Abstract

RUIZ, María Julia. Grow old in childhood. Masculinity, old age and identity in Lo niego todo by Joaquín Sabina. Recial [online]. 2022, vol.13, n.21, pp.36-62.  Epub Sep 16, 2022. ISSN 2718-658X.  http://dx.doi.org/10.53971/2718.658x.v13.n21.37845.

In this article, we will investigate how, in the lyrics of the songs on Joaquín Sabina's Lo niego todo, album and in his promotional statements in the media, the singer-songwriter reconfigures his image as an author’ and problematizes his posture, the one that has accompanied him throughout his authorial project to elaborate a new position: that of a masculinity in decline that, in its aging process, returns to the terrain of childhood to exercise resistance from a childlike position. This declining masculinity is manifested from the image of otherness, since the aging subject needs to rearrange his identity and reconstitute it. The body of the old man, in his loss of sexual potency, power, hierarchy, exposes the mandates of an impossible masculinity. The studio album Lo niego todo and the autopoetic book that accompanies it, Incluso la verdad show the mechanisms and operations of exclusion towards old age in the masculine gender, while offering different ways of settling and circumventing those pre-established mandates in our culture to learn to “grow old without dignity”.

Keywords : old age; childhood; authorial project; lo niego todo; Joaquín Sabina.