Taylor Swift, Innocence, and Normativity

• Forever Adolescence: Taylor Swift, Eroticized Innocence, and Performing Normativity is a thesis by Valerie Pollock at Georgia State University in 2014.
• It explores how Taylor Swift's widely circulated image adheres to guidelines for "appropriate" girlhood, innocence, and feminine performance.
• It grapples with Swift's image as an artist and addresses how she often stands in as the example for imagined "appropriate" femininity.
• Swift's image relies on ideas about innocence and normativity that are directly linked to markers of whiteness without ever having to explicitly name it.
• Swift's performance of normativity and the success she has achieved is an example of how understandings of agency and where it can be located can be complicated.
• Index words: Innocence, Whiteness, Normativity, Taylor Swift, Eroticization, Performance.

The Framework for Innocent's Sweetheart

• Taylor Swift is a twenty-four-year-old country/pop star who was born and raised near Wyomissing, Pennsylvania before moving to Nashville at fourteen.
• Swift released her first single "Tim McGraw" at sixteen and has released an album every other year since then, becoming a spokesperson for brands like CoverGirl and Keds.
• Her net worth is estimated at around $105 million.
• Swift is heralded as "every girl's best friend" with an image that is nonthreatening, innocent, polite, and appropriate for young girlhood.
• In an interview with the New Yorker, Swift said that "the best musical experience is 'hearing a song by somebody singing about their life, and it resembles yours so much that it makes you feel comforted."
• Video journals give fans a personalized insight into her diary-like confessions, where they can leave comments professing their admirations and connection to her.
• Swift is the youngest artist to be awarded Entertainer of the Year by the Country Music Association, the youngest artist to win Album of the Year at the Grammys, and Billboard's youngest ever Woman of the Year.
• Some critiques of "contemporary youth culture construct childhood innocence as nostalgic, white, middle-class, static, and passive".

Women in Country Music

• For Cecelia Tichi, the significance of country music is tied to an attachment to patriotism, with "country [being] synonymous with nation.
• Commercial country music began in the 1920s and has changed to identify shifting periods in American culture.
• The 1930s and 40s brought about "hillbilly" music, associated with minstrelsy and the "performance of "black" and "white" rustic identities" and barn dances.
• The "Nashville Sound" of the 1950s and 60s was marked by country artists adapting their sound to fit a more popular sound.
• This led to the "Outlaw" music rebellion by artists who wanted more traditional, rough lifestyle-inspired music.
• The 1980s brought another turn back to the "Nashville Sound," a sound that now mixes in with traditional, conservative values in a post-9/11 era.
• Women have held a position within country music's popularity, but their place as chart-topping hit-makers has only taken off within the last thirty years.
• For Malone and Neal, "one of the most positive developments of the eighties and nineties was the ascendance of women entertainers.
• Dana Wiggins observes that country music females present deliberately crafted appearances, performing "gender, region, class, and race as well.
• While these female artists don't necessarily identify as feminists, their lyrics and themes have often represented "equality, empowerment, and respect for women".

Swift's Songs and Music Videos

• In You Belong With Me, Swift plays a high school aged "nerd" character.
• Swift's glasses and ponytail are exchanged for long curls and a white dress in a transformation scene in which Swift's character shows up at the school dance.
• The video ends with Swift and her crush professing their love for each other.
• Love Story resembles a modern-day telling of Romeo and Juliet.
• Swift plays Juliet, wearing a white dress throughout the video and sneaking out of her castle to meet Romeo.
• In White Horse Swift is sitting on the floor of her home crying over the boy who broke her heart.
• The lyrics for the chorus explicitly call for an acknowledgement of the disappointment of a failed fairy tale narrative.
• Swift's erotic innocence relies on the belief that she is untainted and unused, a completely pure bride-to-be.
• The theme of purity is important to Swift's performance of normativity and her whiteness.

Swift Gets Kanye'd

• The 2009 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) solidified Taylor Swift's career history because she was the first country music artist to ever win an MTV VMA award.
• Kanye West jumped on stage, took the microphone from Swift, and said, "Yo Taylor, I'm really happy for you, I'mma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.”
• The events of that night had opposite effects for Swift and Kanye.
• The public saw a confrontation between the out-of-control black man and a white girl.
• Swift's nominations and wins signaled an important crossover in her audience and fan base.
• She had released two albums, with her second album Fearless serving as an example of a teenage girl's high school timeline and journal in 2009.

Performing Normativity

• Swift's image is reliant on a constant rearticulation and repetition of specifically gendered acts.
• Swift has been able to achieve some of the greatest acknowledgements given in pop music.
• Swift's career involves a significant level of performance on and off stage, putting on shows and creates stories to entertain and to sell the meaning of her lyrics.

How Swift Compares

• Swift's nonresistance to normativity has been a main point of criticism and has set her apart from other successful females in the public eye.
• With a large majority of work on female pop musicians romanticizing resistance, artists like Swift who are viewed as not pushing boundaries are often viewed as problematic.
• In their essay "A Bit Much: Spectacle as Discursive Resistance," Shugart and Waggoner analyze Macy Gray and Gwen Stefani as examples of contemporary popular musicians who engage in "transgressive 'spectacular" female performances.

Significance of Taylor Swift

• Positioned in opposition to the successful women who are "doing feminism right" only creates a narrow understanding of feminism.
• Swift's innocence, "normalcy," and unspoken whiteness are the markers of her success.
• She has built a multi-million-dollar career out of writing about adolescent-style heartbreak, being the likeable face for several brands, and maintaining her ever-present innocent girlhood image.
• Despite the focus on female artists who overtly resist norms, Swift's girlhood innocence and effortless performance of markers of normativity have impact.