Methods
The research “Ni Una Menos: A Collective Identity in Rebeca Lane’s Rap” is qualitative and exploratory; it is informed by a multimodal approach (Bolander & Locher, 2014). It approaches the phenomenon by taking into consideration the cultural and capitalist contemporary formation (McEllhinny, 2011). I will take a realist approach (Cameron, Frazer, Harvey, Rampton & Richardson, 1999), acknowledging that we can only approximate a part of the phenomenon due to the complexity of the feminist movement and its diversity as well as due to the complexity of the multiple modes that participate in the construction of meaning and how they interact with the audience online and offline.
Within sociolinguistics, I will work with a glottopolitical and feminist linguistics perspective. For glottopolitics, I understand an approach towards language that reflects upon its object of study taking into consideration our place as researchers in the political arena, as well as the complex interaction of the political within the language and the linguistic within politics (del Valle, 2017; del Valle & Arnoux, 2010). For feminist linguistics, I understand a contextual approach that is not essentialist when it comes to gender identities and their intersections with race, ethnicity, class, and others while understanding these characteristics as historical institutions with normative discourses (Cuba, 2019). The mixture of these two perspectives is what can be understood as glottofemism.
Corpus
The corpus of this project consists of a single rap song: Ni Una Menos by Rebeca Lane. Nevertheless, it includes two different elements: the lyrics of the song and its official video.
Selection
The selection of this specific song is the result of a meticulous search of feminist songs available on YouTube, which was conducted in March 2021. The search consisted of feminist songs available on YouTube that were published after 2015, which is the year when the first Ni Una Menos took place. The main criterion to search was the relationship of the song to the feminist movement. Other criteria were: artist, year, number of views, topic, and place of creation (country). I organized the songs by the number of views, thinking this was a quantitative criterion for the audience reached by the song; nevertheless, the qualitative criteria had priority to make the final decision on the corpus. The results included many different genres, such as norteña music, cumbia, reguetón, rap, and pop. It is important to mention that the number of views on YouTube does not mean that this is the order of the most popular feminist songs because many videos have multiple versions on YouTube. Additionally, we should not ignore that the songs are available on other platforms, such as Spotify.
From the songs, I selected Ni Una Menos by Rebeca Lane (song released in 2017, official video released in 2018). This decision responds to qualitative criteria. First, I considered the relation of the song to the movement: although the fifth song in the number of views, this is the first one in our list with the explicit name Ni Una Menos, which relates to a specific slogan of the social movement. Second, I am interested in the artist and the place from where she speaks: Lane explicitly mentions Guatemala in the lyrics, and, as a Central American, I am interested in prioritizing the voice of a regional artist to see how her music relates to other territories. Finally, among the different genres, rap has currently a central place in feminist music in Latin America.
Delimitation and description
After choosing Rebeca Lane’s Ni Una Menos, it is important to point out that the corpus consists of two elements: the lyrics and the official video, which lasts 3 minutes and 28 seconds. After selecting the song, I reviewed some data to describe and contextualize the song and the artist in the digital medium where we can find this song. Accorgint to SoundCharts (consulted on January 20th, 2022), a data service for music, YouTube was the social media where Lane counted with more followers (over 317,000), followed by Facebook, Instagram, and Spotify. SoundCharts also showed that her music on Spotify was listened to in different places across the world, including almost all the Americas and several countries in Europe; the 5 countries with more listeners were México, Chile, Spain, Argentina, and Colombia.
To describe the song Ni Una Menos, I will start with the number of views, which was 1,791,860 at the time of this search. People could think that this is a small audience; nonetheless, if we consider the conditions of production (Kaltmeier and Raussert, 2019; Levy, 2019; Kolenz, 2021) and the material conditions of the creative industries in Central America, we understand that Lane’s reach is praiseworthy. At the moment of this review, Ni Una Menos was Lane’s most listened-to song on Spotify, with 2,602,101 listeners to January 20th, 2022 (the artist had 91,720 monthly listeners to that date). When it comes to YouTube, the platform Social Blade indicates that, to January 20, 2022, this was the artist’s second most viewed video, with 2,092,084 views. Additionally, it was the most commented one with over 5000, being the only one with more than 100 comments at the moment of this review (Figure 1). This implies that it might be the song of the artist that has caused most interactions at the moment.
To complete this description, it is important to notice that Ni Una Menos has produced around $1.0K and $8.4K to Lane to January 20th, 2022. Nevertheless, it would be important to determine how much the artist personally profits from this amount. This affirmation becomes most prominent when we take into consideration our literature review that pointed out her counter-hegemonic production methods and that her music has a narrow audience (Kaltmeier and Raussert, 2019; Levy, 2019; Kolenz, 2021).
Data collection and analysis
As the corpus of this research consists of a communicative artifact that puts together a song with its video, it is necessary to take a multimodal approach to the analysis. Taking a multimodal perspective goes along with the perspective on language and gender that we take in our theoretical framework (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004). The semiotic artifact we are analyzing is a video. For this research, we have selected to focus on the verbal mode and the visual mode.
To collect the data, I looked for the lyrics online and created a revised version of them. I downloaded the video to be able to analyze it. Then, with a .vtt file, I synchronized the lyrics transcript with the video. For the analysis, I used Atlas.Ti version 23.4.0 for Mac to code the video and the lyrics using the different categories I created according to the theoretical framework. The tools offered by the software made it easier to see the relationships between the results.
For the verbal mode, I focused on indexicality pointing to people and places. Particularly, for people I focused on the first-person singular and plural markers with pronouns or, as it is done in Spanish, with the morphemes of person and number on the verb, as pronouns can be omitted. Additionally, I took into consideration phrases or words that could be icons or symbols concerning feminism. The verbal mode appears in the sung lyrics and also can appear in other spoken or written forms in the video. I also take into consideration other semiotic processes and tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz and Hall, 2004) if the need emerges from the analysis.
For the visual mode, I centered on the body and clothing as modes. This is how bodies are used as a semiotic resource presented systematically to build meaning. In line with the verbal expression of singular or plural, I analyzed if the body is presented alone or in co-presence with other bodies. For this, I will understand that there is a possible interaction in each scene, thus it is important to analyze the frames and see if there is one participant or multiple participants, and what kind of relationships exist. Considering viability, I will not analyze phrases (sequences) of movement, or specific gestures. I also analyzed the clothes as a semiotic system linked to the bodies.
In the analysis, other elements of the visual mode were considered when they work as indexes, icons, and symbols concerning places. I focused on the relationship between these two modes for the creation of multimodal meaning. For place semiotics, I take elements of the other modes that relate to specific places or territories.
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- Kaltmeier, Olaf y Raussert, Wilfried. (eds.) (2019). Introduction. Sonic politics: music and the narration of the social in the Americas from the 1960s to the present. In Sonic Politics. Music and Social Movements in the Americas. New York: Routledge
- Kolenz, Kristen A. (2021). A Central American Mestiza Consciousness: Rebeca Lane, Interruptive Choreography, and Rehearsing Change in the Borderlands. Feminist Formations 33(3), 71-94
- Levy, Jordan. (2019, April 10). Guatemalan poet Reca Lane discusses artistry, activism. University Wire; Carlsbad. New Jersey: Rutgers University
- McEllhinny, Bonnie. (2011). Silicon Valley Sociolinguistics? Analizing Language, Gender and Communities of Practice in the New Knowledge Economy. In Duchene, Alexandre & Heller, Monica. (eds.). Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit, pp.230-260. New York: Routledge.
Silvia Rivera Alfaro has created the research and the website. The text and drawings are under the license of Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.
The video is copyright of Rebeca Lane. The Creative Commons license does not apply to the video and images from the video. They are used on this website with the artist’s permission.