[ad_1]
Lara Malvesi
Barcelona, Oct 8 (EFE).- Journalist Beatriz Navarro reveals in “Dolly Parton. An American Portrait” the thousand facets of the country queen, a figure who has become an icon of feminism, especially for the youngest in USA, who have been able to understand it beyond its apparently superficial and hypersexualized image.
“This feminist generation, what is called the third wave, has much fewer problems than previous ones in combining pure and simple political demands with the defense of femininity or the expression of individuality. And Dolly represents all that” , the author tells EFE in an interview.
Navarro, who has spent half her life as a correspondent for La Vanguardia from Brussels and Washington, says that although Dolly Parton has not taken to the streets with banners, she has practiced feminism “through actions and with her songs,” for that the artist’s life is “a feminist manifesto wearing six-inch heels.”
With her blonde bombshell look, Parton seemed to personalize the stereotype of a woman that feminists wanted to erase and “the activists of her time had a hard time recognizing her as one of their own,” but “at the end of the 80s, Gloria Steinem herself defended “If feminism means that each and every one of us finds our power and helps others do the same, Dolly Parton had undoubtedly done both,” says the journalist.
After his time in the US, Navarro wanted to write a book about the country and first thought about more traditional approaches, he admits, but as he delved into Parton’s life and work he realized that what he really wanted was to explain everything I was discovering about a figure whose biography, far from being a minor topic, sheds a lot of information on recent American history.
“She is a super multifaceted character. You can talk about her from music, from philanthropy – she donated a million dollars for the Moderna vaccine against covid and has a foundation that every month sends free books to thousands of children throughout the US – , you can talk about feminism, class conflicts, racial tensions or religion, among other topics,” says the author.
In “Dolly Parton. An American Portrait” (RBA), the life of the interpreter of “Jolene” and “I will always love you” serves to explain from the bottom up the civil war, the Ku kux Klan or even the Donald Trump phenomenon and his heterogeneous mass of followers.
Navarro also shows his fascination with Parton’s ability to use her hypersexualized and apparently superficial image in an “incredibly clever” way and come up with humor when she is interested in getting away from a touchy issue.
That image of a classic country diva with her lyrics that speak of God but also of the most earthly love brings her closer to the most conservative public, while fascinating her increasingly wide “queer” audience.
Curiously, this dichotomy of the artist, capable of dazzling the “hillbillies” of “deep America” at the same time that she is complicit with feminism and the LGTBI collective, makes her one of the few “glues” of the two Americas at a time of great polarization in the US, says the journalist.
Beatriz Navarro highlights for readers the fact that Parton, raised in a rural area in the Appalachian mountains, in a religious, patriarchal and very poor environment, has stood out as the woman she is today, with an empire that places her between the richest music in the US.
A career that, he says in the book, started after a call from “God” to sing and express himself freely. A “heavenly mandate” that also compels her, curiously, to enjoy her body as if it were not a sin and to be the woman she wants to be, no matter what those who claim the ultimate power to interpret the Bible say. EFE
lmi/hm/bal
(Text) (Archive resources at www.lafototeca.com Code 13870789 and others)
[ad_2]
