The Discreet Charm of Swiftology
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Introduction Should celebrities be more aware of their influence on people? Should they conduct an impeccable life insofar they are role models? Should they actively engage in politics? I find those questions annoying, even though the power dynamic of any celebrity/audience relationship matters. Still, the normative undertone of those formulations repels me. Who are they, superstars, to tell ordinary mortals what to do? And who are we, common folks, to impose our expectations upon famous individuals? Interestingly, I usually find a similar tension when discussing these themes within academic circles. Psychologists, sociologists and literary critics deploy their hypotheses, interpretations, and suggestions with a subtle normative taste behind the attitude of “a lucid and vigilant thinker” (Felski). I want to reprise the question: who are we, social scientists, to indicate what people—either common or famous—ought to think, feel and do? In this piece, I want to tackle this tension by examining a particular case: namely, how Swifties understand and respond to Taylor Swift’s ambiguous political profile. To avoid adding more prescriptions to the already moralistic discussion, I shall abstain from doing a political analysis. Rather, I will stress the affective implications of such ambiguity, which usually amounts to some identitarian confusion among social scientists and fans. Perhaps the way we study Swifties reveals more about ourselves than about them. Since my training has been in psychology and the history of science, my interest is not to take at face value what fan studies’ scholars could say about Swifties. I am more intrigued by how sociological theories have proposed diverse conceptualisations of mass phenomena over time and how fan studies could benefit from a tighter engagement with affect studies. It is possible that over-stressing the political behaviour of celebrities and audiences has turned us blind to the essence of fandom: specialised aesthetic enjoyment. In this sense, ‘Swiftology’ should not be understood as a ‘proper method’ or even as the ‘application’ of a theoretical framework to Swift’s persona or Swifties, but rather as the explicit articulation of how the latter take an active interest in exploring and reshaping the array of meanings and affects surrounding the former. Swiftmania Despite the fact that Taylor Swift as a cultural phenomenon is ubiquitous, her political profile is quite vague. Her country music origins might hint at a stereotypical Southern lifestyle, but the feminist and LGBTQ+ lyrics of her later albums suggest otherwise (Donovan). The frequent topics of romantic breakups and revenge fantasies may indicate a childish character, but her massive success in public relations, awards, and finances reveals an accomplished businesswoman (Théberge). Swift was firstly apolitical, which elicited commentaries about her being a passive banner for white Americanism. Her recurrent victimhood stance amid celebrity feuds has also been denounced as a sign of a lack of political awareness (Cullen). In recent years she has started to slowly display sympathy to the Democrat Party at domestic elections. Still, left-wing journalists have argued that her activism is merely performative, since she remains silent about crucial issues such as the ecological crisis and the Israel-Palestinian conflict (Medford). We can either pity Swift for being under such strict scrutiny or delight ourselves in pointing out her contradictions (Franssen). Anyhow, I wonder if this vagueness is an indicator of something else worth exploring. Counter-intuitively, Swift’s political ambiguity does not harm her popularity, but quite the opposite! As Jamieson Webster puts it, Swifties “get the whole thing … , you get to be the outcast, and you get to be the bitch, and you get to be the winner, and you get to be the loser”. Swift seems to successfully craft a wide spectrum of emotionally-charged experiences in each record, in which her imperfections resonate with her fandom’s humanity. Unlike previous female popstars, Swift’s persona is built upon an ongoing reconstruction of her own self (Canavan and McCamley). And this is precisely what Swifties enjoy the most. This fandom—which amounts to 53 per cent of adults in the USA (Blancaflor and Briggs)—is highly loyal and interactive. Not only do Swifties fiercely defend her, but they also share a net of symbols, themes, inside jokes, easter eggs, and deep-cut knowledge of her music catalogue (Ledbetter). Certainly, there are other groups more cohesive and politically active—i.e., Potterheads or K-pop fans. Still, what I find unique about Swifties is the way they engage with her icon’s equivocality and make something out of it (Driessen). Shifts in Social Theory Let us take a brief detour to the history of sociology to understand the multiple ways that mass phenomena have been portrayed. Albeit Auguste Comte is commonly regarded as the father of sociology; his writings have fallen into oblivion. Karl Marx, on the contrary, produced a body of work that is still discussed today. His grave contains the famous phrase: “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it” (Marx and Engels, 199). He argued that social scientists should explore the material foundations of any society and strive for the dialectical progress of class struggle. The proletariat is said to be alienated by bourgeois ideology, which legitimised the worker’s precarious life by appealing to State law and economic theories. In this sense, social analysis ought to be aimed to awaken the masses so they could regain the profit of their labour, expropriate the means of production, and take down capitalist governments. In short, social scientists should demystify the apparently natural order and participate in the emancipation of the oppressed. These ideas are pretty much still alive in the works of post-structuralist philosophers such as Foucault or Derrida. However, this perspective was challenged at the beginning of the twentieth century. Gustave Le Bon published his seminal The Crowd, where he explicitly stated that masses operated according an “inferior reasoning” (54) when compared to individual judgement. Furthermore, the lack of discernment was seen as a prerequisite to any gathering, rather than being the harmful effect of alienation. Le Bon influenced Sigmund Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power. The former described the leader-mass relationship as analogous to hypnosis, while the latter stressed the paranoid nature of political governance. In any case, the moral of this new conceptualisation is clear: people are unfit to rule themselves, therefore a ruling group will always be necessary. Fascism in Europe seemed to verify this idea, and the eventual decay of the Soviet Union was regarded as the failure of Marxism. According to this point of view, instead of trying to liberate the masses, social scientists should try to help them to elect a non-dictatorial leader who could be held accountable by democratic institutions. Something along these lines can be found in the conjoint work of Nussbaum and Sen. But social theory changed again recently. Neoliberalism has put individual agency at the forefront and has questioned the determinism of social factors. Margaret Thatcher’s infamous remark ‘there is no such thing as society’ gave way to heated debates about the ontological status of ‘Society’. Disenchanted with Marx’s emphasis on economy and Freud’s psychological approach, sociologists began to appeal to ecology, searching for a more tangible understanding of the individual’s exchange with its surroundings. G. Evelyn Hutchinson and E.O. Wilson studied how organisms compete for available resources within a quasi-closed habitat. It is a common trope in philosophy, following Nietzsche’s critique of Darwinism as an unwarranted form of Malthusianism, to stress the alliance between Neoliberalism and Social Darwinism (Midgley). Certainly, this later shift in sociology risks reinforcing the inequities of capitalism. However, when one gets a closer look to Hutchinson’s and Wilson’s writings, one does not find an apology for the survival of the fittest, but rather a detailed analysis of the coordinated effort of distinct species to maintain the habitat’s balance. Although the concept of niche aroused confusion at first, sociobiology is becoming one of the leading paradigms in contemporary social sciences. Fortunately, ecology is not the handmaid of economy, so sociologist can retain their ‘critical edge’ and still reconsider their dated epistemological assumptions (Charbonnier). Thus, current social theory ceased to worry about shapeless masses and started exploring circumscribed niches (Langton). Without this theoretical shift fandom studies probably could not have emerged as a research field. First, niche theory restores rationality to small communities but confines their agency to their respective milieux. If various individuals coming from different niches were to mingle, their specific expertise would be blurred. Second, fan studies are more interested in the inner politics of fandom—debates in the blogosphere, coordination for assisting live events, bracelet exchange, gatekeeping, etc.—than the activism related to external issues. For instance, it is fairly insignificant to study whether or not fans are registered voters if one fails to understand the democratic behaviour deployed among themselves (Nisbett and Schartel Dunn). Third, and most importantly, the focus on local interactions has made fandom studies more sensible to the role of nonhumans and affect in the constant weaving of the social fabric (Chin). To consume merchandise, music or concert souvenirs is not merely an economic gesture, since it entails a complex array of emotions that could lead to the “enchantment of modern life”, to borrow Jane Be
Source: M/C Journal
DOI: 10.5204/mcj.3146
Author: David Antolínez
Language: English
Topic: Music History and Culture
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4413341404