Let’s make the friendship bracelets!!!!
‘Fuck the Patriarchy’: A Taylor Swift Conference
University of Kent, Friday 31st May 2024
Conference Schedule
9 – 9:30 Registration: Cornwallis North West main foyer/ entrance, Canterbury Campus
9:30 Welcome
9:45 – 10:45 Panel 1: ‘Go ahead and light me up’: Swift & Survival, Chair Dr Hannah McCann (University of Melbourne)
“It’s Me, Hi, I’m the Victim It’s Me”: Legal Depictions of the “Victim” in David Mueller v. Taylor Swift. Marie-Andrée Plante, Professor Faculty of Law, Université de Sherbrooke (Québec, Canada)
“You made her like that”; Reading Taylor Swift Through Literary Representations of Female Madness. Sini Eikonsalo. Assistant Professor in English and American Literature, Metropolitan University Prague.
10:45 -11 Break
11:00 -11:45 Roundtable Discussion ‘Who’s Afraid of Taylor Swift’: The Tortured Poets Department, Chair Dr Claire Hurley (University of Kent)
11:45 – 12 Break
12 – 1 Panel 2 ‘Dear Reader’: Swift & Authorship, Chair Dr Clio Doyle (Queen Mary University of London)
A Studio of One’s Own: Swift’s concert films as narratives of authorship. Wickham Clayton, Independent Scholar
Feminist Intertextuality in Taylor Swift’s Songs. Aidan Norrie. University Campus North Lincolnshire.
1 – 2 Lunch Gulbenkian Cafe
2 – 3 Panel 3 ‘The role you made me play’: Swift & Female Agency, Chair Dr Aidan Norrie (University Campus North Lincolnshire).
Taylor Swift and Rebekah Harkness: The Lives, Experiences and Contemporary Perception Surrounding the Writer of The Last Great American Dynasty and its Subject. Jack Cox, University of Northampton, PHD in history.
“The girl in the dress cried the whole way home”: dress imagery, performance and feminine subjectivity in Taylor Swift’s song lyrics. Alizée Goron, Université de Lille (France).
3 – 3:30 Break
3:30 – 4:45 ‘Make the Friendship Bracelets’: Swift & Community, Chair Dr Claire Hurley (University of Kent)
‘Some Kind of Haunted’: A Queer Gothic Reading of Taylor Swift. Dr Hannah McCann (University of Melbourne), Dr Duc Dau (University of Western Australia)
Murdering to dissect: online discussions of Swift’s Wordsworth and the discipline of English Literature. Dr Clio Doyle, Lecturer in Early Modern Literature, Queen Mary University of London.
“Honey, Life Is Just a Classroom”: The Feminist Pedagogical Potential of Taylor Swift-Themed College Courses. Juliette Holder. Texas Woman’s University.
5pm Close
Meet our in-person presenters!!!
Panel 1- ‘Go ahead and light me up’: Swift & Survival
Chair: Dr Hannah McCann
Dr Marie-Andrée Plante- “It’s Me, Hi, I’m the Victim It’s Me”: Legal Depictions of the “Victim” in David Mueller v. Taylor Swift
Marie-Andrée Plante is a professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Sherbrooke (Canada) where she teaches legal philosophy and property law. Her research interests include feminist approaches to law, sexual and intimate partner violence and the intersections between law, culture, and the humanities.
Abstract:
In recent years, the intersection of celebrity culture, sexual violence, and the legal system has become a prominent subject of public conversation. This presentation will contribute to this ongoing dialogue by analyzing the legal battle involving Taylor Swift and David Mueller. In this case, Taylor Swift found herself facing a defamation lawsuit after accusing radio host David Mueller of groping her during a meet-and-greet event. Swift responded to this lawsuit with a counterclaim for assault and battery, seeking symbolic damages of $1.
The Mueller v. Swift case will serve as a focal point for exploring a broader issue: the use of defamation lawsuits by abusers to intimidate survivors of sexual violence, ultimately creating a chilling effect that hinders survivors from sharing their experiences. I will examine how these legal maneuvers frequently reframe the victim as the victimizer, thereby reshaping the dynamics within the judicial system.
Furthermore, this presentation aims to examine the portrayal of sexual violence survivors within legal discourses, particularly by analyzing the pervasive myths and stereotypes that often surround them, such as the notion of the ‘perfect victim.’ Through an analysis of the discourses employed by the parties, the court, and the media in the context of the Mueller v. Swift lawsuit, I intend to place special emphasis on the prevalence and the detrimental effects of these myths on both legal proceedings and the broader societal perception of survivors.
In concluding the presentation, I will explore Taylor Swift’s broader engagement with the legal system and examine the potential transformative impact of high-profile cases and influential cultural icons on the trajectory of social justice movements.
Dr Sini Eikonsalo – “You made her like that”; Reading Taylor Swift Through Literary Representations of Female Madness
Sini Eikonsalo is an Assistant Professor in English and American Literature at Metropolitan University Prague, Department of Political Science and Anglophone Studies. She specializes in contemporary American literature but she is currently interested in researching the representation of mental health through a feminist lens.
Abstract:
Throughout history, women who have not fit the type of an era’s ideal woman, ranging from subdued, domestic, and virtuous to practically invisible, have been assigned the role of “the mad woman”: a witch, a bitch, or simply hysterical. When looking a bit closer, it is evident how much of the perceived “madness” has been caused by patriarchal and unrealistic expectations set out for women.
This paper analyzes Taylor Swift songs, particularly “mad woman”, through iconic literary representations of female madness. While “mad woman” has been associated by fans and media with her real-life struggles, as her songs always tend to be, this article aims to read it in the context of the literary and historical past instead of Swift’s contemporary battles. I suggest that in addition to its potential present allusions, it can be seen to represent the historical battles regarding patriarchy and the concept of female madness. By comparing “mad woman” to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and its postcolonial counterpart, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), I argue that the song draws allusions to the trope of “the madwoman in the attic”, as coined by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Furthermore, the article connects Swift’s songs to other iconic narratives of female madness such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) and Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen” (1978), arguing that the characters’ mental health issues have not arisen from some isolated, inherit instance of “madness”, but rather have resulted from patriarchal oppression and the inability or plain reluctance to try to understand these mental health issues; as Swift puts it, “you made her like that”.
Roundtable Discussion- ‘Who’s Afraid of Taylor Swift?’: The Tortured Poets Department
Chair: Dr Claire Hurley
Dr Claire Hurley is a lecturer in American & 20th Century Literature at the University of Kent. She specialises in race and intersectional Feminism, and her chapter ‘”Scraps of you”: Fabrics of Memory in folklore and evermore’ will be included in the Bloomsbury publication The Literary Taylor Swift out this autumn!
Panel 2- ‘Dear Reader’: Swift & Authorship
Chair: Dr Clio Doyle
Dr Wickham Clayton– A Studio of One’s Own: Swift’s concert films as narratives of authorship
Wickham Clayton is a media and culture scholar based in the UK. He is author of BFI Film Classics – The Wicker Man (2024) and See!Hear!Cut!Kill! : Experiencing Friday the 13th (2020). Wickham is also editor of The Bible Onscreen in the New Millennium (2020), and co-editor of Horror that Haunts Us (2024 with Karrá Shimabukuro).
Abstract:
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023) was in many ways an audacious and potentially ill-advised cinematic release. Not only running at 169 minutes, and little content outside the performance itself, but often demanding a higher ticket price for cinema admission, it nevertheless became an unprecedented success, and allowed viewers a sense of intimacy within a wildly successful major world stadium tour.
However, it wasn’t only the music that drove the film, it communicated the tour’s premise of reviewing Swift’s career not only as a performer but as a songwriter. Indeed, Swift’s role as author of her music, her image, and her own life is a theme throughout her career, with her lyrics often implicitly adopting a necessarily feminist assertion of control over her own narrative, particularly with respect to relationships. Therefore, in The Eras Tour and especially Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions (2020) we can see Swift creating a narrative of her own writing, while both acknowledging and distinguishing herself from her co-writers.
This paper, then, uses these films as case studies to demonstrate Swift’s conscious role in fostering her image as not just performer, but author, and the role these films play in that. In particular this paper will analyse The Long Pond Studio Sessions to show its narrative structure beyond the musical framework, with the track list of Folklore playing out in album order. This analysis, then, will reveal that Taylor Swift as author of her own narrative is one of the most compelling and inspirational aspects of her career.
Dr Aidan Norrie- Feminist Intertextuality in Taylor Swift’s Songs
Aidan Norrie is Lecturer in History and Literature and the Programme Leader of the BA (Hons) English and History Studies at the University Campus North Lincolnshire.
Abstract:
When Harvard University and Queen Mary University of London announced new modules devoted to Taylor Swift in late 2023, many of the responses were both predictable and unoriginal. What many of the commentators bemoaning the apparent decline in academic standards that such modules represented failed to recognise, however, is that these modules acknowledge that the lyrics of Swift’s songs (in particular) have a clear literary merit that warrants academic study. Such studies, which will hopefully only proliferate, underscore the richness of Swift’s song writing and the under-appreciation of the multi-layered and incisive socio-political commentary evident in her songs. Paying close attention to her lyrics demonstrates that Swift is a consummate adapter, taking a variety of references and deploying them to further her feminist and inclusive agendas. This intertextuality pervades her work: some are more obvious, such as the re-working of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in ‘Love Story’, but many are fleeting, such as the biblical allusion to Moses in ‘Now That We Don’t Talk’, which means that the true extent of Swift’s radical intertextuality is often overlooked. By considering some of the literary, historical, and biblical references in Swift’s oeuvre, this paper argues that Swift’s feminist intertextuality both heightens the literary merit of her lyrics and, most importantly, encourages her listeners to challenge patriarchy, bigotry, and prejudice wherever they find it.
Panel 3: ‘The role you made me play’: Swift & Female Agency
Chair: Dr Aidan Norrie
Jack Cox- Taylor Swift and Rebekah Harkness: The Lives, Experiences and Contemporary Perception
Jack is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Northampton currently exploring the transportation of convicts to the penal colonies in America, Australia and within British-occupied India.
Abstract:
Taylor Swift recently made history by being – not only the only woman but, – the only artist ever to win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year four times, another woman who made history was Rebekah Harkness. Swift’s work is recognised globally for her ability to tell stories through the lyrics of her songs. One such song is The Last Great American Dynasty from Swift’s eighth studio album Folklore released in 2020. This song explores the life of Harkness – a composer, philanthropist, and heiress. Immediate similarities between Swift and Harkness come to the surface within these few words, which is what this paper seeks to explore further.
The methodological approach will be to first to contextualise the historical basis through exploring the life of Harkness. Then, the structural approach will be to address some of the key similarities between the life events, philosophy, patronage, as well as contemporary attitudes towards and cultural perceptions of the individuals and their respective careers.
With Harkness being born on 17 April 1915, and dying on 17 June 1982, and Swift being born on 13 December 1989 this approach will allow comparisons and contrasts to be drawn between the two women. Overall, by exploring the text, subtext and context of the song The Last Great American Dynasty this will allow an analysis of how society viewed powerful and influential women in their times, and whether how they are perceived has changed with the progression of time.
Alizée Goron – “The girl in the dress cried the whole way home”: dress imagery, performance and feminine subjectivity in Taylor Swift’s song lyrics.
Alizée is a PhD candidate at the Université de Lille (France). Her work focuses on contemporary fiction and poetry by British South-Asian women, with particular attention to the links between dress and identity.
Abstract:
This paper will focus on the references to dress in Taylor Swift’s song lyrics, from her first album Taylor Swift (2006), to her most recent one Midnights (2022). “Dress” will be understood not only as referring to clothes, but more broadly as an embodied practice which encompasses clothing, accessories and make-up. I will argue that dress structures the construction of Swift’s persona throughout her discography, and helps paint a carefully crafted visual identity which corresponds to how she intends to be perceived by her audience, epitomising her “good girl” image. This image is also largely informed by how Swift wishes to be perceived by her partners within romantic relationships, the subject matter of the vast majority of her back catalogue. This persona therefore often panders to the male gaze. In this respect, dress imagery in Taylor Swift’s song lyrics seems to facilitate her
performance of a traditional, heterosexual gender identity. However, the evolution of Swift’s songwriting, along with the shift in her public image throughout the years, need to be taken into consideration. Indeed, in Swift’s song lyrics, dress is not always a tool that objectifies the subject of the songs and reasserts a hegemonic representation of white, heterosexual femininity. I will argue that, in the songs, the fashioning of one’s appearance and the attention to details such as make-up, hairstyle, clothes and accessories also help Swift express her deepest, most confessional feelings and experiences and ultimately reclaim her subjectivity and agency.
‘Make the Friendship Bracelets’: Swift & Community
Chair: Dr Claire Hurley
Dr Claire Hurley is a lecturer in American & 20th Century Literature at the University of Kent. She specialises in race and intersectional Feminism, and her chapter ‘”Scraps of you”: Fabrics of Memory in folklore and evermore’ will be included in the Bloomsbury publication The Literary Taylor Swift out this autumn!
Dr Hannah McCann, Dr Duc Dau – ‘Some Kind of Haunted’: A Queer Gothic Reading of Taylor Swift
Dr Hannah McCann is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her area of focus is critical femininity studies and involves work on queer fandom, beauty culture, and LGBTQ+ identities.
Duc Dau is an Honorary Research Fellow in Humanities at The University of Western Australia. She is a Scorpio born on Halloween, which might explain why she has mostly written about dead people and religious eroticism, as exemplified by her latest book Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance: The Victorians and the Song of Songs (2024).
Abstract:
Pop icon “Miss Americana” Taylor Swift is not often associated with gothic. Yet, across her body of work we find numerous references to gothic horror elements such as hauntings, monsters, ghosts, and the undead. This paper offers a queer reading of Swift’s lyrical corpus via identifying these gothic horror themes. As many others have explored before, queerness is intertwined with the history of gothic horror. Queerness has often been invoked in the context of the supernatural or demonic because it is viewed as transgressive, deviant, other.
Terry Castle (1993) calls lesbianism the “ghost” of sexual love between women, which has haunted literature for decades. Analysis of her Swift’s oeuvre reveals continual conjuring of a sense of haunting. We read these hauntings as queer coded: queer longing is buried, but makes its presence known. Furthermore, Swift’s ghosts and other creatures of gothic tropes exist outside of what Jack Halberstam (1995) refers to as the norms of time, humanness, gender, and sexuality. In this paper we deploy these analytic viewpoints to suggest thatnwhether Taylor as celebrity is queer or not, her lyrics suggest a queer gothic haunting that cannot be denied.
Dr Clio Doyle – Murdering to dissect: online discussions of Swift’s Wordsworth and the discipline of English Literature
Dr Clio Doyle is a Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. She teaches a class on Swift and Literature at the Queen Mary Summer School, hosts the podcast Studies in Taylor Swift, and is writing a book called Dear Reader: Taylor Swift and the Idea of English Literature.
Abstract:
Baffled by Taylor Swift’s 2020 song “the lakes,” a TikTok user begs a content creator,“PLEASE EXPLAIN THE LAKES I literally feel stupid trying to dissect the whole thing.”The content creator obliges, explaining, “I think you just need a brief history of Romanticism.” Romanticism is a literary and artistic movement usually associated with the work of six male poets. But the video that results from this request explains the history of Romanticism as one of literary theft and unearned oblivion, one in which women’s work is imitated and then forgotten by a series of men. According to this explanation, Swift’s song becomes a tool for uncovering the past of literature as both a body of texts and as a discipline mired in untested assumptions about who is original and what is worth studying. “The lakes” is indeed “dissect[ed]” in this video as requested, in that its references to literary history are laid bare. But it also turns the knife back, dissecting the study of English Literature and cutting at the patriarchal stories it supposedly tells about originality and value. And this is no one-off occurrence: as I argue in this paper, reflections on the history and purpose of literary study are ingrained in online discussions of Swift’s work and can tell us how members of the public understand the discipline of English literature and the kinds of texts and authors it values.
Juliette Holder – “Honey, Life Is Just a Classroom”: The Feminist Pedagogical Potential of Taylor Swift-Themed College Courses
Juliette Holder is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric at Texas Woman’s University, where she also teaches writing. Her work on Taylor Swift has been published in Taypedia, Ms. Magazine, and USA Today.
Abstract:
Over the last year, Taylor Swift has quietly entered another new era: what we might call her academic era. Or, perhaps, it might be more accurate to say that academia has entered its Taylor Swift Era. Either way, scholars have begun interrogating Swift with notable intensity, as demonstrated by the influx of calls for edited collections, international conferences (including this one), and undergraduate courses explicitly centered upon Swift.
I began teaching a Taylor Swift-themed section of first-year writing amidst this surge in academic engagement with Swift’s work–an interest that has also received some significant pushback.
I argue that placing Taylor Swift in conversation with writing curriculum serves a productively disruptive, distinctly feminist, purpose. A Taylor Swift theme can help create feminist writing classrooms, as it embraces multimodality, takes emotion and students’ everyday lives seriously–positioning them as sources of knowledge–and promotes a process-driven approach to writing. This paper will be rooted in feminist pedagogical scholarship (hooks, Micciche, Glenn), along with my own experience teaching a Taylor Swift course. A sample lesson plan on using “All Too Well” to teach editing will be provided and practiced.
The promise of feminist pedagogy is one of hope–it is the belief that our visions of teaching, of rhetoric, of our students, of ourselves can be bigger, and fuller. It is difficult work, but worthy work. To do it well, we must use every tool at our disposal, and in this rhetorical moment, Taylor Swift is a powerful tool for changing our classrooms in meaningful ways.
'Fuck the Patriarchy': A Taylor Swift Conference 