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 ... Read morehow difficult this archival labor must have been.
Gayatri Gopinath
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
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
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
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
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!
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