#whether taylor is actually queer is also irrelevant to this

[godofsmallthings]

i wish i could take the time to parse through my taylor swift is/isn't a gay icon thoughts on here but i fear people on this website don't know how to behave

#like she isn't a gay icon. but she is a lesbian icon? but like in different ways than gay icons have historically been gay icons #basically what i'm trying to say is that her status as a lesbian icon has literally nothing to do with her interactions with the lesbian #community. like i don't feel particularly revered or nurtured by her in the way someone like gaga has taken the time to #actually sit with and deliberately cater to gay culture for example #like it's different. #and almost entirely fandom-led #whether taylor is actually queer is also irrelevant to this #am i making any sense? #like okay i think you could argue she did a little bit of it in 2019 but we all know how that felt/came across #she's better at being a gay icon when she's explicitly not including the queer community in her work or acknowledging them in any way #because it's literally not of her own volition #and i'm honestly not convinced it's an aspect of her art or fanbase she considers #sometimes it feels like it actively makes her uncomfortable #and yet she really has become entrenched in modern day lesbian pop culture iconography in these last few years #anyway this isn't me Saying Anything. i'm just thinking about it #vi is typing...

[bisluthq]

What do you know or think about the theory Taylor being queer? Personally some of her moves and songs always give me fruity vibe👀

This is gonna be a long answer and my first impulse was to say let’s just… not. But I actually have thoughts. History of this blog and my prior interest in Gaylor notwithstanding, it’s not really a theory. I’m actually growing increasingly uncomfortable by the use of the word theory to describe interpretations of songs - to me what a lot of people call “theories” are in fact subjective (often creative and genuinely interesting) interpretations.

The thing about theories is they are ways of explaining aspects of the world around us (whether on a scientific or social level) and can hypothetically be proven to be correct or in some cases be disproven. Theories in the humanities and social sciences are hard to disprove entirely but also tbh can be (eg trickle down economics is a theory that has been disproven). Interpretations are ways of understanding things subjective to our own knowledge, opinions, and the theories we subscribe to which is what lyric analysis always is. It can never be anything other than an interpretation. That’s why when we analyze texts we can say “I’m using X theory to INTERPRET this work in this way” but we can’t say “this is my theory born of this one work (or this one body of work)”. That doesn’t make sense. This is VERY relevant to queer interpretations of Taylor’s music.

When I was in undergrad, one of our setworks was Jane Eyre. The lecturer - a gay man - used queer theory and a queer lens to interpret it. Now, he made a good case for why it can be interpreted that way but like you know what he didn’t do? He didn’t say “Jane Eyre canon lesbo Charlotte Brontë big ole dyke”. That’s not necessary to do in order to say “here are queer themes we can find in this very rich and layered text but if you’d rather write about it from a traditional feminist perspective or if you’d rather talk about the treatment of Bertha as being from the colonies and thus the subaltern or if you’d like to consider autobiographical elements such as CB’s time in boarding schools and her experiences as a governess then you’re wrong”. All of those are valid interpretations of the text, and many can co-exist, but none are definitive nor are they tbh theories. When we did The Tempest, we did it through a post-colonial/decolonial lens and focused on Caliban as essentially the most sympathetic character/hero of the play but again no one went “Shakespeare anti-racist king” because like it’s the text that can be interpreted that way and whatever Shakespeare meant by it - which tbf and I did my MEd on teaching Shakespeare so I thought a lot about ways to teach him and also what he meant while writing this shit as a result and tbh I don’t think he thought very much like I think he was mostly just vibing and selling tickets - is irrelevant. It’s how one reads it and interprets it that matters.

So if you look at a song like Dorothea for example where you have a relationship between a narrator and the titular character that’s somewhat secretive and disapproved of by Dorothea’s mother, and where the narrator feels they’re the only people who truly understood each other, and feels that Dorothea is running away from her past and you say “I see queer themes in this” - well, so do I. If you look at that same song and make a class interpretation where it’s a commentary on social statuses well, yeah I get that too. Neither of those interpretations reflect on Taylor nor does it matter what Taylor meant because both are valid. Saying “I think Taylor dated a girl called Dorothea in high school” is not an interpretation nor is it a theory it’s just wilding. Saying “Dorothea is about Selena Gomez” is also not an interpretation or a theory, it is once again just wilding and talking to talk.

What I’m saying is queer analysis of Taylor’s lyrics is not weird or wrong because she has a large body of work that can be interpreted in a myriad ways. Now that it’s actively being taught in literature departments, I guarantee eloquent queer interpretations will be put forth in some of those spaces. Taylor’s preoccupations with secrecy, forbidden love, and a deeply feminized perspective absolutely lend themselves to queer interpretation.

NOW that we’ve gone through that side of things - which essentially addressed the “fruity vibes” you have (again justifiably) noted in her songs - let’s deal with what I think about Taylor “being queer”. What I KNOW, because Taylor went to CNN and told them so, is she does not identify as queer. She identifies as straight. She does not feel comfortable, in fact she feels actively uncomfortable, about speculation otherwise. She said this. Case closed. Done. Story’s finished. It’s not a 👀 thing. If a person blatantly says “I don’t like you talking about my sexuality” you stop doing it because sexual identity is a very personal thing. Doesn’t matter why they’re uncomfortable, but it’s not a boundary that’s okay to push past once that has been set. Taylor seemed cool with encouraging speculation for a while there, and then she changed her mind. She is an ally, she supports queer fans, she definitely wouldn’t mind the gay Dorothea thing I outlined above or a gay couple dancing to Lover at their wedding or a gay cover of a song of hers with changed pronouns (or a man singing one with the original he pronouns), but she does not identify as queer and she doesn’t like speculation to the point of going to CNN to say so and y’all just need to stop ✋🏼