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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Sexuality
Vol. 8:2 (2019) ► pp.139–165

Discourses of (hetero)sexism in popular music

The legacy of Blurred Lines

| Nottingham Trent University, UK
| Sheffield Hallam University, UK

This article analyses interview data to explore how participants negotiated discourses of (hetero)sexism in relation to the controversial pop song Blurred Lines. Our previous work, based on questionnaire data, interrogated interpretations of Blurred Lines (Handforth, Paterson, Coffey-Glover & Mills 2017) and showed how participants drew on discourses of sexism in their responses. Several participants experienced significant conflict in their interpretations, and here we focus on these more complex interpretations, considering the “small stories” (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008) identified in follow-up interviews with participants. Individual narratives acted as mechanisms through which participants linked Blurred Lines to wider issues such as rape culture, drawing parallels between these and their own lives. Following research in queer linguistics (King 2014; Leap 2014; Motschenbacher 2010) our use of thematic analysis, corpus linguistic tools and narrative analysis highlights the various subject positions that participants negotiated in their storytelling, and how these positions both echoed and challenged normative understandings of gender and sexuality.

Keywords: heterosexism, popular music, queer linguistics, discourses of sexism, corpus linguistics, narrative analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Studying reactions to sexism and popular music with queer linguistics
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Analytical framework: Corpus-assisted discourse analysis
      • 3.1.1Thematic analysis
      • 3.1.2Corpus linguistic tools
      • 3.1.3Narrative analysis
      • 3.1.4Combining quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Discourses of (hetero)sexism
      • 4.1.1Objectification
      • 4.1.2Unequal power relations
      • 4.1.3Rape culture
    • 4.2Narrative analysis
      • 4.2.1Retelling memories of Blurred Lines
      • 4.2.2Public and social spaces
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.18007.han
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