From awkward teen girl to aryan goddess meme: Taylor Swift and the hijacking of star texts

ABSTRACT

Before Taylor Swift came out as a supporter of the Democratic Party in October 2018, the neo-Nazi and white supremacist website The Daily Stormer published 12 articles tagged ‘Taylor Swift’. The Daily Stormer was not the first to notice Swift’s ‘Aryan spirit’. In 2013, an online poster that went by the name ‘Emily Pattinson’ started creating memes with pictures of Swift and quotes by Adolf Hitler on Pinterest. At first glance, these appropriations of Swift’s persona might be interpreted as one-sided fan practices from an undesired audience. However, Swift is not merely the object of these activities. I argue that she offers ample hooks for them in her music. Swift’s star text courts and facilitates a white-supremacist reading, at the same time that it eschews the consequences of this play from her mainstream fan base. Nonetheless, it has become increasingly difficult for Swift to seize control over her star text. In a celebrity landscape so drastically changed by social media, which have destabilised older ideas of celebrity-audience interactions, a polysemic star text that declines to explicitly claim political position provides opportunities for hijacking by audiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Taylor Swift
• audiences
• whiteness
• social media
• memes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See for example the music videos for ‘Tim McGraw’ (2006) ‘Our Song’ (2007), ‘Love Story’ (2008), ‘Fifteen’ (2009), and ‘Mine’ (2010).

2. .

3. .

4. ‘Lulz’ form a cornerstone of Internet trolling culture and denote a darker version of LOLs (Laughing Out Loud). According to Whitney Phillips ‘lulz celebrates the anguish of the laughed-at victim’, it is ‘the amusement at other people’s distress’ (27). Phillips emphasises lulz are complex and only recognisable to those who are already well-versed in trolling.

5. For an overview of all post tagged ‘Taylor Swift’ visit https://dailystormer.name/tag/taylor-swift/. Please be warned that this is a deeply racist, anti-Semitic and sexist website.

6. For Yiannopoulos’ article on the matter, visit https://www.breitbart.com/social-justice/2016/05/11/taylor-swift-alt-right-pop-icon/.

7. For a collection of Breitbart’s tweets, see White (2017).

8. For a more nuanced analysis of the politics of country music, see for example Jackson (2018).

Additional information

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Annelot Prins

Annelot Prins is pursuing her PhD in American cultural studies at the Graduate School of North American Studies at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Her research is grounded in feminist theory and combines audience research with celebrity studies to theorise the rise and reception of celebrity feminism in contemporary US-American popular music.