A Feminist Stylistics Analysis of Sofia Isella’s Song “The Doll People”

Abstract

Language in popular music actively constructs and challenges gender ideologies; however, feminist stylistic studies have predominantly examined mainstream artists whose feminist messages are relatively explicit and declarative. Consequently, the linguistic mechanisms through which indie music articulates feminist critique, particularly through irony, ambiguity, and the simultaneous coexistence of objectification and resistance within a single text, remain largely unexplored. This study investigates how linguistic features in The Doll People by Sofia Isella (2024) construct and resist representations of women within patriarchal discourse. Employing a qualitative descriptive approach, the lyrics were analyzed using Sara Mills’ (2002) feminist stylistics framework at the word, phrase/sentence, and discourse levels. The findings reveal that women are constructed as fragmented and consumable objects through sexualized lexical choices and transactional syntactic patterns, while resistance is articulated through pronoun shifts, collective identity construction, and the narrative progression from objectification to liberation. Thus, the song functions simultaneously as both a representation of and a protest against patriarchal discourse, demonstrating that feminist critique in indie music operates through irony and contradiction rather than through direct declaration. This study contributes to feminist stylistics by extending Mills’ framework to indie music and demonstrating its effectiveness in uncovering ideological complexity in texts where objectification and resistance coexist, thereby providing a replicable model for future analyses of gender representation in contemporary independent music. This study demonstrates how close linguistic analysis of popular cultural texts can reveal the ideological mechanisms through which patriarchal norms are constructed, naturalized, and challenged in everyday cultural life.