Resumen de Women in Leonard Cohen's work
This paper engages in a study of the relationship between popular culture and gender issues in the 20th postmodern society that takes as its point of departure the work of the Canadian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen. It aims at studying the position and role that women execute in Cohen's poems and songs: from a neoplatonic and courtly love scheme where women are viewed as an object of inspiration and worship to an inverted model where female figures lose their connection with the divine and become objects of physical pleasure subjugated to the author's creative power. Questions about the relationships between creativity and desire, art and love and mastery and slavery are intended to be explored in this paper that employs as critical framework feminist theories, Canadian and postcolonial criticism and Marshall McLuhan's theories about art and media. Since Cohen is a pop star, his songs and poems become part of the collective imaginary along with his poetic and male vision about the relationships between men and women. Engaged in a 'victors and victims scheme' popularized by Margaret Atwood in his critical work Survival (1972), Cohen's art becomes the conductive thread of this paper in which popular culture, media and gender questions converge altogether in order to deepen in Cohen's view of women
