Midnights, Madness, and the Feminist Antiheroism of Taylor Swift

𝐌𝐢𝐝𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬, 𝐌𝐚𝐝𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐀𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐨𝐢𝐬𝐦 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐚𝐲𝐥𝐨𝐫 𝐒𝐰𝐢𝐟𝐭
This talk dives deep into the feminism of Taylor Swift, one of the most influential artists of the 21st century.
Often identified as championing feminist causes through her vocal support of other female artists, songs such as ‘The Man’, and her pioneering decision to re-record her masters, Swift’s work is also irrigated by more subtle currents of feminism, with long literary and cultural histories.
Focusing on certain recurring tropes and themes from Swift’s music, performances, and public persona, literary scholar Elly McCausland examines how the singer situates herself in relation to a long genealogy of real and fictional ‘mad women’ whose societal non-conformity manifests through their apparent inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality.
With her work recalling literary figures such as Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham, Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Mason and Lucy Snowe, Tennessee Williams’s Blanche DuBois, and the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), Swift frequently identifies herself with unhinged outliers who trouble social expectations of womanhood and whose resistance is framed in terms of insanity. “Have they come to take me away,” she even ponders in ‘Hits Different’, evoking tropes of institutionalisation.
In the talk ‘Midnights, Madness, and the Feminist Antiheroism of Taylor Swift’, McCausland argues that in acknowledging and even embracing her own ‘madness’, Taylor Swift argues for its potential: Her work posits the hazy space between fantasy and reality as a liminal zone that is highly conducive to creativity, empowerment, and subversion.

𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐄𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐌𝐜𝐂𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐝
Elly McCausland is a professor of English Literature at Ghent University, Belgium. A self-proclaimed Swiftie, she is the driving force behind Literature (Taylor's Version): a course offering “an in-depth look at key themes, topics, genres and techniques from English literature (c.900-1900) via the lens of modern popular music; specifically, the work of Taylor Swift.” McCausland’s blog Swifterature further explores the interconnection between Taylor Swift’s work and the techniques, traditions, and tropes of English literature.

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