INSIDE GENDER DOMINATION IN ROMANIAN CONTEMPORARY GIPSY SONGS
INSIDE GENDER DOMINATION IN ROMANIAN CONTEMPORARY GIPSY SONGS

Summary/Abstract: The paper is a gender approach to the texts that accompany the contemporary Gipsy music in Romania, the so-called, derived from a Turkish term, “manele.” It is a research of a wide spread cultural phenomenon belonging to popular culture in Romania. The study attempts to find out what is going on in rural Romania, mainly at the level of the lower class people, as far as man – woman relations are concerned. The corpus of the study is constituted of the texts present on eight different audio records, belonging to different authors. The texts of the songs are genuine in the sense that they are composed by the singers themselves and are indicated by them at request. In their large majority, these productions speak about how women look like, what purpose women serve for and what men do in order to value and individualize themselves. It is all about a discourse of masculine overself-evaluation, as a strategy of imposing their power. The research points to what is going on at these levels of society in terms of gender discrimination, different sexroles attributed to men and women (favouring men) as the texts reflect a deeply patriarchal mentality.

• Details
• Contents