“Authentic” American Girlhood on Taylor Swift Fan Forums
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Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 ‘She isn’t whoring herself out like a lot of other girls we see’: Identification and “Authentic” American Girlhood on Taylor Swift Fan Forums ADRIANE BROWN, State University of New York at Oneonta ABSTRACT This article examines the forum sections of two websites devoted to Taylor Swift fandom: Taylor Connect, Swift’s official website, and Amazingly Talented, a popular fan-produced website. Fans insist that Taylor Swift is an ordinary girl, and they continually suture her musical and extratextual personas by emphasising the autobiographical nature of her songs. Swift’s music and her media presence sell an image of an ordinary girl, enabling fans’ identifications with her. Fans assert that they “know” Taylor through her music and media persona and that Taylor’s relatable lyrics make them feel like she understands them deeply. However, Swift’s positioning as an “authentic” American girl subject is wholly tied to her status as a white, middle class, heterosexual, normatively feminine girl—characteristics that are repeatedly shored up through the lyrical and visual elements of her music and music videos and through fans’ insistence that she is a “good girl.” KEYWORDS Taylor Swift, girlhood, fan studies, authenticity, propriety, digital fandom Allison: Her music [is] like therapy. I love that she wrtiesi all of it. I love that she cares about her fans and does things like t-partys and the 13 hr meet and greet. I love how generous she is to her fans. I love how excited she gets when she wins awards and how truly thankful she is. There’s SO many different reasons. AUTHOR: So, it’s more than just liking her music? Allison: Of course! I love her to death. I would do anything to meet her someday and tell her how much she means to me and how much shes helped me through. This excerpt from an interview with Allison, a seventeen-year-old Taylor Swift fan who posts regularly on Taylor Connect, demonstrates how Taylor Swift’s popularity is premised upon her image as someone who, despite her international fame and popularity, is still an “all-American 161 Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 girl next door.” There are thousands of websites devoted to Taylor Swift where fans write prolifically about how Taylor Swift has changed their lives, not only through her music but also through “who she is.” Fans assert that Taylor sings about subjects that are relevant not only to teenage girls, but to everyone—falling in love, feeling like an outsider and coping with heartbreak. However, while fans assert that Swift is universally relatable, they also position her as a beacon of morality because of her adherence to standards of white propriety, and there is little acknowledgement of the ways that these two discourses are contradictory. This article examines the forum sections of two websites devoted to Taylor Swift fandom: Taylor Connect, Swift’s official website, and Amazingly Talented, a popular fan-produced website. Fans insist that Taylor Swift is an ordinary girl, and they continually suture her musical and extratextual personas by emphasising the autobiographical nature of her songs. Swift’s music and her media presence (including her online journal and forum posts on her official website) sell an image of an ordinary girl, enabling fans’ identifications with her. However, the capitalist marketing strategy that underpins this image of ordinariness is also made invisible: Swift’s supposedly “authentic” image validates the fantasy that Taylor is the subject of her songs in a completely genuine way, that she experiences what “normal” teens do, and that “everyone” can relate to her, regardless of their gender, race, social class, or sexuality. Her image produces the normative expectation that there is a universal experience of adolescent girlhood love and romance. Swift’s positioning as an “authentic” American girl subject is wholly tied to her status as a white, middle class, heterosexual, normatively feminine girl—characteristics that are repeatedly shored up through the lyrical and visual elements of her music and music videos and through fans’ insistence that she is a “good girl” whose infallibility makes her a good role model for young girls. In contrast to artists such as Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj, who explicitly foreground sexuality both visually and lyrically, Taylor Swift represents a nostalgic longing for a piece of Americana in which women’s sexual desires were kept under wraps. Swift’s music implicitly and explicitly insists that race and gender no longer matter; yet, it privileges “traditional values” such as monogamy, propriety, and abstinence—values which are historically and inextricably tied to whiteness, heterosexuality, and normative femininity (Coontz, 2000: 181; Davy, 1997: 212; Odem, 1995: 3). The idealisation of American girlhood, which Swift represents, constantly and implicitly privileges a vision of “authentic” girlhood that is invested in whiteness, heterosexual monogamy and romance, and middle-class propriety and consumption. I begin with a biographical discussion of Swift, considering how the narrative of Swift’s advancement to stardom and her public persona enable a depiction of her as an “authentic, all- American” girl. I then move into a discussion of fandom, asserting that while digital spaces enable fans to intersubjectively imbue lyrics and music videos with meanings that are significant to them, the dominance of corporate music interests significantly limit fans’ agency. Next, I turn 162 Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 to a specific analysis of Taylor Swift fan sites, drawing on visual, textual, and interview data to analyse girls’ identifications with Swift. Fans assert that they “know” Taylor through her music and media persona and that Taylor’s relatable lyrics make them feel like she understands them deeply. The collision of fans’ two main claims about Swift—that she is a girl just like them and that she is an infallible role model—creates a situation in which fans simultaneously confirm Swift’s highly idealised image and assert that they can live up to it. I discuss the ways that fans articulate their identifications with Swift as an ordinary girl, and I then analyse the ways that girls characterise Swift as a role model, suggesting that Swift’s image of propriety compels fans to attempt to adhere to strict standards of femininity and purity and to stigmatise behaviour that falls outside of these strict moral codes. Methods In this article, I examine both Taylor Swift’s official website, which is produced by her management company, and one unofficial site, which is produced and maintained by fans. Taylor Connect is the forum section of taylorswift.com, Swift’s official websiteii. In addition to the forums, the website also includes a biographical statement about Taylor, song lyrics and explanations, music videos, concert dates, photo galleries, a Taylor merchandise store, and an online journal supposedly written by Taylor. Amazingly Talented is the forum section of the most popular fan-created Taylor Swift site, taylorswiftweb.net. Fans express the perception in several forum threads that this website is more youth-dominated than Taylor Connect or other Taylor Swift fansites, with a number of users self-identifying in the 11-15 age range. I focused on this fansite because of its large number of adolescent users, its active forum community, and its encouragement of users employing imagery as a means of expressing fandom (such as distributing monthly awards for ‘Best Signature’). In the context of this article, I constitute “fans” as users on Taylor Swift fan sites. Users on these sites are not necessarily representative of Swift’s fandom as a whole (for instance, fan ages may skew younger on websites than among her fans more generally). I also note that participatory cultures of fandom, such as these websites, tend to attract more intensely devoted fans than casual ones (Jenkins, 1992: 138; Stenger, 2006: 26). Thus, this article is not an examination of the entire range of Swift’s fans, but rather of a self-selected group of individuals whose devotion to Swift and her music extends beyond listening to albums and attending concerts. I used a two-part approach to conducting my research: visual and textual analyses of websites and instant messenger interviews. For both parts, I focused on girls from the US between the ages of 14 and 19. I spent four months monitoring topic trends on the forums, doing targeted searches for particular topics (such as the Kanye West incident), and posting discussion questions. When I began research for this article, I posted messages to the main forums of both 163 Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 sites, announcing my presence to users and asking for interview participants. In the discussion questions I posted, I clearly indicated that I was a researcher working on a study about Taylor Swift fans. Interview participants, website users, and administrators were aware that their responses to me could be used for journal articles or books, and I indicated in my initial post that I also planned to utilise information from other threads on the website. I included my official email and a link to my research blog in all correspondences and encouraged users to contact me if they were uncomfortable with any aspect of my research. I captured and analysed both written text and images, such as photographs and graphics. I also solicited and conducted instant messenger interviews. Most users did not list their ages in their profiles, and many users had private profiles, so I had to rely on threads in which users revealed their ages. I used numerical search terms (‘15’) as well as phrases (‘how old are you’), and successfully located several lengthy threads on each site in which users revealed their ages.