Romanticization of Women's Inner Struggle and Its Resistance in Kodaline's Moving on

Abstract

This study examines the forms of feminist resistance and the representation of women's inner struggle in the lyrics of Kodaline's song Moving On. Using a feminist literary criticism approach, this qualitative descriptive research applies liberal feminism and post feminism as the main theoretical frameworks. The primary data is the full lyrics of the song, analyzed through close textual reading to identify passages depicting women's emotional pain, healing process, and romanticization, as well as subtle forms of resistance. The analysis reveals two major findings. First, the lyrics contain four forms of feminist resistance: resistance through reinterpretation (reading the song as a story of female resilience), resistance through agency (acknowledging the woman's ability to rebuild her life), resistance through subversion (undermining traditional gender stereotypes), and resistance through silence or absence (the woman's unspoken voice exposing the one-sidedness of the male narrative). Second, the song consistently romanticizes women's inner struggle by reducing the female ex-lover's complex emotional journey to an aesthetic and nostalgic backdrop for the male narrator's melancholy. Her pain, healing, and personal growth are filtered through the male gaze and transformed into poetic elements that serve his emotional needs. This study concludes that even conventional breakup songs can simultaneously reinforce and subtly challenge patriarchal ideologies, and that feminist readings of popular music remain essential for cultivating more equitable gender representations.