The derailment of feminism: a qualitative study of girl empowerment and the popular music artist

Abstract

“Girl Power!” is a message that parents raising young women in today’s media-saturated society should be able to turn to with a modicum of relief from the relentlessly harmful messages normally found within popular music. But what happens when we turn a critical eye toward the messages cloaked within this supposedly feminist missive? A close examination of popular music associated with girl empowerment reveals that many of the messages found within these lyrics are frighteningly just as damaging as the misogynistic, violent, and explicitly sexual ones found in the usual fare of top 100 Hits. In fact, this cooption of feminist messages introduces a new danger in that it masks the commodification of feminism into a marketed brand of heightened sexual awareness (Gill 2008) while promoting traditional male behaviors as equalizing acts of power (Kilbourne 2009 ).