Growing Up With Miss Americana: Taylor Swift Fandom and American Girlhood (December, 2020)

Note: this presentation was completed in late 2020, which is several eons ago in the field of Swift Studies.

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Taylor Swift is a polarizing figure, which is an interesting power to find in someone whose main detractors’ chief argument is that she is not particularly substantial or important. Like many artists currently, she thrives on direct communication via social media with fans, which fuels intense fandom, particularly on the sites Twitter and Tumblr. Swift is well known for engaging directly with fans, and “throughout her career [has] cultivated a close relationship with her fans, connecting with them on a personal level when possible, frequently using social media and gifting gestures to facilitate these interactions” (Galloway 242). The relationship is reciprocal and has led to a career based on invoking emotional responses and affections in the largest possible number of people. In addition to being a massive celebrity and reliable moneymaker, as a songwriter Swift has experienced growing up in the public eye while simultaneously making her living writing about her experiences growing up. Taylor Swift has been a celebrity and performer since age 16, when her self-titled first album was released. Now, at age 30, Swift is a powerful, wealthy adult with eight extant studio albums of songs describing the experience of growing up female.

Fandom of Swift is a loaded identity, because her fans have become a pop cultural shorthand for flippant, shallow, unserious young women, almost exclusively categorized as “teenage girls,” or (inexplicably) “13-year-old girls.” Not only Swift’s work, but her identity as a celebrity and role model, as well as the identity of her fans are tropes that change in response to how her image of perfected American femininity has presented at given times in the last decade and a half. Taylor Swift fans, called “Swifties,” aren’t unusually fervent in their fan activity compared to fans of other artists, but the stereotype of the Taylor Swift fan is sticky – a teenage girl with only trivial thoughts and concerns. Historically, this makes Swift fandom a very uncool, unsophisticated, and derided identity, comparable to that of Twilight fans. In 2018, after Swift declared herself a supporter of LGBTQ+ equality and of the Democratic Party, Mike Huckabee mocked Swift fans as “13-year-old girls,” over whom he assumed Swift would have specific influence. He seemed unaware that Swift herself was 28 at the time and had been very famous for 12 years. If every one of her fans was somehow 13 when she released her first album, in 2018 they would have been 25 – well above the legal voting age. But the reality of Swift fans being adults was not what Huckabee was interested in. He cared about dismissing fan response to Swift (including the ability to be influenced or moved to action by her political stances) by claiming that Swift fandom is restricted to those who are female and very young, and (ergo) who do not matter.
It is challenging to describe Taylor Swift fandom because by definition of her success, Taylor Swift songs are everywhere. To consume Swift, one does not have to deliberately try to consume her. One does not have to identify as a Swift fan in order to enjoy her music or contribute commercially to her success. When I speak of Swift fans – those who love her particularly and with energy, focus, and devotion – I am speaking of a group that is not monolithically female, but that identifies with an artist who is extremely and consciously feminine and feminized. Swift’s sartorial and musical aesthetic has evolved over the course of her long career, but in every era, it has been romantic, confessional, and emotional. She cultivates and represents qualities that are gendered female, and this makes Swift fandom a female gendered practice.

Much of the dismissal of Swift’s fans as young comes from how young Swift herself was when she became a famous songwriter and performer. Releasing her debut album Taylor Swift at age 16 and being an artist who performs songs she chiefly writes herself, it is unsurprising and appropriate that her music was about the things that she had the experience and capacity to care about at the time. Fitting neatly into the expected feminine behavior of the world of country music, “Swift’s age and background meant that she could cultivate the image of a bubblegum-country cherub fairly easily. Just by existing, she checked so many boxes: in addition to being extremely young, she was blond, white, wealthy, and thin. On top of that, she liked to strum her guitar in poufy outfits, to sing her own longing lyrics about backyard romance, and to giggle and go along with whatever her interviewers wanted, crafting her goody-two-cowboy-boots image like a pro” (Knibbs). It is true that a large part of Swift’s early fanbase was young women her age, and the experience of listening to Swift songs, and on her early albums especially, “Swift says and sings sentiments that her fans might have difficulty conveying but that they feel deeply” (Galloway 249). By giving language and narrative to the nearly universal experiences of insecurity, romantic frustration, and infatuation, Swift began her career by giving young female fans a pretty, successful proxy by whom to see themselves represented.

With her 2008 album Fearless, Swift became an inescapable celebrity and also, at age 18, cemented what would become the shorthand for her brand and the stereotype of her fans. Thirteen songs from the album spent time on the Billboard Top 40 charts, underscoring that while she may have been singing about teenage romance in vintage ballgowns, Taylor Swift was at the same time making a great deal of money and contributing to the musical environment of a good portion of the humans on planet Earth. The Fearless era cemented the common conception of Swift as preoccupied with romance, influenced largely by the Romeo and Juliet-themed song “Love Story” and its accompanying music video. Additionally, the song “You Belong With Me” inspired a critique that stuck long after both the artist and her subject matter matured– that Swift sees herself as an underdog victim as well as a fairy tale damsel in distress. I argue that these two identities are valued lenses through which her largely young, female fanbase understands their own experience. The cult of perfect femininity does not allow for unabashed confidence, so framing a romantic narrative as a fairy tale or an underdog story lets fans see themselves as protagonists while still obeying the social rules of femininity. Particularly in the young fans who were her peers when her career began and reached its zenith, Swift provided culturally sanctioned and pleasant way to explore feminized roles in romantic self-narratives.

The mainstream condescension toward young female Taylor Swift fans lies largely in the assumption that the things this demographic cares about – fashion (self expression), romance, friendships, and resolving insecurities – are not serious or important. It is a dismissal of pleasure for pleasure’s sake, as well as a rejection of the idea that romantic love – an experience and impulse that in men has historically launched wars – is a trivial preoccupation when experienced by young women. The fans are not unaware that society dismisses their priorities this way, and “fandom, with its potential to create pleasure, form connections with others, and inspire creativity [helps many girls] deal with change, uncertainties, and anxieties…in addition to the more general tribulations of adolescent life” (Herrmann 81). Swift’s myriad branding partnerships, prolific album release history, and rigorous touring habits give fans ample opportunity to engage in Swift fandom via commerce, and social media helps them connect with others who value the intimate experience of identifying with a Swift song in the same way they do.

The most valuable feature that Swift brings to fans who fell for her as teenage girls has been the experience of growing up in tandem with the object of one’s fandom. It is fans’ consumption and meaning making of Swift’s work that makes her such a behemoth in the music industry, and the culture which has sprung up around adoration for her music and personal brand has “translated [them] into social practices…if no ‘meaning’ is taken there can be no ‘consumption’” (Hall 164). The song “Love Story” was Swift’s first truly massive mainstream hit, and its video created the image of her many casual observers conjure if asked to think of what Taylor Swift represents. It is a lovely song, and a fun song, and it will be playing over grocery store PA systems for decades to come. But it is just a catchy song until it becomes a language with which individual fans communicate true emotion among one another. The existence of online communities has replaced the mid-century snail mail-fueled fan club, and “everything that a fan posts, shares, and creates online is a type of performance” (Galloway 242), performed for, with, and in relationship to others who also create deep personal meaning from the experience of Swift’s music and persona.

Taylor Swift fans continue to grow in tandem with the object of their devotion, and those like myself who are also women and near her age find themselves similarly reconciling the selves of their early adulthood with a self-navigating genuine independence and solidifying identity. As she has grown and her songwriting has matured, Swift has resisted the impulse (if she has such an impulse) to be self-deprecating of her former work. She corrects errors regarding misogyny present in her early songs, but never apologizes for the intensity of feeling that they communicate. She never dismisses her music and with it, those who love it. Taylor Swift’s early songs, which describe completely normal romantic ups and downs in a young woman’s life, are dismissed as proof of girls’ insubstantial intellectual heft by a mainstream culture that paradoxically still consumes and consumes Swift’s every release. In Swift’s journey to a fully realized adulthood she undergoes a reconciliation experienced by many young women, including her fans: reconciling who she feels she is with how the world sees her and defending her right to exist even if she has made mistakes. She never concedes that feeling things deeply makes her innately bad. This is an experience shared by many of her age and gender, and those of other ages and genders. Her success is a symptom of the universal appeal of her preferred subject matter and her objective talent, but her fans are the result of an aggregation of specific experiences by specific people who were able to project them onto and find meaning from songs written by someone whom they will almost definitely never meet.

Works Cited

Galloway, Kate. “Musicking Fan Culture and Circulating the Materiality of Taylor Swift Musical Greeting Cards on YouTube.” American Music, Volume 38, Number 2, Summer 2020, pp. 240-261

Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks. Ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Douglas M. Kellne. John Wiley & Sons, 2012. Pp. 163-173.

Hermann, Mareike. “Not One of Those Screaming Girls: Representing Female Fans in 1990’s Germany.” Women’s Studies in Communication 31 (1): 79-103

Knibbs, Kate. “Ten Years of Taylor Swift: How the Pop Star Went From Sweetheart to Snake (and Back Again?).” The Ringer. August 21, 2019.