Taylor Swift, Gender, and Feminism: What Do the Data Say?

In the world of Swiftian scholarship, several scholars have credited Taylor Swift with feminist impact, while others have criticized both her type of feminism and claims to be a feminist. Many arguments rest on a narrow group of protest songs (“The Man”, “You Need To Calm Down”, and “Only The Young”) and a short period of Swift’s career in which she made many paratextual political gestures (2019-2020). However, claims about a songwriter’s feminism (or lack thereof) will be more accurate, robust, and nuanced if they draw on data from her whole career. This article provides the first systematic survey of gendered, feminist, and sexist content in Swift’s discography. Using discourse analysis, I examined the song lyrics, music videos, and official lyric videos in Swift’s discography to identify patterns in her treatment of feminist and gendered topics, themes, and mechanisms. I assigned codes to each theme, trope, and mechanism, and recorded all the instances of each code that I found in each song. I then graphed the data to identify trends and patterns, and analyzed them to answer research questions: is Taylor Swift feminist? (How) has her engagement with gender developed? What aspects of feminism does she engage with and what mechanisms does she deploy? This article presents the methodology and results of the study. By cataloguing Swift’s presentation of distinct gendered roles and behaviors, her critique of prescribed gender roles, and examples of her own reproduction of sexist ideology, I identified patterns and variations in Swift’s treatment of topics relevant to feminism specifically and gender more generally. This discography-wide survey enables scholars to draw data-based conclusions about Swift’s feminism, treatments of gender more neutrally, and possible endorsement of sexist ideology.