The Representation of Gender Discrimination in Taylor Swift’s Music Video The Man. A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

In a society dominated by men, women have always been objectified and regarded as inferior to men. Gender discrimination has been present in the daily life of women for a very long time. The role of mass media has been crucial to shape society’s mind in believing men to be better than women. The emergence of new technologies and new means of communication have provided an effective tool to raise awareness on this discrimination. The aim of this paper is to show how the issue of gender inequality is represented in Taylor Swift’s music video The Man. In order to do so, the most important scenes of the video portraying daily life discriminatory situations were selected. Afterwards, both a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis and a Multimodal Conversational Analysis have been carried out with the objective to see how the different modes of communication i.e., speech, visuals, gaze, and gestures come together to create meaning. The findings of the analyses conducted on the music video show that gender discrimination is still a major issue on the everyday life of millions of women and that there is still much work to do in order to put an end to this problem.