The return of God, of religion and, apparently, of nuns is announced. Because Rosalía appears with her hair covered on the cover of her latest album and claims to practice voluntary celibacy and is more spiritual than ever. As in so many other phenomena of our postmodern culture, the important thing here is not what the artist is or is not, but what he implies and the multiple interpretations that can be made of his work. Is a woman with her hair covered by a white scarf and her body imprisoned in a straitjacket a nun? Where is the nun in everything the Catalan does? In the wealth in which he lives, in the hypersexualization with which he presents himself in public and in the videos in which he expresses his newly discovered spirituality? Neither abstinence, nor modesty, nor renunciation of the body, I see none of this in the singer, but my astigmatism prevents me from ignoring all those contradictions. If Rosalía is good at anything, it’s cultivating ambivalence, so effective today in broadening audiences. This seduces the most modern and also attracts neoconservatives who believe in superior and invisible creatures. It’s music, it’s art, it’s the reinterpretation of images and symbols, it’s what anyone who dedicates themselves to creation must do.
The problem is when this reappropriation of certain elements turns out to be deceptive, ignoring its more murky and harmful contents. Rosalía is now a nun and the girls will want to go to a convent, but does anyone really know what a nun is? Well, what is represented on an audiovisual level in these animated fantasies is one thing and another is what they seem to deliberately ignore: that we are talking about women subjected for a long time to the structure of male domination that is the Church. I worked for a few months with a couple of older, real sisters, and their lives are not even remotely reinterpretable: “we only had two options”, one of them told me, “marry a man or marry God”. And to marry the Almighty was to accept a life of service to the Almighty mosens for those who cooked and cleaned even then, when they limped clinging to a cart. I perceived in them lives of self-denial, confinement, renunciation and painful repression. The surprising thing is that those who two days ago were encouraging us to be sluts are now telling us to become nuns. Let’s see what awaits us in this world that seems more like vapor than liquid, an evanescent gas.
