Music comes to us as a warm gift that can fill our ears, hearts, and souls with sounds that make us feel. However, it really works best when we are able to relate to what we are listening to. This project stems from a more personal area that combines a lot of who I am—a Taylor Swift fan, a popular music lover, a Media Studies student, and a queer woman. Although Taylor Swift is often seen as a heteronormative artist, I’ve taken on the challenge of exploring how one can queer her music anyway. The parameters of my project specifically focus on her two albums folklore and evermore rather than the entirety of her discography. This was a choice made for a more centered study, and from my own take of how these two particular albums have the most queer implications out of all the music she has released.

 

The major questions I aim to answer in this project are: How can an artist who doesn’t identify as queer have their music be understood as queer? How does audience play a huge role in the interpretation of music?

 

The project is divided into several sections which separate the artist’s background, the audience’s reactions to the two albums, the explanation of queer theory, and my own readings of some specific songs.

 

I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it!