“Funky fresh dressed to impress”: A corpus-linguistic view on gender roles in pop songs
Since the beginnings of modern popular music, listening to pop songs has been one of the major pastimes in Western countries, raising the question how popular music contributes to the shaping of beliefs and attitudes in general and gender roles and stereotypes in particular. While there
is a considerable body of research concerning the depiction of men and women in pop music videos, the lyrics of pop songs, so far, have largely been neglected as a viable source of data. On the basis of two corpora of contemporary pop songs by male and female artists, respectively, the present
paper explores discourses of femininity and masculinity as represented in the lyrics of pop songs. It is shown that although the two corpora behave surprisingly similarly in some respects, the way in which male and female artists refer to themselves or to the opposite sex might contribute
to the consolidation of unfavourable roles for women.
Keywords: corpora; gender roles; pop songs; stereotypes
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: 01 January 2015
- Access Key
- Free content
- Partial Free content
- New content
- Open access content
- Partial Open access content
- Subscribed content
- Partial Subscribed content
- Free trial content