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Start Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Upon her arrival on the music scene in 2006, Taylor Swift was christened the unofficial “good girl” of country and pop music. Amidst an American cultural and political obsession with teen abstinence, Swift’s supposed moral goodness was primarily built through the chaste demureness of her music and attire. After Swift had a tense encounter with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian in 2016, however, Twitter declared a #taylorswiftisoverparty, and Swift went into hiding for a year. She released Reputation in 2017 and re-emerged with a newly sexualized persona, clad in bondage gear and declaring the old Taylor “dead.”
This paper examines the cultural production and reinvention of white, feminine sexual subjectivity through Taylor Swift’s music and through fan responses to her work. I examine several types of Taylor Swift fan sites--the forum section of two popular Swift-focused websites, the r/TaylorSwift subreddit, and comments on official Taylor Swift YouTube channel videos--at three different timepoints in Swift’s career in order to trace the development and deconstruction of the Swiftian “good girl.” I argue that Swift’s shift from indicting “bad girls” for their supposed sluttiness in the Speak Now era to identifying with the “other woman” in Folklore both reflects and enables important shifts in young women’s sexual subjectivities over the past fifteen years. Fundamentally, however, this paper asserts that the deftness with which Swift can move between “good girl” and “bad girl”, as well as her ability to interrogate those categories, is specifically enabled by heteronormative whiteness.
“There is no such thing as a slut”: Creating and destroying the “good girl” in Taylor Swift’s musical persona
Upon her arrival on the music scene in 2006, Taylor Swift was christened the unofficial “good girl” of country and pop music. Amidst an American cultural and political obsession with teen abstinence, Swift’s supposed moral goodness was primarily built through the chaste demureness of her music and attire. After Swift had a tense encounter with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian in 2016, however, Twitter declared a #taylorswiftisoverparty, and Swift went into hiding for a year. She released Reputation in 2017 and re-emerged with a newly sexualized persona, clad in bondage gear and declaring the old Taylor “dead.”
This paper examines the cultural production and reinvention of white, feminine sexual subjectivity through Taylor Swift’s music and through fan responses to her work. I examine several types of Taylor Swift fan sites--the forum section of two popular Swift-focused websites, the r/TaylorSwift subreddit, and comments on official Taylor Swift YouTube channel videos--at three different timepoints in Swift’s career in order to trace the development and deconstruction of the Swiftian “good girl.” I argue that Swift’s shift from indicting “bad girls” for their supposed sluttiness in the Speak Now era to identifying with the “other woman” in Folklore both reflects and enables important shifts in young women’s sexual subjectivities over the past fifteen years. Fundamentally, however, this paper asserts that the deftness with which Swift can move between “good girl” and “bad girl”, as well as her ability to interrogate those categories, is specifically enabled by heteronormative whiteness.
Bio
Adriane Brown is Associate Professor and Director of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Augsburg University. Her work uses feminist theories of gendered, racial, and sexual subjectivities to explore productions of the self in diverse media environments ranging from Taylor Swift fan communities to cosplay contests at comic conventions. Her work has previously been published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Formations, Introducing the New Sexuality Studies, and Networking Knowledge.