Reading Taylor Swift as a Cultural and Political Text
March 11, 2024
1 hr 4 min
8
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1,101 of 1,730
Episode 8 · March 11, 2024
Reading Taylor Swift as a Cultural and Political Text
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American Politics Episodes Around March 11, 2024
Episode 1,101 of 1,730 — walk the feed in the order it was published.
Reading Taylor Swift as a Cultural and Political Text
Summary
It’s the UConn Popcast, and Taylor Swift is by some measures the most popular person on the planet. Her periodic reinventions set the mass cultural terms of debate, and her political interventions – through exhorting her fans on social media – lead to huge spikes in voter registration. It is hoped by Democrats, and feared by Republicans, that a Taylor endorsement of Joe Biden in 2024 might meaningfully tip the scales in favor of reelection.
In this episode, we consider Taylor Swift as a popular and political text, over which she exercises substantial, but not total, authorial control. What role in the culture does she play? How should we interpret her recent association with the NFL? How do the parasocial relationships of her fans – “Swifties” – to the artist herself contribute to authorship of the Taylor text. And how should we read the counter-subversive conspiratorial responses to her halting forays into electoral politics?
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