Chapter published in:
Developing New Identities in Social Conflicts: Constructivist perspectives
Edited by Esperanza Morales-López and Alan Floyd
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 71] 2017
► pp. 182–202

Chapter 9. The (re)construction of gender roles in the genre of song

In search of female empowerment1

This chapter follows recent trends in CDA and adopts a constructivist, cognitive and multimodal approach to discourse analysis. I focus on the study of songs to analyse how discursive mechanisms are used to fight commonly held beliefs about female identity. The songs selected, taken from a wider corpus, attempt to fight domestic violence and/or try to empower women. In some of them, we can observe how a new identity is constructed while in others we observe that gender stereotypes, and the patriarchal beliefs upon which they are based, are still subtly maintained. In most cases, we can see that the songs are characterised by vague discursive constructions which are only meaningful in context.

Keywords: constructivism, text-world theory, cognitive linguistics, critical discourse analysis, songs, multimodality, mental spaces, gender studies
Published online: 26 July 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.71.09fil
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