Something different bloomed
writing in my room...

A collection of my essays and other writings regarding Taylor Swift, fandom, and celebrity culture. For essays written by other people, see my bookshelf.

The Invention of Homosexuality, Privatization of Sex, and Taylor Swift is an essay that I wrote for an undergraduate queer theory course about Kaylor as a social phenomenon in the historical context of shifting definitions of sexual identity and the blurring of the private and public spheres.

"The tendency to speculate about people’s sexualities is a fairly modern invention. As queer theorist David M. Halperin explains, before the invention of the term “homosexuality” in 1892, same-sex desire was understood as an aspect of sexual inversion, which “referred to a broad range of deviant gender behavior, of which homosexual desire was only a logical but indistinct aspect.” Homosexuality, on the other hand, specifically focuses on “sexual object choice,” therefore reflecting a “major reconceptualization of the nature of human sexuality, its relation to gender, and its role in one’s social definition (34).” He explains that isolating sexuality from gender created a sexual taxonomy which placed people in exclusive binary categories characterized by the gender of one’s partners. According to Halperin, the creation of this taxonomy inspired “the multiplication of techniques for deciphering what a person’s sexual orientation ‘really’ was -- independent, that is, of beguiling appearances” (35). Therefore, the desire to speculate about a person’s sexual orientation is a modern phenomenon as the ability to classify sexuality according to sexual object choice did not exist until the nineteenth century. If Swift was not a modern celebrity, her writing and her relationships with women would be understood in a completely different way."