Sorted and Scripted: Genre, Gender, and the Semantic Structure of Feeling Rules in Popular Music

Are women in popular music really less angry, or have they simply learned, genre by genre, to sound that way? This paper addresses that question through a computational analysis of 29,573 song lyrics spanning five genres, five decades, and two gender categories. Drawing on Bourdieu's field theory and Hochschild's feeling rules framework, we find that genre is the dominant structural force shaping emotional expression, explaining 17–18\% of the variance in anger and disgust scores, effect sizes that dwarf those of gender or decade. Gender operates not as a suppressor of emotional intensity but as a sorting constraint: female artists are systematically underrepresented in anger-dominant emotional territory, yet those who occupy it express anger at intensities indistinguishable from their male counterparts. When genre and emotional register are held constant, however, male and female artists draw on categorically different thematic vocabularies to enact the same emotion, hinting towards a semantic layer of gendered expression that persists even after sorting is accounted for. Female anger expression has risen steadily across five decades, suggesting not assimilation but expansion. Gendered constraints on emotional expression in popular music are structural, consistent, and slowly loosening.