论文总字数：71342字

摘 要

正如黑人民权斗士Malcom X (1959)所言: “在美国最不受尊重的就是黑人女性”。由于黑人妇女同时面临种族与性别的双重压力,其“战士”就形象尤为重要。而在音乐领域, 歌词文本还包含斑驳和复杂的性别意识和种族意识。从歌词文本中寻找现代黑人妇女的话语, 探索现代黑人女性的视角, 无疑是切实可行并就有现实意义的。

本研究采用费尔克拉夫的批判话语分析的三个层次，本文的语料从碧昂丝的两张专辑中选取的五首歌曲（共1838词）进行层次分析: 描述、解释和解释。

本文共分五章: 第一章是绪论，本部分提出本文的研究背景,说明本文将结合相关的黑人女性主义批评理论,以性别视角和种族视角切入碧昂丝的歌词文本分析。第二章总结黑人女权主义批评与碧昂丝的相关研究文献，指出将填补相关学术空白的尝试。第三章介绍批判性话语分析的三个层次，并选取了碧昂丝五首歌曲的歌词文本作为研究素材。第四章论述了碧昂丝通过这些歌词如何建构她的身份以及确立了她的意识形态，以及她的身份建构和意识形态的确立如何反映了美国当下的社会实践。在讨论阶段得出, 这些都是通过代词“我（I）”、“她（she）” 和系动词“是（to be）” 的共存来实现的, 并通过使用黑人英语中的代码转换 (如 “ain’t（否定）”等) 进行推广。同时，碧昂丝的个人身份和意识形态是通过对非洲裔美国人的社会意识形态来塑造的。第五章总结全文主题, 指出本研究的不足之处, 并为今后相关研究提出建议。

关键词：意识形态；黑人女性主义；碧昂丝；批判话语分析

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements i

Abstract ii

摘要 iii

Table of Contents iv

List of Tables v

Chapter One Introduction 1

1.1 Research background 1

1.2 Research purposes and significance 2

1.3 Organization of the thesis 2

Chapter Two Literature review 2

2.1 Black Feminist Criticism 3

2.2 Beyoncé 4

Chapter Three Research methodology 6

3.1 Research questions 6

3.2 Research material 6

3.3 Analytical framework - Critical Discourse Analysis 7

Chapter Four Results and discussion 11

4.1 Descriptive stage 11

4.1.1 Lexico-syntactical level 11

4.1.2 Discoursal level 15

4.2 Interpretive Stage: Processing analysis 16

4.2.1 Personal identity: a female feminist 17

4.2.2 Ethnic Identity: an Afro-American 18

4.3 Explanatory Stage: Social analysis 18

Chapter Five Conclusion 22

5.1 Major findings 22

5.2 Limitations and suggestions for future research 24

References 25

Appendix I 27

Appendix Ⅱ 39

List of Tables

Table 1: Word classes…………………………………………………………………7

Table 2: Use of pronouns…………………………………………………………

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research background

As Malcom X (1959), the Black fighter for human right puts it: “The most disrespected woman in America is the Black woman”. Since black women face both the ethnic and gender pressures, the image of that fighter is particularly important. As a topic of universal significance, feminism has an important meaning no matter in mainland of China or overseas. Feminism mainly refers to the elimination of gender differences, gender discrimination and gender oppression, with some social and political activities to promote gender equality. Since the 1960s (the second wave of feminist movement), with the active promotion of feminists such as Virginia Wolf, black female writers have raised courage for the majority of black women on the issues of reproductive rights, education rights, salary rights, voting rights, representation rights, and domestic violence. They have challenged the authority of the patriarchal society, gaining more and more vital rights and interests.

Taking the 1980s as the demarcation point, the main task of feminism before the 1980s was to fill in the historical gap caused by gender differences. However, since the 1980s, feminism began to focus on the gender with deeper meaning, political, economic, religious, cultural, ethnic, and other forms of gender, which forms a new part of post-feminism combined with the value orientation of post-modernism. Then feminism also emphasizes the difference caused by race, class, country, age, sexual orientation, etc. Madonna Ciccone, the iconic figure on the American pop music scene in the 1980s and 1990s, demonstrated her power to be free from male control in her sexy, subversive, traditional image. Thus later in American pop music, female performers follows the lead of Madonna’s way based on the physical attributes of gender differences to promote their feminism, which mostly refers to white feminism in the field of music. It was until the black American performers Beyoncé Knowles, Solange Knowles, etc., interpreted how they comprehended their feminism in all aspects of gender, race, class, family that there came the black feminism in pop music.

1.2 Research purposes and significance

This article aims to analyze Beyoncé's music texts using the text analysis model in Fairclough's critical discourse analysis. Discourse analysis is a kind of semantics and linguistic study in a combination of social and cultural perspectives from the traditional text analysis. Through the analysis of discourse practice, another text was produced in conjunction with text analysis, which was finally pushed back into social and cultural practice. Discourse analysis allows us to find the least noticeable effects in many language texts. The ultimate goal of this study is to further promote awareness of gender equality and racial equality by exploring the deep cultural context behind the black female performer Beyoncé's interpretation of her black feminism through the lyrics.

1.3 Organization of the thesis

The organization of paper is divided into five chapters. The research background of paper is discussed in chapter 1, to explain that it combines relevant black feminist criticism, from the perspective of gender and ethnicity into Beyoncé's lyrics text analysis; then chapter 2 reviews the related researches on black feminism criticism and American black female singer Beyoncé; chapter 3 is applied to reviewing Critical Discourse Analysis as the methodology of the paper, within the process of three stages, then clarified research questions and research materials, musical discourses from the lyrics; chapter 4 discusses how Beyoncé constructs her identity and establishes her ideology through her lyrics, and how her construction of identity and establishment of ideology reflect the social practice in American society. The chapter 5 summarizes the full-text theme through conclusions, and points out the deficiencies of the paper, with directions for the future.

Chapter Two Literature review

2.1 Black Feminist Criticism

In the contemporary United States. There are many schools of feminism, such as liberal feminism, Marxist feminism, socialist feminism, radical feminism, psychoanalytic feminism, and post-modernist feminism, which differs from their own different perspectives. However, they are mostly limited to expressing the proposition and tactics of white middle-class women in the United States against gender discrimination and neglect the dual oppression of race and gender suffered by black women into the research category, which results in black feminist dissatisfaction and criticism. In this context, black feminism seeks to explore the problems of black women and to gain the rights of black women by excavating the previous works of black women which are buried before, aiming to establish a new criticism that are different from those of white feminism.

With the rise of the abolitionist movement in the United States, in the 19th century, American black writers, such as Washington and Harris, began to emerge with their literary works that were discussing ethnic consciousness between races after the Civil War which gradually made the black issue a social issue in the United States. In the 1970s, black literature embraced a new period of prosperity in which black female writers got rid of superficial social protests, combined with two traditional and linguistic features, interpreted life meanings from different angles, and established their own status. The early female literary studies mainly focused on natural gender and cultural gender. Then they gradually shifted to gender. In some feminine literary works, there are a large number of frequently used words, such as gender, gender awareness, gender perspective, etc., which replaced the early female discourse.

These changes are the same as those of Western feminism. The introduction of ethnic concepts into feminist literary criticism which is the basis of black feminist criticism. Black feminism criticizes black feminist criticism as an important part of the whole feminist theory and forms a literary theory. Afro-American feminist criticism stood above American feminism with its unique characteristics. It became an important part of American literary criticism. Now it is considered to be the new center of Afro- American literature. (Davis 1981: 256)．

After the development of the second half of the 20th century, black women's literature and academic research have shown vigorous development while the research of black women in academia has also had a greater impact. During this period, the history of black women who were buried with their literature received more attention. Researchers started to study the internal relations of race, class, and gender. The academia of black feminist study critiques social racial prejudice and white bias in women's studies, which then becomes different from mainstream feminism. Women's studies, Afro-American feminist studies, and interdisciplinary studies have developed rapidly during this period. Black female literature, gender studies and other courses entered the American classroom, black female journals increased. The concept of a grand female was challenged.

2.2 Beyoncé

Born on September 4, 1981 in Huston, Texas, Beyoncé described her childhood as a very shy little girl who was not good at talking. When her parents first sent her into a dance class, her parents found out that their daughter was just like being so able to come out of a shell that she just released her true feelings in a real paradise. When Beyoncé was a child, she took part in and won the beauty pagenants which asked the contestants to show the static concept of femininity. It affirms white supremacy, Eurocentrism, Middle-class, heterosexual and patriarchal society illusions towards the perfect woman.

The beauty contest is a phenotypic iteration that creates an image that Susan Bordo (1993) treats as one "that has the hold on our most vibrant, immediate sense of what is, of what matters, of what we pursue for ourselves". To put another way, Beyoncé was very clear at a young age of how to evaluate, satisfy and exceed the expectations of “creating image” through stage performances. And, to some extent, it was Beyoncé’s self-image creation that made it the central narrative of her performance as an artist in public performances, with some certain deviation that origins from her race.

As Aisha Durham (2012:37) asserts:

Through performance, Beyoncé calls attention to intersecting discourses of racialized sexuality and gender, and she highlights the particular constraints that exist for Black girls and women who also want to express their sexuality in a society where Black bodies are always marked as deviant.

That marking is, of course, an off-shoot of the transatlantic slave trade and its practice of using auction blocks as stages where “racial sexual codes” about female blackness were produced, distributed, and redistributed with impacts that persist in the present day (McKittrick 2006:80). I think that Beyoncé's long-term success can partly attribute to her constant reference to and use of the "racial-sexual codes" historically produced at the auction, which stresses the physiological difference of "non-white, non-male".

To some extent, Beyoncé proves what the black feminists have been fighting for a long time - the right to a full career, to have her own body, and to define the scope of her existence as an excellent performer, she has showed her consistency. Whether or not a performer can maintain a high level of accomplishment in decades depends on the increased sensitivity to discipline, skills, and control that will undoubtedly make a substantial contribution to Beyoncé's long-term success and impact. Ironically, these abilities are diluted in her public image, tend to be a racialized "created image", that is, a beautiful, sexual, and very nice woman (Bordo 1993), whose choice can be interpreted, like the counter-propositions pursued in the history of feminist works.

The current scholarship surrounding Beyoncé is extensive and has offered a detailed look at individual expressions used in feminism movements both visually and vocally, but there is a lack of research that interprets the facility Beyoncé used to spread her message on black feminism in linguistic fields. To address this gap in the research, this thesis offers an analysis of how Beyoncé shaped her language to support her blackness as a female.

Chapter Three Research methodology

3.1 Research questions

Studying one’s use of language helps to understand people’s identity and the ideology of the society in which they live. The questions here arise: How do African-Americans use language as members of marginal groups? What kind of identity has been established through the language they use and what kind of social ideology has been revealed? In order to find answers to these questions, the author analyzed the words of Beyoncé, an African-American female singer, in order to understand how she constructed her identity through language and how the society in which she lived shaped her language. The following are research questions.

1) How are lyrics used by Beyoncé to construct her identity?

2) What is the relationship between the constructed identity and the ideology?

3.2 Research material

The research chose lyrics of Beyoncé’s music in her latest two albums Beyoncé and Lemonade as research material for two reasons. The first reason is that the author considers himself as a practitioner of the black subculture for several years, and has access to and knowledge of much of the material he finds useful for his thesis. The second reason is that black female RNB performers such as Beyoncé deliver themselves quite explicitly in their lyrics. Songs in most musical disciplines can contain social comment or autobiographical elements, but in Beyoncé’s music, the artists do it blatantly, rarely with use of metaphor that alludes to the true voice behind.

To be specific, 5 best Beyoncé songs were collected and thoroughly studied. Overall, the first reason I choose these 5 songs is that these lyrics from her 5 songs use lots of informal language and black American slang such as “I’mma”, “ain’t”, which has a certain purpose for her personal statement. From the perspective of musical critics, in the website of Metacritic which aggregates reviews of media products, these two albums have received 85 and 92 metascores based on 34 professional media critics, with two user scores of 8.1 based on 1249 ratings and 7.7 based on 2713 ratings, where these 5 songs are particularly listed as top tracks of their albums. That’s why these 5 songs are chosen as my research materials in the study.

While reading the lyrics, the researcher identifies all the words, sentences and paragraphs that matched Beyoncé’s life as a black feminist. Then the researcher uses a critical discourse analysis method to analyze each lyrics. The researcher also identifies any texts that corresponded with the Afro-American language, informal languages, and American slang terms in the stage of discussion. The textual data (see Appendix 1) used for the analysis are the lyrics of 5 songs, 1838 words in total, written and performed by Beyoncé. The chosen songs are from the two studio albums that Beyoncé released between 2014 and 2016: BEYONCÉ, LEMONADE. As Beyoncé mentioned that her songs were about his African heritage and herself as Afro-American singer and performer, the textual data for this study represents a purposive sample.

The 5 songs, which form the textual data, are as follows (See Appendix I):

01 Flawless [Track 1 - BEYONCÉ]

02 Pretty Hurts [Track 2 - BEYONCÉ]

03 Freedom [Track 3 - LEMONADE]

04 Formation [Track 4 - LEMONADE]

05 6 Inches [Track 5 - LEMONADE]

3.3 Analytical framework - Critical Discourse Analysis

Though both sociolinguistics and systemic functional linguistics have tried to bring social factors into the picture of linguistic study, they fail to reveal the relationship between language, identity and ideology, and it is under this circumstance that another framework was established to study this interrelationship.

Fairclough has made a great contribution to the discussion of the relationship between language, discourse and society. According to him (1989: 18), language is a part of society. The relationship between language and society does not lie in the external sense, instead, it lies in the internal sense. As language is a part of society, linguistic phenomena reflect social phenomena; and social phenomena shape linguistic phenomena. Fairclough (1989: 19) also views language as a “social process”. He distinguishes discourse from text: text is a product and discourse is a process of text production. He further elaborates the difference between discourse and text: discourse is a process of social interaction and text is a part of it.

In addition, Fairclough treats language as a “socially conditioned process” (1989: 20). This process “includes the process of production” (of text) and “the process of interpretation” and is adapted by practices of society. An analysis of text includes analyzing the production and interpretation processes; while an analysis of discourse includes analyzing the production and interpretation of social conditions.

To see the relationship between language, identity and ideology, a critical theory is required. Critical, according to Fairclough (1989), aims to reveal connections which may be hidden from people. A critical study of language is an analysis of social interactions that go beyond their linguistic factors. It is an analysis that aims to find out the “hidden determinants” in the system of social relationships and its possible “hidden effects” (Fairclough 2001: 4). It seems that a critical study is not as scientific or objective as other quantitative studies involving numerical data analysis. However, it must be pointed out that no research is completely objective when discussing the subjectivity and objectivity of social science (Wodak 1989). A critical analysis aims at revealing inequality and injustice by taking sides with the powerless and suppressed, which is a better way to study the interrelationship between language, identity and ideology (Wodak 1989). In seeing language as discourse and as social practice, and in illustrating the interrelationship among language, identity and ideology, Fairclough (1989: 21) built a model – Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) – which stems from a critical theory of language that sees the use of language as a form of ‘social practice’ (Janks 2001: 26). CDA consists of three dimensions – texts, interactions, and context, which correspond to three interrelated stages:

Description – the stage which is concerned with formal properties of the text

Interpretation – the stage which is concerned with the relationship between text and interaction, and which sees text as the product of the process of production and as the resource in the process of interpretation

Explanation – the stage which is concerned with the relationship between interaction and social contex.

The stage of description involves the description of text. Analysis at this stage involves the identification and ‘labelling’ of formal characters of a text. According to Fairclough (1989: 110), formal features have three types of values: experiential, relational and expressive. Experiential value refers to contents, knowledge and beliefs. A formal feature with experiential value is “a cue to the way in which the text producer’s experience of the natural or social world is represented”. Relational value refers to relations and social relationships. A formal feature with relational value is “a cue to the social relationships which are enacted via the text in the discourse”. Expressive – or connective – value refers to subjects and social identities. A formal feature with expressive value is “a cue to the producer’s evaluation (in the widest sense) of the bit of the reality it relates to”.

The phase of interpretation involves interpreting the relationship between text and interaction by discourse participants. It involves the “cognitive processes” of participants (Fairclough, 2001). At this stage, the analyst is “in the position of offering interpretations of complex and invisible relationships” (Fairclough 1989: 22).

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