Voice and resistance

An analysis of the song "No azara", by La muchacha, from a feminist perspective

Abstract

Songs sometimes surprise us, they carry within them some messages that detonate at certain moments. "No azara", a composition created by Latin American singer-songwriter Isabel Ramírez Ocampo in May 2021, in the midst of a National Strike in Colombia, echoes the protests of a very important sector of society. We have chosen to do a discourse analysis of the song to glimpse and highlight meanings that come into play in the peoples' action and resistance. The analysis will be unfolded from the very path taken by the song, along the seven stanzas of the work, and will be taken into consideration: the construction of the subject of resistance in the lyrics of the song, from the memories of meaning summoned in it facing the socio-historical context (especially some historical-political and cultural aspects of Colombia) and trying to consider as much as possible also the musical and vocal performance. Our analysis is articulated by the fact that we assume a reading of the song from feminism, so that we propose to it a dialogue with the Afro-Latin American feminist thought of Lélia Gonzalez (1988), the perspective of feminism for the 99% proposed in the manifesto of Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser (2019) and, finally, the decolonial reading of the gender issue, from María Lugones (2014) and Françoise Vergès (2020).