Now I've read all of the books beside your bed...

A collection of books, articles, videos, documentaries, podcasts, etc. related to Taylor Swift, celebrity culture, and fandom. Contrary to the lyrical title, I have not necessarily read all of these — some I have read many times, others I read some time ago and need to revisit, others are on my reading list and/or were contributed by site readers. Have any suggestions? Email me at neoswiftology@gmail.com or send me an ask on tumblr! Also get in touch if you have trouble getting access to any of these, I am happy to help!

Books and Journals

Celebrity Studies is a peer reviewed journal that focuses on critical exploration of fame and celebrity using a range of interdisciplinary sources, media forms, and historical and social contexts.

Chapters, Articles, and Essays

Queer folklore: Examining the Influence of Fandom on Sexual Identity Development and Fluidity Acceptance Among Taylor Swift Fans (2022) by Leah Dajches and Jennifer Stevens Aubrey is an academic article that analyzes the relationship between fandom, oppositional readings of Swift's work, and sexual identity and acceptance. They found through a survey of Swifties who identify as women active in online fandom spaces that engaging in queer readings of Swift's work is correlated with positive identity development among queer fans and greater acceptance of sexual fluidity among fans across identities.

On good girls and woke white women: Miss Americana and the performance of popular white womanhood (2022) is a brief academic article by Annelot Prins reflecting on 2020 Netflix documentary Miss Americana, how Taylor Swift frames her desire to be seen as good, and how that intertwines with traditional ideas of white womanhood changing in a neoliberal society. This piece is building on an earlier article by Prins about how Swift's embodiment of white femininity made her image appealing to white nationalists in spite of her progressive political views ( Click here jump to my summary of that article). The author notes that Swift taking control of her political advocacy and career more generally is an expectation of women celebrities which is then used to accuse them of inauthenticity and manipulation. I want to do my own analysis of Miss Americana and Swift's embodiment of white femininity, and Prins's work is a wonderful foundation for that type of project.

I Don't Give a Damn About Your Bad Reputation: Taylor Swift, Beyoncé Knowles, and Performance (2021) by Gina Arnold is an academic article that compares Taylor Swift's Reputation Stadium Tour with Beyoncé's Homecoming, both long-form videos of music performances by groundbreaking female solo artists released to Netflix that made a significant impact on their fans and the surrounding culture. She focuses on how the two artists perform authenticity and how their performances reflect the changing landscape of race and gender in American culture. While I found her analysis to be overly unsympathetic to Swift at time, it remains a profoundly interesting exploration of Swift's positionality as a white businesswoman and performer whose hypervisibility is a double-edged sword.

At the same time, Swift's tightly choreographed Reputation tour is a perfect representation of her art. It melds together her persona, best-known music, and most importantly, her vision of herself, and it is a carefully presented showcase of all that she thinks is best about her art. But though the shows on the tour, and this, the video of one of them, are certainly absorbing, what is most striking are the themes that are brought out by Swift, both in her monologues and in the staging of her songs. If her two hour-plus performance is treated as a text, the arc of its narrative is not so much about love as it is about success. In Reputation, Swift makes her success in the field of music visible. And this creates a problematic dynamic, because it is very difficult to subsume your art in values that encourage young women to be beautiful, and helpless, and in thrall to heteronormative romance while simultaneously trying to show them that you are a powerful woman, with the same goals and aspirations as men. Phelan's warning that visibility can incur voyeurism and surveillance is almost unnecessary here, as, in this instance, both things are self-inflicted and self-directed, and Swift's complicity in this desire to be observed, judged, and surveilled is total. And yet, surely the dissonance between the audience's adoration of her and her constant, nervous self-reassurance is a vision of disempowerment? (p. 5)

Reputation matters: parasocial attachment, narrative engagement, and the 2018 Taylor Swift political endorsement (2021) by Gwendelyn Nisbett and Stephanie Schartel Dunn is an academic article exploring how the parasocial attachment experienced by Taylor Swift fans facilitated political participation following her 2018 Instagram post endorsing the Democratic Party and condemning Marsha Blackburn.

From awkward teen girl to aryan goddess meme: Taylor Swift and the hijacking of star texts (2020) is an academic article by Annelot Prins analyzing how Taylor Swift's persona is built on a specific racial, gender, and class positionality which "post-racial white nostalgia and post-feminist irony that obscure the political ramifications of these commodified subjectivities with their tongue-in-cheek aesthetics," which enabled white nationalist trolls to claim Swift as an icon in spite of her vocal support of the Democratic party. She analyzes how Swift's music and persona, referred to as a "star text," contain multiple meanings, allowing her portrayal of white femininity, victimhood, karma, and reputation to be interpreted critically from a critical race theory perspect and be celebrated by white nationalist groups. While the article is brief, it is a brilliant articulation of a lot of thoughts I've been having about how Swift embodies white femininity and how celebrity persona has become divorced from the identity and desires of the celebrity concerned.

What the appropriation of Swift – and the ease with which this could be done – shows is that the impact of social media on star texts can hardly be underestimated, and must be understood specifically in terms of a loss of agency of the culture industries constructing these star texts. In the age of social media, celebrities like Taylor Swift have to grapple with this lack of control as audiences explore the digital possibilities offered to them. While the invisible yet highly profitable political undeterminedness of whiteness has long been an asset to Swift, the currently highly politicised US landscape means that polysemic and ambiguous star texts like hers are especially ripe for hijacking. The hijacking of not just specific star texts, but also larger emancipatory discourses of social justice movements, often through irony as an aesthetic tool to render these discourses eligible for lulz or chaos, needs to be theorised further. (p. 146)

The passing of the postmodern in pop? Epochal consumption and marketing from Madonna, through Gaga, to Taylor (2020) by Brendan Canavana and Claire McCamley is an academic article that uses the lyrics of pop musicians to examine the idea that we are transitioning from a postmodern culture to a post-postmodern culture.

Song lyrics of prominent pop music artists, Madonna and Taylor Swift, are suggested to illustrate respective characteristics. Lady Gaga is held up as an intermediary between Madonna's deconstructive and Taylor's reconstructive selves...The rise of Taylor Swift as a post-postmodern paragon provides insight into where the post-postmodern turn might be observed and how it may impact marketing theory and practice. (from the abstract)

Reading real person fiction as digital fiction (2018) by Judith Fathallah is an academic article which argues that, in order to fully understand the phenomenon of real person fiction (RPF), one must use the tools created by scholars of digital fiction. Digital fiction is defined as fictional work created to be read on a computer which would lose its value or funcationality if removed from the digital context. Imagine fanfiction without author's notes, tags, and comments — it becomes a fundamentally different text. The majority of contemporary fanfiction, including those featuring real people as characters, can be considered a form of digital fiction, and Fathallah argues that fanfiction utilizes metalepsis, a self-concious movement between levels of reality, in which the meta experience of collaborating, commenting, editing, searching, and tagging on fanfiction platforms constitutes an additonal narrative that interacts with the primary narrative in complex ways. These levels of reality are complicated further in RPF, as writers argue that they are engaging with mediated representations of the celebrities rather than the actual celebrities themselves. This is a spectacular read that introduced me to the concept of metalepsis, and as someone enamored by how postmodern literature plays with themes of reality and narrative structure, I cannot wait to explore these ideas more. Fathallah also has a book all about fanfiction and the author where she calls for a Foucauldian perspective toward fanfiction which embraces it as a discursive practice capable of both subverting and reinforcing dominant cultural narratives, so I hope to review that soon.

'Jensen Ackles is a (homophobic) douchebag': the 'politics of slash' in debates on a TV star's homophobia (2017) is an academic article by Joseph Brennan that analyzes DataLounge threads debating whether or not Supernatural star Jensen Ackles is homophobic based on his distaste for slash culture within the fandom. Brennan builds upon this analysis to develop a politics of slash which positions m/m slash fiction against queerbaiting, arguing that this discourse is less concerned with Ackles himself but rather with larger debates surrounding queer suggestion and visibility. He also considers how these communities are largely comprised on women writing about m/m relationships, many of whom are less concerned with representation and more interested in a romantic pleasurable storytelling practice. This often leads to the conflict being framed as misogynistic gay men versus homophobic straight women, another example of the false binaries constructed by the politics of slash.

The Innocent and the Runaway: Kanye West, Taylor Swift, and the Cultural Politics of Racial Melodrama (2016) by Shaun Cullen is an academic article that provides a brilliant exploration of the 2009 VMAS incident between Taylor Swift and Kanye West, how both artists responded after the event, and how it interplays with cultural narratives of racial melodrama. This article was published February 17, 2016, meaning it would have been written and sent to publication before the release of West's Famous or any of the drama that came from it, although it is an eerie coincidence that this article and that song were released in the same week. I think this article is a fascinating look into the race and gender dynamics of the Swift/West feud and the public response to it. It also highlights how Swift embodies certain ideals of white femininity, an idea that I hope to explore in detail soon. In 2022, everybody knows Kanye West is a shitty person, so we seem to have moved on from this conversation, but I still find it extremely interesting. I definitely want to revisit this article when Speak Now (Taylor's Version) and reputation (Taylor's Version) come out.

Persona studies: Mapping the proliferation of the public self (2014) by P David Marshall is an academic article that argues in favor of the development of persona studies, "where research on the celebrity is a subset of a wider study of how the self and public intersect and produce versions and identities that in some way continue to support the wider demands of our work economies."

'Shipping bullshit': Twitter rumours, fan/celebrity interaction and questions of authenticity (2014) by Helena Louise Dare-Edwards is a brief article providing a critical analysis of a series of Tweets sent by Louis Tomlinson in 2012 addressing the Larry Stylinson fandom and their popularity on Twitter. The article does not explore the Larry fandom in depth, but the author provides some clever insights as to how fan reactions to this tweet illustrate their conceptualizations of authenticity and performance. While this article focuses entirely on Larry, the behavior she describes is commonly seen among Gaylors and among Swifties more generally.

The 'bullshit tweet' and several others in the series contain minor errors; yet, seemingly aware of this as a marker of authenticity, some fans suggest this may be an intentional ploy by management tweeters to create such an illusion. The strategies of reversal that Larry fans employ here highlight the veritable instability of the markers of authenticity. Since many markers can be easily imitated by anyone, they can also be purposefully utilised in order to suggest authenticity, even in its absence. (p. 522)

Documentaries, Films, and Videos

The Public Dystopia of Queer Speculation (2022) is a YouTube video essay by Rowan Ellis analyzing the phenomenon of queer speculation and queerbaiting and how it harms the targets of those activities as well as participants and bystanders, contextualized within the history of outing and queer celebrity icons. She specifically focuses on the outing of Heartstopper actor Kit Connor and the speculation surrounding Taylor Swift and Harry Styles. She argues that, while this speculation often seems harmless to the participant, it risks forcing people to come out to avoid harrassment and invasions of privacy, harming people's personal identity development and relationships, and reinforcing the harmful idea that we are entitled to know a person's sexual identity.

Anthony Bourdain - A Love Song (2021) is a YouTube documentary by Lola Sebastian exploring their personal parasocial relationship with Anthony Bourdain, Bourdain's legacy, and the nature of fame and celebrity. I do not know if Sebastian would consider this a documentary, but considering that it is the length of a feature film and explores parasociality with a level of nuance I have not seen elsewhere on the internet, I feel confident placing it in this category. They analyze how parasocial relationships distort fans' perceptions of their fave celeb and how that relationship is commodified, particularly in the context of the death of a beloved cultural figure. They also note that parasocial relationships are inevitable in contemporary society and that the term seems to be applied unevenly, with women's celebrity interests being dismissed and derided as parasocial while men engaging in similar behavior regarding sports stars rarely receive the same swift diagnosis and scrutiny. Lola Sebastian is easily one of my favorite people making video essays; while this is my favorite of their videos, I highly recommend the rest of their channel. They also have a video about the cultural legacy of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita that is relevant to this project - in fact, it was the video that taught me everybody's favorite buzzword, "parasocial."

The Systemic Abuse of Celebrities (2021) is a YouTube video essay by Broey Deschanel addressing the exploitation and abuse that celebrities are subjected to and deconstructs the idea that fame equates with wealth and power.

Miss Americana (2020) is a Netflix documentary directed by Lana Wilson exploring Taylor Swift's life and career, particularly reflecting on the aftermath of her 2016 cancellation, her mental health, and her political views. It provides a fascinating look into how fame has affected Swift's life, freezing her at the age she became famous, in her words. I am sure I will write many an essay about this film for this website.

Podcasts

You're Wrong About is a podcast hosted by Sarah Marshall that revisits misremembered people and events throughout history and casts them in a new light. While they have never covered Taylor Swift specifically, the show talks a lot about celebrity culture and especially the way the media distorts our perception of famous women, and their work has significantly affected how I think about Swift and celebrity more generally. Some episodes I find relevant to this project are the OJ Simpson series, the Princess Diana series, the Jessica Simpson memoir deep dive, the trilogy about The Chicks, cancel culture, and the Iraq war, the two-parter about Tanya Harding, and the episodes about Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great, Yoko Ono, and Courtney Love.

What I Will Say is a podcast run by Cam, one of my Tumblr mutuals, that covers pop culture, gossip, and celebrities. While it started out primarily as a Gaylor project, it has expanded out from there into a fun little community that covers a lot of different topics. Cam also made the Swiftgron masterpost that we will be discussing over in Wonderland soon.

Taydar was a podcast hosted by Hattie Hayes and Sarah Kennedy about all things Gaylor. Their last release was in July 2020, so I think they're inactive now. While I no longer agree with most of the theories they discuss and find some of the people they platform problematic, the pod was a big part of my Gaylor journey, so I wanted to include it for completeness.

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