Are the tears over? Cultural responses to domestic violence. A case study

Abstract

In this paper, we study El Huecco’s song “Se acabaron las lágrimas” (The tears are over) with a double objective. On the one hand, we intend to understand how songs, and other cultural manifestations, can be used as a response to given social problems, such as gender-based violence. On the other hand, we intend to identify the discourse strategies which are used in this song to oppose domestic violence, and also to see how these discourse strategies are helpful to establish an emphatic relationship with the audience. To do so, we adopt a multimodal approach which understands the song as a unitary discourse made of different communicative modes (lyrics, music and image, at least in this case). We combine that multimodal approach with Critical Discourse Analysis with the objective of explaining how the identified discourse strategies are used to oppose commonly-held beliefs about the role that women, and men, have in society.