Lover In Plain Sight: Taylor Swift and the Dichotomy Between Inherently Queer Female Experiences and Heterosexual Romantic Idealization
“We’re a crooked love in a straight line down / makes you want to run and hide.” –I Wish You Would, 1989
“Life makes love look hard.” –Ours, Speak Now
“I knew there was no one in the world who could take it / I had a bad feeling.” –Dancing With Our Hands Tied, Reputation
“Running scared, I was there, I remember it.” –All Too Well, Red
Secrecy, fear, and the fragility of love are consistent themes throughout most of Taylor Swift’s discography, starting with Speak Now. (Her self-titled debut album is widely understood to be more about the idea of love itself, rather than personal stories of her own.) But why? For a straight white girl from Pennsylvania, who has historically dated the same type of interchangeable white man, Taylor Swift has objectively never been oppressed in the act of love. Her love has never had to fight for its rights. In fact, for all intents and purposes, Taylor Swift’s love is the type of love that is celebrated: it’s straight, and it’s white. Yet her music tells a different story: looking at her lyrics, one would think and Taylor Swift spent the majority of her life being persecuted for her love. She writes about her love being “wrong.” She writes about hiding her love until the dark hours of the night, the only time she believes it to be safe. She writes about being afraid of love almost as much as she writes about enjoying it.
As a straight, white girl from Pennsylvania, Taylor Swift’s narrative of love makes absolutely no sense - unless one of those descriptions isn’t true. And she’s definitely white.
I propose that the love Taylor Swift writes about - falling in love with your best friend; the raw vulnerability of realizing you’re in love with someone you shouldn’t be in love with; and the ever-present, wildly intimate and intense levels of emotion in the relationships she’s portraying - is actually a near-perfect representation of how queer women experience love and relationships, and the “heterosexuality” straight people perceive is the exact same kind of Hollywood-type romance that they’ve spent years deeming as rare and idealized. It is neither of those things. It’s just female and queer.
Rather than subscribing to the notion that Taylor Swift has been able to write almost bizarrely passionate love songs about men she “dated” for three months apiece, in this essay I will
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