Policing the celebrity of Taylor Swift: introduction

For roughly the last two decades, the music, life and public image of American musical artist Taylor Swift have been major focal points of global celebrity culture. Making her debut in the early 2000s in country music, and subsequently re-inventing herself in an ongoing, intensely mediated and hotly debated series of artistic transformations from country star to synthpop idol and finally to critically acclaimed storytelling-songwriter, Swift has now become one of the best-selling musicians of all time. She has received a dozen Grammy Awards and holds high positions in several prestigious rankings of artists, songwriters, and influential celebrities. Her personal life – although with this level of fame, it is hardly appropriate to label it as ‘personal’ – has also contributed to her claim to fame as one of the most-talked about celebrities of the early twenty-first-century: her feuds with Kanye West (who famously disrupted the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards by breaching the stage and announcing that Swift did not deserve the award for Best Female Video), Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj, her legal battles over music rights with the American entrepreneur Scooter Braun, and, finally, her much gossiped-about relations with, among others, pop singer Joe Jonas, actor Jake Gyllenhaal and DJ Calvin Harris – all of her private details have been ongoing fodder for gossip magazines.

It is hardly surprising, then, that Swift’s celebrity has proven to be a rich topic for celebrity studies research. In 2021, just after the completion of this Forum’s special issue, Contemporary Music Review published a thematic issue on Swift (Fogarty and Arnold 2021); in as well as beyond the pages of that issue scholars have explored how Swift’s stardom is inflected through race (Cullen 2016; Arnold 2021), gender (Sloan 2021), class (Krebs 2014), capitalism (Smialek 2021, Théberge 2021) and authenticity (Dubrofsky 2016). In Celebrity Studies, too, several colleagues in the field have published on Swift; so far, they have mapped her strategies of authenticating her rapidly changing musical persona (Wilkinson 2019), demonstrated the ways in which her public image is co-opted by extremist political movements (Prins 2020), and explored her contribution to neoliberal feminism (Isaksen and Eltantawy 2021).

This special issue of Celebrity Studies’ Forum section, themed ‘Policing the Celebrity of Swift’, presents four new contributions to this burgeoning field of ‘Swift Studies’, shedding light on the politics – in a literal as well a more figurative sense – of Swift’s celebrity as well as her fandom. In the first contribution collected here, Simone Driessen presents an analysis of the interviews she conducted with young ‘Swifties’ in order to understand how fans respond when a celebrity’s persona becomes contested. In line with Matt Hills (2018), Driessen starts out from the observation that fandoms are governed by implicit rules or ‘doxa’ and argues that Swift’s public announcement of her political stance, in a 2018 Instagram post, can be considered as a disruption of those doxa. Driessen finds that some fans come to see the disruption as a reason to discontinue their fandom, while others perceive it as a confirmation of the legitimacy of their fannish investment: either way, disruptions of doxa offer insights in the ways in which fans police the admiration of their idol.

Nicholas Krebs authored the second contribution to this issue, in which he analyses Swift’s political statements in light of the question of whether the singer can be considered a celebrity politician. Building on the work of John Street (2004), Krebs approaches this question by drawing an illuminating comparison between the political activities of Swift and those of Kanye West: he notes that both Swift and West can be considered celebrity politicians – in that they are both popular entertainers who pronounce on politics and claim the right to represent specific groups or causes – yet that there are important differences, too. Krebs outlines how race, gender and, intriguingly, landscape, play important roles in the very different constructions of Swift’s and West’s political celebrity.

In the third contribution, Annelot Prins, too, takes Swift’s political statements as her starting point, but focuses in particular on how the celebrity’s political awakening is presented in the 2020 documentary Miss Americana. Prins notes that the documentary, and Swift’s image as a politically committed pop star with it, play into a stereotypical understanding of white women as especially ‘good’, moral and giving. Connecting this stereotype to the logic of late capitalism, Prins argues that in the neoliberal landscape, goodness, authenticity and control go together: Swift’s new-found political agency demonstrates how notions of self-improvement, political resistance and gendered morality become discursively aligned and affirm the status quo.

The final piece in this issue is by Daisy Pignetti, who directs our attention to what one could call the ‘affective politics’ of Swift as well as her Swifties, that is: the emotional dynamics of her public feuds with other celebrities, in particular with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, and how these dynamics are co-construed by both the Swifties and the Kardashian/West fandom. Taking her cue from Vivi’s Theodoropoulou’s insights in anti-fandom in the context of sport stardom (2007), Pignetti’s observes that when two celebrities are feuding, their fans are invited to become anti-fans of the rival celebrity. Pignetti traces how this affective logic plays out in the public clash between Swift, West and Kardashian, concluding that the affective politics of such feuds can shift dramatically after a public swipe between the celebrities, but that the emotional investment of fans in their idol is also intensified after each attack.

Together, these four pieces demonstrate that the final word on Swift remains to be said: further research on Swift’s celebrity, which seems ever-increasing, will have much to offer scholars who wish to understand celebrity politics as well as the policing of celebrity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gaston Franssen

Gaston Franssen is assistant professor of Literary Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He has published on celebrity in the Journal of Dutch Studies, Celebrity Studies, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. In 2016, he co-edited Celebrity Authorship and Afterlives in English and American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan); in 2017, Idolizing Authorship: Literary Celebrity and the Construction of Identity, 1800 to the Present (Amsterdam University Press).