I feel ambivalent about lauding Aretha Franklin's achievements. True, she has torn down a lot of barriers for women in the music industry and made a butt load of money, but she just screams "mammy" to me. She's always been overweight and overpowering, and asexual because of it, and yet she's considered one of the most iconic black women of music. To me, in some ways she's shaken up the industry. In other ways, she's reinforced the status quo as a black woman (representative of black women everywhere) who's reached dizzying levels of success, yet has remembered her place and stayed in it--as a black woman who lacks the sexual potency of "true womanhood" (unlike most non-black pop tarts and long-standing industry divas). And we know that being an asexual woman in a sexist society comes with a whole host of complications that usually culminate in that woman being marginalized in some way (nothing new there). Don't get me wrong--powerful women are awesome, as are women of all shapes and sizes. I want women to feel comfortable in their skin and that they have the ability to shape the world. But I feel that, in Aretha's case, as with many other black women in the public eye and in the general public, being asexual is as much a subjugating factor as being hypersexualized.
Also, I don't like her voice. I will say that if you take her voice out of most of her songs from the 60s and 70s, though, they become really beautiful songs.