Religious aesthetics and feminist containment in Rosalía: the disciplining of excess between cooptation and resistance

This article examines the disciplining of ‘feminist excess’ in public reception and Rosalía’s aesthetic repositioning in the context of the emergence of her album Lux (2025), situating her reluctance to explicitly identify as a feminist in a cultural scenario marked by the resurgence of religious youth movements, the advance of anti-feminist tendencies, and post-#MeToo disputes over the conditions of visibility and legitimacy of feminism. Based on a corpus of 40 journalistic pieces published in Spanish media, the article applies a model of critical discourse analysis based on the operationalization of the concept of excess in two analytical dimensions: as an epistemic device that organizes the politics of excess between discipline and resistance, and as a dynamic category linked to the redefinition of the thresholds of the intelligible. From this perspective, the article proposes to address containment not only as a technology of regulation, but as a space in which the limits of the intelligibility of feminist political activism and its discursive representation are renegotiated.