Masculinities, passion and violence in the lyrics of the Cuarteto Cordobés (1976-1990)

The Cuarteto Cordobés is regional type of popular music characteristic of Córdoba (Argentine Republic). Every weekend, thousands of people attend different dance clubs throughout the city where working class youngters meet to be part of a ritual in which they are constituted as heterosexual men and women. In those rituals, cuarteto musicians stand as models of successful masculinity. They do so in the performance itself but also in their songs. It is a trait of those songs that the enunciator assumes the voice of different characters that are marked by passionate states. These are males who suffer, love, experience anger, resentment, jealousy, sexual desire, etc., with great intensity. These passions establish the central elements in the construction of standardized masculinity models, while also serving as prelude to socially legitimated actions by males, among them, violence against women. This paper analyzes the way in which the lyrics of the cuarteto songs legitimize certain forms of violence against women, in the period between 1976 and 1990; and the transformations brought on at that time by Chébere and La Mona Jiménez in the discursive paradigm of the cuartetero field.