When American professor Brian Donovan launched a video on TikTok appealing to fans of Taylor Swift who would like to be interviewed as part of the preparation of a book on their world, that of swifties, he hoped to receive around twenty responses. It ended up being a hundred times more, and the message was seen 120,000 times.
“I was reassured about the interest of the subject,” said Duty the professor at the University of Kansas, specializing in the sociology of culture. He is continuing to write his essay this winter, during a sabbatical year.
A specialist in the phenomenon of celebrity, he created it two years ago and has since twice offered a course entirely devoted to Taylor Swift. Some literature departments, including in Canada, already give lessons on the texts of his many songs. Unless I’m mistaken, the course devoted to an analysis of “Swiftism” from a sociological point of view is unique in the world.
There is never anything ordinary with this megastar breaking records one by one. She was in Tokyo on Friday as part of a world tour described as the first to rake in a billion big U.S. dollars in revenue. Two weeks ago, she became the first artist to win four Grammy trophies for album of the year.
This weekend, her fans are likely to increase the total number of viewers tuned in to follow the Super Bowl game in Las Vegas – and especially the slightest appearances of their queen on the screen – and thus generate a new peak . The Kansas City Chiefs, team of her lover, Travis Kelce, face the San Francisco 49ers.
A disco ball
Brian Donovan will also watch the game. He explains that the atmosphere is electrifying in his neck of the woods these days: the main campus of the University of Kansas is in Lawrence, Kansas, between the capital Topeka and the Missouri city of Kansas City. The professor also specifies that he indeed chose his new and exciting subject before the media madness surrounding the power couple formed by the performer and the Chiefs footballer. Academics have also been able to follow and analyze the exponential influence of this new development in recent months.
“Three years ago, Taylor Swift began to find herself at the center of discussions in my sociology of culture course,” explains the man who decided to devote an entire first term to her the following year. He retaught the course The Sociology of Taylor Swift last fall and in two versions, one in a seminar restricted to graduate cycles and another in an amphitheater. The reaction from the students was very strong. It is now the most popular course in the Department of Sociology.
“This seminar uses the life and career of Taylor Swift as a disco ball to provoke thoughts about large-scale processes such as the culture industry, celebrity and fandom [la communauté de fans], as well as the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary American life,” summarizes the lesson plan distributed to the students, who are in fact mostly female students. “We will explore several fundamental topics in the sociology of culture, including the construction of authenticity, symbolic boundaries and control, fandom and fan work, as well as celebrity politics. »
An absolute substitution
That said, Mr. Donovan, a doctor in sociology, always begins his lectures by explaining that the registrants’ passion for the pop star will not exempt them from working hard and accepting the confrontation of critical points of view from their idol. . The sociologist himself swiftie assumed for years, develops a Durkheim-like perspective on the large and complex subject. In the sense that, for him, a society is above all “a set of ideas, beliefs, feelings of all kinds” which are realized by individuals and their interactions with each other, now overstimulated by social networks.
“I’m interested in this kind of collective joy that binds fans together,” he says. I observe how their one-way vertical relationships with Taylor Swift create a basis for lateral social connections that sustain them in life. In sociology, we are used to emphasizing suffering and inequalities. My main goal with this sociological research is to show the positive aspects of a fan group’s subculture [le fandom]. This community has its own life and generates an incredible energy which creates a rare feeling of belonging. I don’t mean it has nothing to do with Taylor Swift. Obviously, she is adored, put on a pedestal. But ultimately, it’s the feeling of friendship and sharing that holds the fan community together. »
He even sees in it a sort of absolute substitution, of small transcendence, in any case, a “quasi-religious” attitude. The most serious followers study the idol’s texts, adopt certain rituals. The professor says that the promotional merchandise (the t-shirts, in particular) is then used for swifties to recognize each other. They can then talk to each other spontaneously using what the pros call a “ fanlect “, a fan dialect, often peppered with extracts from songs from the large Swiftian corpus.
We saw others, with Elvis or the Beatles. The same condescending and sometimes misogynistic reproaches of collective hysteria were also addressed to the fans of these pop idols of yesteryear. The professor points out that the fans know they’re overdoing it, since it’s part of the game.
And then Taylor Swift, unlike Madonna or Miley Cyrus, for example, does not focus on sexuality, does not appear first and foremost as a sex symbol. “His image is not aimed at the heterosexual male gaze. Its image is first and foremost one of reliability. This is what makes her so attractive to young women. She’s not trying to be sexy for the boys. She tries to establish a relationship with the other girls. »
The extreme center
But hey, the most popular girl at the world’s biggest school still embodies the cliché by dating the most popular football player of the moment. This passionate affair gives rise to conspiratorial exegeses, which see in particular in the golden couple a creation of the Pentagon dedicated to promoting the Democratic candidacy in the next elections, if by chance Taylor Swift and her chum supported Joe Biden.
This delusional reading stems from the observation of his immense and potentially decisive popularity in politics. In fact, Taylor Swift’s positions are a little left of center on the ideological-political spectrum. Above all, she has cultural capital even more extensive than her bank account which explains the desire of all camps to attract or repel her, even if it means that absurd stories are invented about her.
“I find it especially remarkable that she has managed to avoid getting stuck in the discourses of the American culture wars so far,” says Professor Donovan in conclusion. This position began to change about a month ago. Her notoriety is so great, now politicians and political commentators know they can gain attention just by talking about her. »