‘Fierce Girls, Flower Guys’: The Discursive Representation of Gender Identities through English in K-pop Lyrics
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Abstract
K-pop music has enjoyed growing popularity in the global market over the years, resulting in research on the industry in various sociocultural aspects. Among these is its high relevance to gender norms and identities, which has been approached in analyses of several K-pop music components, including corporate practices, costumes and choreography. However, little attention has been paid to the language of its lyrics. At the same time, a huge literature on discourse and gender, which is constituted by studies on a wide range of text types, seems to fall short in research on lyrics as a gendered discourse. The present study therefore seeks to fill these gaps by analyzing English parts of K-pop lyrics performed by girl groups and boy bands to investigate how male and female identities are represented to international audience. For this purpose, contemporary K-pop lyrics that contain English, launched in 2023-2024, were collected. The English parts of the data were processed by corpus software to extract common words that constitute the texts. It is found that first- and second-person pronouns and determiner are among the top-10 most frequent lexis in the English parts. They were analysed qualitatively in terms of transitivity and collocational patterns. Their textual patterns point to the ways gender stereotypes are debunked in English parts of the given lyrics, e.g. women represented as powerful, assertive, confident, and taking control of the relationship and men as desperately love-struck, vulnerable and submissive.
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