Of Folksongs and Feral Children: Taylor Swift’s White Settler Womanhood
BY ERIN MORTON
The romance of a white woman’s settler childhood seems innocuous enough when sung in a Taylor Swift lyric. After all, who could fault her for a memory of swinging in the trees over a creek at age seven, “too scared to jump in”? “Please picture me in the trees // with Pennsylvania under me,” sings Swift, as she laments lost loves and childhood friendships of rural U.S. America. Disconnected from the pressures of adult womanhood, Swift’s 2020 hit album Folklore returns her to playing in the weeds of her white settler girlhood, the storytelling site of a simpler time and place “before I learned civility.” The land romanced as a folk song turned mass-media pop album acts as both memory and mimesis for childhood girl innocence. It becomes a placid backdrop to settler experience, rather than a source of settler colonial capitalist accumulation accomplished through the cis-heteronormative making of white femininity.
Settler colonialism’s seemingly romantic placidity and everyday gendered innocuousness is the lure that makes Folklore such consumable pop media: Swift, a wild girl without a care in the world, who “used to scream ferociously // Any time I wanted,” unwinds and unravels in the forest. This feral freedom came before she grew up in the white settler woman’s modern world – a world full of cis-heteropatriarchal expectations that made her a “mad,” “crazy” woman whose face appears to her ex-lover “in the neighbour’s lawn.” One could even extend these autobiographical readings of song lyrics to stand in for a broader notion of the white settler feminine, especially since Swift readily denies that she is the character behind the songs’ stories. Yet through the pretense of the folk song, Swift returns all white settler women to saner folkloric memories, where men tilled land under the guise of ownership, their wives spun wool into cardigans, and their lore became the repetitive daily rhythm of colonial capitalism [2]. If media scholars of folk music revivalists have noted that “folk and machine were often one in the same” [3], the white settler colonial feminine reimagined as the feral rural girl offers a parallel corollary. What came first, the “mad woman” or the feral girl, and which is a purer construction of a white settler state to rub up against your neighbour’s fence post?
Where Folklore’s lyrics evoke agrarian settler childhood memories through storytelling, the album’s visuals reflect the fabricated colonial dreamscapes of Instagram. The various album and single covers feature black and white photographs of the braided-haired singer sitting against a tree, standing in the forest, and immersed in a field. Swift clads herself in knitwear (cardigans), lace, and floral dresses. Never mind that a Black woman-owned company, The Folklore, came up with these cardigan logos, first: white girls like Taylor are good, and anyway they didn’t mean to culturally appropriate [4]. Combined with Swift’s lyrics, these clothing designs and album visuals embed her in the childhood wilderness of settler imaginations and a rural “#cottagecore” aesthetic, which equates “rural life with a perfect past, glorifying the domestic role of women, and insisting that it is ‘wholesome by definition’” [5]. Responding to a fan on Twitter who missed Folklore’s surprise drop, Swift quips, “We are all somber woodland fairies now. Feel free to grab a wicker basket and join us!” [6]. The childhood wild becomes a settler homesteader foraging the landscape, a land later tamed, cultivated, and loved despite a constant longing to escape from one colonial fantasy to another: “Pack your dolls and a sweater,” she tells her childhood companion in “Seven,” “we’ll move to India forever. Passed down like folk songs, the love lasts so long.” From Pennsylvania to India, white women like Swift play, dance, travel, forage, gather, take, erase, and steal, all-the-while reimagining their childhood homelands and foreign escapes as simultaneous places of constraint and freedom.
Swift has only to return to her girlhood in the meadow or the forest to escape the normative constraints of white settler femininity. When she does grow up, the love lost to hetero settler sex becomes a metaphorical propertied landscape, too, as in the duet “Exile” with collaborator Bon Iver: “You’re not my homeland anymore // So what am I defending now?” Who is defending Swift against the constant and consuming threat of Indigeneity and Blackness that the white feminine racializes itself against, if not her white cis male lover? And what is Swift defending, if not the persistent re-articulation of settler femininity through the trope of the “good white girl,” who is socialized into fear, into thinking we are unsafe and vulnerable in non-white spaces, and who will critique her Black male critics like Kanye West only through indirect lyrical allusion [7]? Who is Swift if not every liberal white woman who publicly sheroes herself after a lifetime of silence that predates the 2016 U.S. election, in this case to endorse two Democratic candidates on Instagram in 2018 only to be acclaimed that she “cares more about black people than Kanye West” [8]?
![Image source: Rock NYC [9]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6047daeeaff86c5b1c1246a1/1627482467537-76737PKJ51PENHEI0AUA/EdnG_R8XYAAnCHM.jpg)
Image source: Rock NYC [9]
Swift’s white settler femininity is a site of care, and it cares damn hard about itself. Don’t worry, folks, “Betty” is really told from the perspective of “James”—who is definitely a boy—and so there is no crack in this heterosexual veneer (or is it pottery molded at a cottage kiln) [10]. Would such queerness also bring her childhood to an end, in Lee Edelman’s sense, an end to innocence, towards “practices of gay sexuality and the undoing of futurity” [11]? If an adult Swift is now her male lover’s contested homeland, the girl she left behind must remain straight, just moderately uncivil enough, and free to remove herself only so far from the modern patriarchal capitalist condition [12]. Reaching one’s peak at seven in the forest and the field means caring what people think of you once you return to your hometown and fully actualize the modern white feminine in the ways ableist cis-heteropatriarchy insists. As Dakota scholar Philip J. Deloria identified over 20 years ago, the white settler logic of using escape to nature to “prepare children for modernity” also paired Indigenous peoples and nature “rhetorically as natural, simple, naïve, preliterate, and devoid of self-consciousness” [13]. Likewise, here Swift’s girlhood prepares her for a set of white settler feminine expectations that she can only challenge so much; after all, she can’t be too “crazy,” if the society that makes “us” all made her this way.
Swift’s songs bring her childhood memories into this sharp rhetorical relief, normalizing “white women’s subject-making” through settler logics of land-as-property to be consumed, and the violence of Indigenous elimination and erasure, anti-Blackness, and collective colonial amnesia [14]. How can we follow critical feminist scholars of settler colonialism and whiteness to “(re)imagine what white settler femininity and subjectivities can look like” [15]? How can we remain vigilant of the ways in which anti-capitalist desires also romanticize the domestic rural and the so-called natural landscape that depends on anti-Indigenous, racist colonial, and homophobic and transphobic violence [16]? One way is to resist losing our many gendered white settler selves in a Swiftly pastoral lyrical moment, and to see the folklore machine for what it reproduces: an invented placid vision of a folkloric past that depends on agrarian proto-capitalist cultivation to sow the seeds of colonial conquest. Untangling Swift’s “barren land” visions might then become a hoax we settlers no longer want to believe in.
1. Banner image source: Photo by Beth Garrabrant. Tim Peacock, “Taylor Swift’s Folklore Album Exceeds 1.3 Million Sales in 24 Hours,” U Discover Music (July 26, 2020): https://www.udiscovermusic.com/news/taylor-swift-folklore-million-sales/.
2. See Willow Samara Allen, “Learning to become White Girls in a Settler Colonial Context: Exploring the Racial Socialization of White Euro-Canadian Women,” Settler Colonial Studies 10, no. 3 (2020): 16.
3. Henry Adam Svec, American Folk Music as Tactical Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 108.
4. Maiysha Kai, “A Swift Solution? Taylor Switfly Rebrands her Folklore Merch After a Black Business Owner Calls Foul,” The Root (July 30, 2020), https://theglowup.theroot.com/a-swift-solution-taylor-swiftly-rebrands-her-folklore-1844553968.
5. Claire Ollivain, “Cottagecore, Colonialism, and the Far-Right,” Honi Soit (September 8, 2020), https://honisoit.com/2020/09/cottagecore-colonialism-and-the-far-right/.
6. Carolyn Twersky, “Taylor Swift Had the Sweetest Response to the Superfan Who Missed the ‘Folklore’ Release,” Seventeen Magazine (July 31, 2020), https://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/music/a33470428/taylor-swift-superfan-went-offline-doesnt-know-folklore-exists-viral-tweet/.
7. Allen, “Learning to become White Girls,” 16-17.
8. Isabel Greenberg, “Twitter is Freaking Out About Taylor Swift’s Political Instagram Post,” Harper’s Bizarre (October 8, 2018), https://www.harpersbazaar.com/celebrity/latest/a23639988/taylor-swift-political-instagram-post-reactions/.
9. Iman Lababedi, “Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’ Reviewed,” Rock NYC (July 24, 2020): http://rocknyc.live/taylor-swifts-folklore-reviewed.html.
10. Callie Ahlgrim, “Taylor Swift saying the narrative of ‘Betty’ is a ‘boy’ doesn’t negate LGBTQ fans’ interpretations of the song,” Insider (August 7, 2020), https://www.insider.com/taylor-swift-betty-lyrics-gay-james-boy-lgbtq-fan-reactions-2020-8.
11. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 19. I am grateful to Lucas Crawford for suggesting to me queer theory’s rejection of “childhood” as a homogeneous form for which everyone should be nostalgic. I really hope he writes his own response to Folklore so I can learn more about these ideas.
12. See Toby Rollo, “Feral Children: Settler Colonialism, Progress, and the Figure of the Child,” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 1 (2018): 11-12.
13. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 106.
14. Allen, “Learning to become White Girls,” 2.
15. Allen, “Learning to become White Girls,” 19.
16. Ollivain, “Cottagecore, Colonialism, and the Far-Right,” https://honisoit.com/2020/09/cottagecore-colonialism-and-the-far-right/.
Dr. Erin Morton is a white settler scholar who lives and works on the unceded and unconquered land of the Wolastoqiyik, the people of the beautiful river. She was born and grew up in Mi’kma’ki, on unceded and unconquered Mi’kmaq territory. Morton is Full Professor of Visual Culture in the Department of History at the University of New Brunswick.
