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Vila, Pablo, and Pablo Semán. Troubling Gender: Youth and Cumbia in Argentina's Music Scene. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011. vii, 217 pp., notes, references, index. ISBN 978-1-4399-0267-7.
In this work, Pablo Vila and Pablo Semán examine gender relations in Argentina through the prism of cumbia villera (lit., "shantytown cumbia"), a type of music performed in bailes or bailantes (dancehalls) throughout the Greater Buenos Aires region. The authors were heavily influenced by Frances Aparicio's seminal book, Listening to Salsa (1998), which tackles the issue of gender in Latin America through a textual analysis of salsa music and interviews with both male and female listeners. Similarly to Aparicio's work, which can be read in dialogue with Troubling Gender, Vila and Semán present and interpret the voices of male and female cumbieros (cumbia dance attendees). However, in contrast to Aparicio, the authors go beyond a textual analysis of cumbia villera to examine the spaces where this music is played, arguing that the metalinguistic cues of the mostly male cumbia villera musicians and the male and female cumbieros hint at meanings that cannot be gleaned solely by the text. Vila and Semán correctly argue that the lyrics and metalinguistic cues constitute a dialogue that must be acknowledged in a thorough analysis of gender relations.
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