements above illustrate the ways in which the hermeneutic practice elides the text as a literary construct and insists on a direct correspondence between fiction and reality, exercising what Toril Moi has termed “excessive referentialism.”5 Indeed, what Palmer does not take into account is that female representation and by and large any representation results from textualizing a myriad of factors such as gender, race, class, and ideology. She does not find a problem in defining a fixed gender identity for women as well as for men; she participates, in fact, in fixing women’s identity, notably by naturalizing women’s emotions and even ascribing patriarchal values to those emotions (e.g. “Pain exalts them”). Yet as a critical strategy, Listening Woman can supersede the simplistic representational assumptions that the above quotation illustrates. In reading women’s representation in Latin popular music, Listening Woman entails “both the ways in which women are figured . . . and the ways in which such figuring gives representation its force by repressing female desire.”6 As Pamela Caughie implies, “Reading Woman” is synonymous with “reading what is not known in literature or theory,”7 that is, reading the silences and filling in the gaps created by a male-centered perspective and phallocentric discourse. Thus, Reading Woman, as critical tool, always already implies an active agent within the (female) reader or listener who constructs meaning out of a text in differential ways; this dialectical relationship surfaces in the possible double readings of this signifier (woman as object, as in reading representations of women, and woman as subject, as in woman who reads). While it is a given that gender makes a difference in...

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