help with my Uni assignment - apparently Im being too much of a feminist

[OnlyWantsOne]

I have to do a language analysis research project

this is my hypothesis

Aim;
I propose the analysis of song lyrics from a specific group / genres of music. I plan to do this to prove whether specific genres have biased lyrics regarding women. Predominantly, I aim to determine whether the "rap" industry may possibly be classed as patriarchal, or whether women' s issues are addressed in a responsible manner.

but apparently I am not analysising it enough from a linguistic PoV

can any one help?

linguistically speaking this is the study of the construction of the language. You could do this but rather then look purely at the feminist issue look at the sentance construction and whether there is links between the manner in which the language is delivered and the image that is constructed by the listener.

eg. does rap and hip hop type of music, predominated by men have a shorter less conventional lyric construction when compared the more rmb/ballardy type stuff that women generally produce.

Not sure how much help this will be but it might help focus you .... or just miss the point.

just seen your other thread in student parents. reading the full op of other thread not sure that my post is of any use. sorry.

oh, thanks any hooo

Sounds like an interesting assignment - good luck with it (sorry not qualified to offer advice!)

Only Rap? There are all sorts of "ownership" assumptions in popular music. Not to mention the ubiquitous use of "babe" or "baby" when talking about a woman. Grrrr!

Not helping much, I suspect!

welll yes that could help

I bassically need a new hypothesis because the one I have i hate

OK, I'm not an academic so apologies if this isn't helpful. From your post, it sounds as if you're looking at the actual language used to prove that certain popular music genres are patriarchal? If my understanding is correct, though, I think you may be in a situation where the music is simply a microcosm of the entire issue of patriarchy. Although rap music is particularly offensive (with it's habitual reference to "ho's" etc - says the woman who's never really listened to it) I think all popular music is influenced by society as a whole and thus reflects the patriarchal attitudes around us. I refer again to the continual use of "baby", "my baby" etc. That said, there are plenty of songs sung by women (no idea if they wrote them) that refer to "my baby", "my man" soooo is it patriarchal attitude or does the romantic notion of love assume ownership of the beloved?

can you look at some social constructionist stuff and incorporate that into your essay?

One perspective on misogyny in rap music would be if it is more common in comercially succesful music than rap culture as a whole. This is then about the mostly white male audience, and how they choose to perceive black men and what kinds of music a mainly white male select from the range of music produced by black people.

This has been found in pornography - where the male is black and the female is white, there is more violence to the female than when both people are white. The target audience is white men.

So the level of misogyny is selected by white men choosing that black men will be represented in a very damaging and stereotypical way - it is not about misogyny being more common amongst black people.

I have no experience in this subject but if you are interested in whether women's issues are being addressed responsibly, it would make sense and be most interesting to look at how women are representing themselves, particularly as rap music has a historical association of giving voice to the oppressed (in terms of race). So I would look at the work of female rappers, and explore whether women's hip hop can be thought of in terms of voicing resistance within a notoriously male dominated genre characterised by excessive performances of heterosexual masculinity. I would discuss songs in which female rappers appropriate and subvert the sexist language of their male counterparts, as well as looking at songs in which women rappers go against the usual structures and language of male rap.

HTH. Fascinating sounding topic though. good luck!

Ooh randomama you took the words right out of my mouth, (and rearranged them into a better order). I remember seeing a video by a female singer on youtube on a very common subject matter in "popular" rap - something about wanting oral sex if I remember rightly - and the comments were just disgusted with her. Looking at female rappers and how they use their work to explore misogyny would be fascinating.

She's probably not a real rapper (know nothing about rap) but can I put in a good word for the now-overlooked Ms Dynamite, some of her lyrics were brilliant at combatting misogyny and violent rap appealing to sad white boys.

Do read the Deborah Cameron if you haven't already. I wonder if the issue is that your hypothesis is rather broad and hard to test.
Something quantifiable that's relatable to linguistic and not just gender-political questions would be ideal. Something syntactic, looking at how often male/female characters are subjects or objects of active verbs (and therefore implied female passivity)? Or something more in the discourse analysis way of things?

I know what you mean Dittany, we've got Tom Jones to thank for "Delilah" after all, that's a bit of a kareoke (can't spell) favourite isn't it?

BUT I don't think it's necessarily racist - for one thing you don't know about the ethnicity of the OP or her background (unless I've missed it somewhere), plus there are plenty of white rappers to look at. It's just "black music" in origin.

I think (fwiw ...I actually know very little about the subject matter but know a bit about constructing academic research) the problem is perhaps in the thing you say you wish to determine: whether the rap industry is patriarchal or whether women's issues are addressed responsibly.

first you set up an "either/or" which is not really a very tight way of constructing a research question. It's also not very well defined - what are "women's issues"? what does it mean to address them "responsibly"? It's also possibly flawed (might it be possible for a patriarchy to address women's issues responsibly?). and lastly (and here I really don;t know) is it possibly just not focused enough on linguistics/language?

what I wonder is whether that you use rap to test a theory about language - perhaps there are theories that suggest predominant use of certain types of language in a particular (cultural?) arena has the effect of excluding women from participating in that (cultural) activity. or has the effect of women taking on particular roles within that arena?

ultimately it amounts to pretty much the same thing - is there a link between the language and patriarchy? - but ties it to theory and defines patriarchy a bit.

sounds very interesting.

a related topic could be homophobia in dance hall music. there's certainly awareness of it but less than misogyny in rap.

I agree that analysis of the language itself doesn't seem to make up a big enough part of the hypothesis. If you wanted to focus more clearly on the language you could pick out something like: "how does the language of mainstream rap portray violence against women as light-hearted/mainstream?" which involves looking in more detail at things like active/passive voices etc etc. Just an example but it puts the spotlight where it should be.