Annelot Prins. Celebrity Studies. Volume 11, Issue 1, 2020.
Before Taylor Swift came out as a supporter of the Democratic Party in October 2018, the neo-Nazi and white supremacist website The Daily Stormer published 12 articles tagged ‘Taylor Swift’. The Daily Stormer was not the first to notice Swift’s ‘Aryan spirit’. In 2013, an online poster that went by the name ‘Emily Pattinson’ started creating memes with pictures of Swift and quotes by Adolf Hitler on Pinterest. At first glance, these appropriations of Swift’s persona might be interpreted as one-sided fan practices from an undesired audience. However, Swift is not merely the object of these activities. I argue that she offers ample hooks for them in her music. Swift’s star text courts and facilitates a white-supremacist reading, at the same time that it eschews the consequences of this play from her mainstream fan base. Nonetheless, it has become increasingly difficult for Swift to seize control over her star text. In a celebrity landscape so drastically changed by social media, which have destabilised older ideas of celebrity-audience interactions, a polysemic star text that declines to explicitly claim political position provides opportunities for hijacking by audiences.
In her songs and their accompanying videos, Swift’s persona is built on a highly marketable gendered, raced and classed identity, often expressed via post-racial white nostalgia and post-feminist irony that obscure the political ramifications of these commodified subjectivities with their tongue-in-cheek aesthetics. In her early work, white femininity is called upon through the presentation of Swift as virtuous fairytale princess, who wears elaborate gowns and pristine white dresses. In later videos, Swift received critique for the colonial nostalgia of music video ‘Wildest Dreams’ (2014), and her feigned amazement at black twerking butts in the music video for ‘Shake It Off’ (2014). Swift’s investment in white femininity as a cultural identity that strongly relies on Victorian notions of innocence, virtuousness, fragility and victimhood did not go unnoticed in academic work on the topic (Cullen 2016, Dubrofsky 2016, Bell 2017). Yet, it remains challenging to centre that whiteness in research.
In part, this difficulty arises as a result of whiteness’ invisibility. Whiteness is for example oftentimes masked as a non-race, or, to put it in the words of Richard Dyer, ‘when whiteness qua whiteness does come into focus, it is often revealed as emptiness, absence, denial or even a kind of death’ (Dyer 1988, p. 44, see also Hooks 1992, p. 165-178). In his foundational work on the topic, Dyer critiques how whiteness constantly reproduces itself as the norm, ‘as if it is the natural, inevitable, ordinary way of being human’ (Dyer 1988, p. 44). Dyer shows that by masking itself as a non-race, white power is secured through its insidious invisibility. When whiteness is not considered to be a racial category its racially privileged position becomes almost impossible to analyse.
But Swift’s whiteness is visible in new ways today. Dyer’s observations are complicated by the current moment, wherein white identity politics have gained momentum (Hawley 2017, Neiwert 2017, Grossberg 2018). Swift’s whiteness is noticed by not just those critiquing it from a critical race studies perspective, but also by an assembly of online trolls, white supremacists and white nationalists. In 2013, this led to the creation of ‘Taydolf Swiftler’ memes. In these memes, an image of Taylor Swift is either juxtaposed with a quote by Adolf Hitler, or conversely an image of Adolf Hitler is juxtaposed with a Taylor Swift lyric. In one instance, an image of Swift on a red carpet is for example embellished with a quote by Hitler reading ‘Pride in one’s own race is a normal and healthy sentiment’, signed with Taylor Swift’s autograph. A black and white picture of Hitler features the Taylor Swift lyric ‘It’s hard to fight when the fight ain’t fair’, signed by Adolf Hitler. The memes first started popping up on Pinterest—a visually focused Internet platform mostly known for its tame wedding planning inspirations, home decorations and recipes. It is unclear how to interpret these memes: were they leftist critiques of Swift’s investments in whiteness, alt-right trolling exercises aimed at ‘lulz,’4 or genuine right-wing embraces of Swift? They were ambiguous; a characteristic endemic to social media meme culture, while the use of irony also recalls white nationalist exploitations of online ambiguities.
Media outlets however quickly picked up on Taydolf Swiftler, effectively amplifying the spread of the memes. If the memes started as trolling culture, this would mean that Taydolf Swiftler was successful in what in trolling culture is called ‘media fuckery’—i.e. the memes were deemed marketable by click-based online media companies who jumped on the story. In her book on trolling culture, Whitney Phillips writes that reports on such stories of course serve trolls with exactly what they desire from the media: exposure and laughs—or ‘lulz’. At the same time, media outlets also win: They get the clicks that provide an audience for the much needed advertisements on their websites (Phillips 2015, p. 5-6). The feedback loop between the creators of the memes and the journalists writing about them transformed Swift’s star text, resignifying the meanings of her whiteness with every post they made.
Taydolf Swiftler had a long and complex aftermath. Facebook groups titled ‘Taylor Swift for a Fascist Europe’ seemed to multiply whenever they were taken down. The memes spread to other platforms like 4Chan and Reddit, which due to their substantial yet anonymous user groups and minimal gatekeeping facilitate more ‘troll culture’-oriented and politically subversive conversations than platforms like Facebook or Pinterest. The consequence of this is that the irony and tongue-in-cheek aesthetics of this assembly of meme makers lose the readability they may originally have had: it is impossible to tell who is speaking through these memes, with what intents.
Leveraging the undeterminable character of both the social media memes and of Swift’s star text, The Daily Stormer, deemed a neo-Nazi website according to The Southern Poverty Law Centre and run by proud white nationalist Andrew Anglin, was quick to embrace Swift. Anglin started publishing articles labelling Swift an ‘Aryan goddess’ and even used images of Swift for seemingly random articles that do not mention her name. These posts exclusively discuss racist and anti-Semitic beliefs, with a special focus on the distinct qualities of the white race. Right-wing forum Breitbart quickly followed suit, with Milo Yiannopoulos arguing that Swift has been secretly nodding to her reactionary fan base all along, using her earlier mentioned representations of white femininity as proof.
Swift’s star text, like all star texts, is polysemic. She has however never openly claimed the alt-right grammar in the ways in which celebrities like Morrissey and PewDiePie have. But it is exactly her silence, in combination with her conservative white image, which makes her such a prone victim to hijacking. Her articulations of white womanhood—especially the use of irony and nostalgia in her evocation of such femininity—unmistakenly interact with the grammar of the alt-right and white supremacists. Her star text offers hooks to those who have embraced a position of white victimhood and white dispossession. When those audiences look at Swift’s work, they read a white dispossession of power in it, tapping into the feeling of being wronged that takes centre stage in white identity politics. Once a website like Breitbart starts tweeting the lyrics of Taylor Swift’s ‘Look What You Made Me Do’, the song is recontextualised as an expression of white anger, turning it into an anthem of racial resentment. White nationalist irony, which revolves around trolling, is made to intersect productively with Swift’s ironic yet nostalgic white femininity.
Swift never spoke about the memes, though her legal team sent a Cease and Desist letter—the first step to in a defamation lawsuit—to a blogger who argued Swift supports white supremacists. The American Civil Liberties Union subsequently sent Swift’s team a letter in which they write that the blog is an exercise of free speech. ‘Criticism is never pleasant’, the ACLU writes, ‘but a celebrity has to shake it off, even if the critique may damage her reputation’ (Rischer et al. 2017, p. 2). Recently, Swift has tried to regain control over her star text by pledging her allegiance to the Democratic Party—something she had seemingly avoided throughout her entire career for fear of alienating her conservative and Republican fan base, arguably the core of her fan base since her time in country music wherein her conservative star text was shaped.8 The question remains whether or not she will be able to disentangle her star text from white nationalist and supremacist play.
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. Social media complicate irony in ways that are vulnerable to white nationalist exploitation: such memes could be alt-right efforts, but they could also be the work of trolls with widely divergent political commitments. This ambiguity means that irony becomes indistinguishable from political statements. Who is laughing at whom? What exactly can marketable whiteness be made to signify in this moment of insurgent anti-racist activism and white identity politics?