Desire, female sexuality, and agency in Sabrina Carpenter’s lyrics: a corpus linguistics analysis

Abstract

This study examines how desire, female sexuality, and agency are discursively constructed in the lyrics of Sabrina Carpenter’s three most recent studio albums (2022–2025) through a corpus linguistics approach. Drawing on a corpus of 46 songs analyzed with AntConc, the study combines lexical frequency analysis, KWIC concordances, and collocational patterns to identify recurring linguistic strategies associated with the expression of desire. The findings reveal that Carpenter constructs female desire through a lexicon characterized by humor, irony, intimacy, and self-awareness, while recurrent terms such as love, want, need, hot, and bed appear in contexts that foreground agency, boundary-setting, and active participation in romantic and sexual relationships. The analysis further suggests that these representations reflect a postfeminist sensibility in which desire is expressed as playful, explicit, and self-determined, while remaining embedded within broader cultural and commercial frameworks. By integrating corpus linguistics with discourse analysis, the study contributes empirical evidence to research on gender, sexuality, and popular music. It also demonstrates the value of corpus-assisted approaches for examining contemporary cultural texts and highlights the relevance of Sabrina Carpenter’s work as a site for exploring current discourses of femininity, sexuality, and agency.