From the Audience

The ability to queer Taylor Swift’s music really starts off with the audience listening to the music. Empowered by their own queer experiences to find themselves within spaces of Swift’s songs, these kinds of listeners know the importance of being able to look past dominant readings and instead employ their own to resonate with their realities. Mark Duffett’s Understanding Fandom is an important read that better informs us of the wonders and complexities regarding fans. Through his analysis surrounding fans, Duffett mentions how “people of different identities interpret the same music differently" and that they "seek affinity on the basis of their own pre-existing identifications” (199). With that in mind, it bolsters the idea of being able to interpret Taylor Swift’s music as queer. Duffett also highlights in the piece that “those in a minority have to inhabit a world in which the cultural conventions may be different to what they desire” (201). The queer community is definitely a marginalized community that exists within this immersive media culture. Most mainstream artists, like Taylor Swift, clearly have a more dominant audience in mind and they usually tend to be a heteronormative one. Because of this, queer audiences have become really good at reading between the lines and using codes that allow them to queer the text.

 

When Taylor released folklore and evermore, there were many articles from queer-identifying authors that picked them apart for their queer undertones. While this specific audience has been doing this for years with her previous music as well, these two new albums definitely gave much more rich subtext to analyze. In an article that breaks down why Taylor Swift songs can be considered gay, it focuses on how folklore, and more specifically “betty,” hit the head on the nail for that. The author, Madison Kircher, explains how the song can be about a love triangle including three women and no men at all. It all depends on the listener, and since we are focusing on queer audiences in this research, we already have our answer to how we want to view it. The piece finishes off by saying: “Allyship is creating art where we’re just naturally a part of the narrative. With folklore, Swift finally gets it right.” It’s clear that queer audiences don’t have to work too hard to make songs within this album fit their experiences and stories.

 

Taylor’s skilled storytelling and brilliant lyrics throughout these albums have often allowed others to relate the music to their gay reckonings. Kat Tenbarge, who is a woman-loving-women, talks about how some of these songs capture the pain of being closeted. They are littered with themes of infidelity that relate to situations of having relationships that aren’t accepted. Another article by Rachel Lewis gathers a bunch of other listeners and their takes on how folklore has been incredibly queer to them. Some highlight how Swift has always been an artist who sings through her emotions, but the difference about it this time around with the two albums is how she does so with a more distanced perspective, showing how much she has grown as a songwriter.

 

In Mark Lipton’s “Queer Readings of Popular Culture,” Lipton perfectly captures the process in which one is able to perform a queer reading on text. While he focuses on queer youth within the piece, the points he made can definitely still be applied to this topic. The three different ways that one queers text include: (1) alternating the intended meaning, (2) practicing negotiation, and (3) playing the role as a detective. All three of these ways are clearly how audiences of Taylor Swift were able to come to these conclusions of interpreting folklore and evermore as gay albums. From the articles referenced earlier about all these queer fans and their understandings of specific songs, it’s obvious that they are applying these methods to best fit their experiences within the music.

 

Just because Taylor Swift isn’t gay, does not mean that her music can’t be. She doesn’t have to step out to the rest of the world and tell them that her music is or isn’t gay—the interpretation of it all has less to do with who she is and has more to do with who the audience identifies as. Their ability to relate to the music comes a lot from the emotional attachment to the media that they are consuming and how there’s a “psychic massaging [that] centers predominantly on audience’s emotions, adding intimacy and a ‘for me’ quality” (Woolsey 10). From a queer audience’s perspective, their beliefs and realities dictate the queer meanings of Taylor’s songs and can be found on their terms.