Сила и слабость: динамика репрезентации гегемонной маскулинности в русскоязычном рэпе

Журнал социологии и социальной антропологии. 2024. Т. 27. № 1. С. 103–138.

Zhuchkova S., Бойченко А. Е., Smirnov N.

In public and academic debate, rap is often presented as one of the most aggressive music genres, depicting violence and cruelty in various ways. One of the reasons for that is rap’s social background. It emerged in the criminal area of New York first created by the deprived Black population. Using the notion of hegemonic masculinity, various researchers have shown how rappers manage to dominate others by demonstrating misogyny, homophobia, and aggression towards other artists in their lyrics. However, a recent study of Russian-language rap that analyses several thousand texts of this genre, showed that Russian-language rap might be different. It shows topics related to emotions, feelings, and reflection, i.e. features that do not fit into the typical image of rap’s hegemonic masculinity. Using the results of this study and an extended corpus of texts, the present research poses questions about how these images co-exist in Russian-language rap. This research attempts to reveal what and how exactly Russian rappers express and experience emotions, and how the content of their songs changes over time. The results show that Russian-language rap is much more characterised by a «reflexive» image associated with the expression of feelings and emotions. Moreover, if in the early periods the main source of emotions was reflections about one's path and destiny, over time they are replaced by feelings and emotions about romantic love and break up. At the same time, the increasing prevalence of masculine topics has also been noticeable in recent years. These are topics that, in our opinion, express a new image of hegemonic masculinity. This «new» hegemonic masculinity establishes male dominance using wealth, drug use, and popularity among women, but not aggression and cruelty, that characterised rap’s more traditional masculinity practises.

Keywords: topic modeling, интеллектуальный анализ текстов, тематическое моделирование, hegemonic masculinity, гегемонная маскулинность, Анализ динамики, Russian rap, dynamics analysis, text mining, русскоязычный рэп