Taylor Swift and Feminist Solidarity
What does it mean for women to stick together in a postfeminist age?
Taylor Swift has come a long way since denouncing feminism all those years ago. Now more invested in incorporating feminist ideas into her public image, she’s become more inclined towards certain strands of women’s empowerment. One idea she’s latched onto though, is that of solidarity — but what does that actually mean in an era which has been characterized as postfeminist?
Last week, some tweets were exchanged between Swift and Nicki Minaj, who expressed some disdain at this year’s MTV Video Music Award nominations. She notes how influential her video for “Anaconda” (a repurposed version of “Baby Got Back”) has been in terms of its cultural durability, arguing that if she had been a white artist, she would have received a nomination for the Video of the Year award.
Instead, Taylor Swift received that nomination for her “Bad Blood” video, which had a lot of pre-release hype but was disappointingly unremarkable. Though Nicki’s tweets weren’t exactly pointing any specific fingers, Taylor took the opportunity to address the issue directly.
So what exactly is Taylor getting at here, and what does this tell us about contemporary race and gender relations as presented in the popular media?
This isn’t the first time Swift has come out with the whole “you’re not allowed to pit women against each other!!!!” thing. A while back, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler made a joke about Swift while hosting the Golden Globes 2014. The joke was essentially about how Taylor, often charactized as boy-crazy, should stay away from Michael J. Fox’s son. It wasn’t a particularly hilarious joke but it obviously riffs off Swift’s public persona as a serial dater (which is itself brings up a lot of issues about how women are portrayed in the media in terms of their heterosexual availability — a subject perhaps best left for another time).
Quoting some wise words once said to her by journalist Katie Couric, Swift’s response was that “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women.”
Okay, but Taylor, what does that actually mean?
Swift’s feminism has been described as a “one-size-fits-all” kind of feminism, but there’s more going on here. Being white, slim, heterosexual, conventionally attractive and having worked her way to economic empowerment (thanks in part to parents who had the resources to take a chance on their young talented daughter by moving to a different state so that she could work on her career), Taylor Swift perfectly fits the mould of postfeminist empowerment. I’d say that Swift embodies postfeminism par excellence due to the contradictory nature of the popular brand of feminism she adopts. Swift’s (post)feminism incorporates the legitimate feminist goal of women’s solidarity but then rejects engagement with racial issues (also a legitimate feminist goal). In this way, feminism becomes skewed to serve the privileged, with overarching capitalist aims.
In an earlier piece I outlined how postfeminism erases the idea of racial oppression by promoting a shared experience of “universal womanhood.” This means that women are only oppressed because of their gender, not other factors such as race or sexuality.
So when Taylor says to Fey and Poehler something along the lines of “you’re not being very nice to me and I think that’s unfair because we gals are supposed to stick together,” I’m inclined to give her that one. I do think there needs to be solidarity between women in a culture which so often causes rifts between them, arguably strengthening patriarchal sentiments. The joke was a bit more complicated than how Taylor was making it out to be, but I’ll give her that one nonetheless.
But Taylor’s go-to response that “we gals are supposed to stick together” takes on a very different function when considered in the context of race. Because like postfeminism, Taylor sees oppression only through the lens of gender, while Minaj speaks from the perspective of a black woman, who has a very different relationship to popular media in terms of empowerment and representation.
This is the type of racial erasure enabled by postfeminist culture. Postfeminism is in this sense post racial, in that it favors a “we’re all just human beings” or colorblind approach. By saying “we gals are supposed to stick together” (again, a legitimate feminist aim) Taylor distracts from the issue at hand — namely that black artists don’t receive the same kind of recognition as white artists do because of racism. Talking about race therefore becomes out-of-bounds. In turn, Swift’s sentiments are reinforced by the ideological machine of the mainstream press, who, through language and narrative framing, suggest that Nicki was having a go at poor Taylor, who just wants everyone to be nice.
Unfortunately we live in a world where just being nice is somewhat of a luxury (a privilege, even?). Every action carried out by every individual or institution carries some kind of political baggage. Swift’s popular feminism is problematic because it denies the existence of racial issues. It also creates a false dichotomy in which it looks like people who criticize Taylor are by default championing sexism, when really it’s not that simple.
So yes, we gals need to stick together. But there need to be more nuanced ideas of what “sticking together” actually is. White women sticking together with white women is going to be different to white women sticking together with black women. If the notion of “sticking together” eclipses real social issues, that’s not really feminism at all — that’s postfeminism.
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