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8. Patriarchal Synecdoches: Of Women’s Butts and Feminist Rebuttals
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c h a p t e r e i g h t Patriarchal Synecdoches Of Women’s Butts and Feminist Rebuttals La Sonora Matancera, Cuba’s most famous septeto (septet) whose singers included Daniel Santos, Celio González and Celia Cruz, popularized a hit called “Las muchachas” (The girls) during the 1940s and 1950s.1 Analogous to the Beach Boys’ hit “California Girls,” “Las muchachas” maps women’s bodies as national or continental geography. Whereas in “California Girls” the Beach Boys celebrate the free-spirited, outdoor character of West Coast Anglo women, the Sonora Matancera expresses a male predilection, not without its own alternative nationalist overtones, for the Cuban woman from Havana, Matanzas, or Santiago. The enumerative structure of these lyrics presents an ideal (national) body that is a composite of the various best “parts” of the female types from various Latin American countries. Illustrating the pervasiveness of the synecdoche in musical textualizations of the female, the ideal woman in “Las muchachas” represents the continental body of Latin America, embraced by the polyphonic subjectivity of a Don Juan or a Daniel Santos— “I love them all.” Indeed, after naming a preference for Cuban women— “No, no, pero cuando veo a una habanera toda la sangre se me alborota. Y si yo veo a una matancera entonces sí que boto la pelota” [No, no, but when I see a woman from Havana, I get agitated. And if I see a woman from Matanzas, then I really get excited]—the male singing subjects conclude that they want to “dance” with them all. This pluralizing of Woman (Woman as multiplicity) not only maps the geography of a Latin male gaze and desire, but most centrally, it delineates a Don Juan subjectivity whose desire and libidinal economy are never static nor totally satisfied. “Las muchachas” illustrates the predominance of the male gaze and masculine desire in Afro-Caribbean music and in salsa, one that fetishizes the woman’s caderas (hips) as a signifying locus of (often political) pleasure. d i s s o n a n t m e l o d i e s / 142 The mulatta, in particular, has been constructed as an antinomy to the Beach Boys’ ideal of a blonde, thin California girl. Certainly, as Puerto Rican writer Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá exemplifies in his beach chronicle titled “El veranazo en que mangaron a Junior” (The great summer when Junior was arrested), the aesthetics of the ideal body in Latin America is culturally and racially marked.2 In a narrative voice that resonates with salsa’s phallocentric language, Juliá chronicles a beach festival in Punta Salinas, Puerto Rico, and establishes el gufeo (humorous signifying) as a communal ritual based on a culture of male pleasure, gaze, and desire. Both observer and participant, the narrating subject, a journalist, positions himself as a voyeur in the utopian and carnavalesque space of a salsa festival at the beach. The underlying mirada definidora (defining gaze) structures and constructs this text as a sexual performative act, contiguously relating musical and erotic performance. In one passage the author describes the musical performance by Junior Moonshadow as a series of gestures of phallic penetration, ejaculation, and aggression that equate sex and music as performance (not unlike Eddie Santiago’s provocative movements of penetration staged throughout his singing appearances). The text itself traces the male desire through gaze into an erection and an orgasmic discourse that concludes in an almost postorgasmic descent. As the narrator ’s defining gaze identifies “tres ricuras de hembras con buenos muslos y mejores nalgas” [three tasty females with good thighs and even better butts],3 the sounds and discourse of Cuban rumbas serve as intertext to the male experience. Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s fixation with the female “butt,” inscribed throughout his work in narratives like “Una noche con Iris Chacón,”4 is reaffirmed in the lyrics of salsa and Afro-Caribbean musical traditions, whose songs and cuts continue to position the Caribbean mulatta as the embodiment of rhythm, movement, and erotic pleasure. Orquesta Aragón’s “Tan Sabrosona,” authored by Rafael Lay and Richard Ergües, is structured around a male voice/gaze that addresses the mulatta woman: “mi negra no te molestes si te dicen sabrosona / por ese andar que tú tienes / tan tremendo y retozón” [my black woman, don’t get upset if they call you tasty / because of the way you walk / so tremendous and playful].5 Clearly, this visual erotic fixation on the hip and...