RHYME OF THE GIRLS TIME: A LOOK AT THE FEMALE EMPOWERMENT DISCOURSE IN THE RAP MUSIC FROM NORTHEASTERN BRAZIL
Discourse Analysis; Women's Empowerment; Rap music; Women; Northeastern Brazil.
It is common knowledge that the discourses, which are extremely heterogeneous in their ideological and/or artistic forms, paint a beam of concerns peculiar to their space-time; and that such discourses not only present those concerns but also question them. Given a 21st century plunged into the interactive agility of communicative vehicles, the enunciates that sustain artistic discourses are full and increasingly turbulent sources of questions and answers. From that dynamism, rap songs echo in their characteristic expressivities, by demarcating a particular aesthetic-poetics, as well as by stimulating debates that rethink the boundaries inherited from gender identity cleavages. Thus, from the links between inventiveness, rhyme and music with the living day-by-day experiences, this research is born; it crosses theoretical and practical confluences to arrive at the unfolding of a greater proposition: to think the representation of northeastern women - here inscribed by the states of Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba and Pernambuco - within the hip hop culture as far as rap is concerned as a discursive practice. The research approach is based on the qualitative (CHIZZOTTI, 2005) and interpretative (MOITA LOPES, 1994) paradigm, linked to the field of Applied Linguistics. This work aims to problematize the discourse of female empowerment in its interdiscursive relations and in the contemporary configuration of the enunciative scenes (MAINGUENEAU, 1997; 2006; 2008; 2013) in three rap songs by the groups Caboclas MC's (RN), Donas (PE) and Sinta a Liga Crew (PB). In order to comply with this proposal, I adopt a vast theoretical-methodological framework that combines French Discourse Analysis with studies developed in the spheres of gender issues, power relations, notions of empowerment, changing identities and the hip hop movement focused on the rap element.