Beyonce and Gender Roles Essay

Gender Roles in Beyonce: “If I Were a Boy”

Nowadays, many popular music can be heard by millions people. The singers tend to create more songs in order they can be accepted by the public worldwidely. One of the indicators to make a good song is through the theme as represented toward its lyric. It is because people now can think critically toward something especially to get the meaning of a song. Mostly singers create their songs based on the reality within society. It is not surprise recently we can find a song using social issues as the theme. One of the songs which contain social issue coming from Beyonce, a R&B singer, entitled “If I Were a Boy”. This song has become her first single in the album “I am…Sasha Fierce” which was released in November, 2008 (http://www.mashpedia.com/I_Am..._Sasha_Fierce). Therefore, this paper will analyze further the lyric of Beyonce’s song “If I Were a Boy” which responds to the gender issue in United States.
      This song is about the feeling of a girl when she wants to be a boy. The lyric is closely related to the gender issue because there are many phrases or sentence which represent the gender role of man. As Beate Krais (2006) stated that ‘the construct of the social role is, as is apparent in the use of the term “actor”, a specifically sociological variant of the paradigm of rules and norms as the mechanisms that transform individual action into social action” (Krais: 2006, p. 125). It indicates that the role of individual in social life is based on the social paradigm which constructs the action in society. Therefore, in this paper I will argue that in the album “I am… Sahsa Fierce” and the single “If I Were a Boy” Beyonce demonstrate her dissatisfaction to be a woman and her critics to male domination toward female. Thus, we can see how a song can be used to raise the gender issue in society.
The first verse in this lyric can be analyzed as the starting point to reveal the desire of Beyonce to be a man. She sings...