Women’s Empowerment and Confidence in Pop Music: A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of Little Mix’s Lyric Song “Change Your Life”

Abstract

Empowering women in home, the workplace, the market and the community require building self-confidence which is a challenging matter. It is not easy to inspire people to have a better sense of self-worth and endeavor better personal, social and economical life. Pop music nowadays, can inspire people and basically women to change and have better life. This paper intends to investigate women’s empowerment and confidence in Little Mix’s pop lyric song “change your life” through the feminist critical discourse analysis approach. This paper aims to identify the linguistic concepts of women’s empowerment and their ideological perspectives. The problem under investigation implies that women’s issues are still of interest to study in different disciplines but instead of focusing only on how women are portrayed and represented in different genres such as reports, essays, movies, network and music; the direction has changed to identify the linguistic concepts that empower women. Therefore, different transitivity processes are intended to address women’s mentality and emotional appeal which reflect in turn different social ideologies. The data involve the analysis of Little Mix’s band lyric song “change your life”. The paper is conducted through the qualitative research approach based on an eclectic model including Lazar’s (2005) “Feminist Critical Discourse Perspective”, Fairclough’s (2003) Three-Dimensional Model and Halliday and Hasan’s (1985) Systematic Functional Linguistics model. The study concludes that Pop music depends on using three types of transitivity processes including material, mental and relational in order to improve women’s mentality, confidence and desire to create change in their life.