Licia Fiol-Matta traces the careers of four iconic Puerto Rican singers-Myrta Silva, Ruth Fernandez, Ernestina Reyes, and Lucecita Benitez-to explore how their voices and performance style transform the possibilities for comprehending the figure of the woman singer. Fiol-Matta shows how these musicians, despite seemingly intractable demands to represent gender norms, exercised their artistic and political agency by challenging expectations of how they should look, sound, and act. Fiol-Matta also breaks with conceptualizations of the female pop voice as spontaneous and intuitive, interrogating the notion of "the great woman singer" to deploy her concept of the "thinking voice"-an event of music, voice, and listening that rewrites dominant narratives. Anchored in the work of Lacan, Foucault, and others, Fiol-Matta's theorization of voice and gender in The Great Woman Singer makes accessible the singing voice's conceptual dimensions while revealing a dynamic archive of Puerto Rican and Latin American popular music.
Industry Reviews
"A welcome addition to the growing field of Latina/o sound studies. . . . [The Great Woman Singer] provides us with a guide to listen anew and in new ways." -- Ivan Ramos * Sounding Out! *
"Something resonates and pulses throughout Licia Fiol-Matta's The Great Woman Singer. . . . Fiol-Matta's attention to the gendering and racialization of the voice in Puerto Rican popular music makes crucial interventions within Latin American and Caribbean studies." -- Summer Kim Lee * Women & Performance *
"Privileging vocality, the sonic over the scopic, Fiol-Matta guides us through a series of questions the very performers spur as social subjects. She also provides a heuristic through which we might listen with more care to glean an understanding of the social web within which 'great' cultural producers operate." -- Leticia Alvarado * Latino Studies *
"This new book makes a number of important interventions into the gendered history of music and performance and, in the process, offers some new and potentially deeply influential formulations. . . . Fiol-Matta changes completely the way we read 'great female singers' but in the process she questions the value of 'greatness,' 'femaleness,' and 'singing.'" -- Jack Halberstam * Current Musicology *
"An investigation that doesn't refuse that wonder of childhood . . . The Great Woman Singer gives us the ample material evidence and imaginative know-how to extend women's vocal influence to record all kinds of different stories." -- Alexandra T. Vazquez * Current Musicology *
"Fiol-Matta models for us a mode of both listening and looking with deep care. . . . She expertly weaves the archival excavation of the lives and artistic output of each of the four figures in the book with a critical theorization of voice and gender, but she does this so seamlessly that we may fail initially to apprehend just how difficult this archival labor must have been." -- Gayatri Gopinath * Current Musicology *
"Rich in detail and theoretically sound . . . the paradigmatic nature of the biographies offered within makes Fiol Matta's work vital not only to students of Puerto Rican music, but to scholars of Latin American and (non-Latina/o/x) US popular music as a whole." -- Maria Elena Cepeda * Centro *
"The Great Woman Singer is a brilliant intervention in Puerto Rican studies that contributes to our knowledge about Puerto Rican culture through gender, voice, and music." -- Frances R. Aparicio * Studies in Latin American Popular Culture *
"Popular music scholarship has sometimes shown a tendency to eschew cultural theory in favor of either archival heft, formal analysis, or colorful anecdote. In her work, Fiol-Matta defiantly bucks this trend, showing theoretical sophistication without abandoning either historiographical rigor or novel appeal." -- Jason Borge * Revista de Estudios Hispanicos *
"Licia Fiol-Matta has written a marvelous exploration of the voice. In the process, she assembles a vocal archive of Puerto Rican performers whose labor is usually relegated to footnotes or cursory mentions. She demonstrates the ways these singers worked through, with and against the nothingness they were assigned." -- Lorena Alvarado * Journal of Popular Music Studies *
