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"I'm Still Trying Everything to Keep You Looking at Me": Taylor Swift and the Autotheoretical Construction of Public Selves

2023; Feminist Studies; Volume: 49; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/fem.2023.a915915

2153-3873

Olivia Ordoñez,

Rhetoric and Communication Studies

"I'm Still Trying Everything to Keep You Looking at Me":Taylor Swift and the Autotheoretical Construction of Public Selves Olivia Ordoñez (bio) arielle, my college roommate, loved taylor swift for years before I managed to feel anything but annoyance about the popstar. I was determined that Arielle and I, randomly assigned to live together by the large state university we attended, would be friends, so I listened to a lot of Taylor Swift in 2008. I had a small, tight group of friends in high school, each of whom believed that attending a single party would irreparably damage our chances of getting into the colleges of our choice. So when the university gifted me with a built-in friend, I was committed to not squander this chance to expand my social circle or maybe even become someone new in college. After all, Arielle had politely feigned interest in my embarrassing-to-me-now explanation of who Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady were after she made the mistake of asking who was on the City Lights Bookstore poster over my bed. The least I owed her was nodding along to her explanation of why Swift's Romeo and Juliet fantasy was the perfect combination of princess fairytale and ironic commentary. "Taylor is such a weirdo," Arielle tells me happily, sprawled on her lime duvet in our dorm room. As Swift sings about the jealousy she feels that her crush's girlfriend has "everything that [Swift has] to live without," I roll my eyes. My polite nods have limits. As a fat Latina, I wonder from my dorm bed: What does Swift live without? I'm not proud of it now, but for most of Swift's career, I found her cloying. I resented her for things she could and could not control: her [End Page 394] ubiquity, her political silence, what I perceived as an affected Southern accent, that she dared to publicly proclaim herself awkward when all I could see was her tallness, her thinness, her whiteness, her blondeness. Over time though I've come to love Swift, and to desire my own version of Taylor. The Swift I've come to love is complicated. I love that in the recent years of her career she has demonstrated a willingness to learn about systemic oppression, sometimes in real time (and, admittedly, only after she has already said the "wrong" thing). I love that the trajectory of her narrative self-creation has been toward an expressly political, feminist image. Although she has been many things to many people over the course of her career, Swift's present self-construction is one that explicitly foregrounds the act of self-creation, exposing the strings she pulls to animate her public image. In typical Swift fashion, she does it, paradoxically, more shamelessly and more guilelessly than any of her peers. In showing her audiences how hard she works not only to construct her career but also to construct the various Taylors on which her career rests, Swift has become a powerful autotheoretical songwriter. In this piece, I illuminate some of the Taylors that have come in and out of view since the start of her career in 2006 and that have since been memorialized on the Eras Tour. First, I explore who Swift has been to fans (a group in which I include myself), music critics, and academics. I then demonstrate that Swift has used not only her songwriting but also the re-recording of three of her first six studio albums to perform an autotheoretical self-construction that, since 2016, has foregrounded a self-aware feminism. Importantly, Swift's self-construction is baldly palimpsestic, bringing all of her past selves into line with her currently desired image of self by writing over recorded histories. In advancing this argument, I draw from several feminist scholars of autotheory, including Lauren Fournier, Robyn Wiegman, and Arianne Zwartjes. All three scholars begin with similarly simple, self-described definitions of autotheory (using lived experiences to challenge or construct theoretical knowledge) and then productively expand the definition to encompass projects that "regenerate the famous feminist mantra, the personal is political."1 Zwartjes especially works to expand the...