Over the a long time, because it advanced from a slur right into a time period of tribal pleasure, the phrase queer was transformed by lecturers right into a verb. To queer a textual content is to search for hidden, un-straight that means—to theorize that sexual repression shapes Holden Caulfield’s dangerous angle and Nick Carraway’s unreliable narration. Usually, readers queer a piece via their interpretation. What the writer actually meant is, in lots of circumstances, unknowable; the textual content and its impact are what issues most.
Maybe popular culture ought to relearn this use of queer, judging by the most recent controversy surrounding Taylor Swift. Final week, The New York Occasions ran an opinion piece speculating that Swift isn’t straight; this weekend, one among Swift’s associates, talking anonymously to CNN, blasted the essay as “invasive, unfaithful, and inappropriate.” The state of affairs reveals how followers and celebrities have develop into too inflexible of their relationship to one another, lacking the teachings that queerness has to show.
Framing itself as a commentary on the social expectations that also compel homosexual individuals to remain within the closet, the Occasions op-ed, by the editor Anna Marks, scanned via Swift’s inventive output and biography for indicators of somebody nursing same-sex need. Lots of Swift’s songs, Marks identified, are about secretive romance. A few of her visuals painting cross-dressing and appear to reference to lesbian touchstones. Her 2019 album, Lover, included specific shout-outs to homosexual rights in its lyrics and advertising and marketing marketing campaign. These supposed clues, Marks wrote, “recommend to queer those who she is one among us.”
This argument will not be new to anybody who follows Swift intently. For years, a neighborhood of listeners generally known as “Gaylors” has spun related theories on Reddit and TikTok, poring over ambiguous rumors and paparazzi pics to lend credence to their lyrical interpretations. Within the universe of Swift’s fandom, Gaylors are divisive; one other faction, “Hetlors,” goes out of its strategy to shoot them down. Swift herself not too long ago weighed in: Within the liner notes for 1989 (Taylor’s Model), she expressed annoyance that some individuals assume she dated her feminine associates.
This back-and-forth would possibly appear to be particular to Swift—and be significantly provocative given how she has famously sung about crushing on assorted Prince Charmings. However remarkably, variations on the Gaylor phenomenon could be present in all types of fandoms. Wars as soon as raged amongst listeners of One Course over whether or not two members of the boy band have been in love. In any given fan-fiction neighborhood, “slash” tales—pairing up same-sex characters—are prone to have an outsize following.
These dynamics mirror the social realities that Mark’s essay critiqued. Historical past is filled with artists who stayed within the closet whereas embedding references to queerness of their work. And even in our period, when an unprecedented variety of individuals establish as LGBTQ, hottest leisure is about straight individuals. A number of viewers members nonetheless have to learn into tales, to undertaking and remix and embellish, to be able to absolutely relate. That is normally innocent—or, quite, it’s wholesome, a testomony to artwork’s capaciousness.
The issue proper now’s that the interpretive work that queer individuals have all the time needed to do is happening in an overheated social-media atmosphere that’s voyeuristic to a delusional diploma. The unimaginable craving to know who our artists actually are past the artwork they put out is a robust lure that retains customers scrolling TikTok and different platforms the place followers collect. Because of this, listeners don’t simply analyze songs to search out meanings relevant to their very own life; they examine songs, looking for fact concerning the creator’s life. And, ideally, that fact validates their very own.
Swift has fed this mentality to spectacular impact—by infusing her work with references to private sagas whereas setting up a wonderfully relatable media persona for herself. Her songs, it should be famous, have by no means been strictly autobiographical: Her 2020 albums, Folklore and Evermore, have been marketed as experiments in fiction, and earlier than that, she mentioned she borrowed tales from her associates’ lives. However her model actually is all about herself. And proper now that model is, to guage from the headlines surrounding her currently, centered on her relationship with the soccer star Travis Kelce.
Maybe that’s the reason somebody in her camp felt the necessity to torch Marks’s column. “Due to her huge success, on this second there’s a Taylor-shaped gap in individuals’s ethics,” CNN’s supply mentioned. “This text wouldn’t have been allowed to be written about Shawn Mendes or any male artist whose sexuality has been questioned by followers … There appears to be no boundary some journalists received’t cross when writing about Taylor … all beneath the protecting veil of an ‘opinion piece.’”
The quote is shockingly forceful (and a bit inaccurate: Marks herself beforehand wrote an article questioning the sexuality of a male star, Harry Kinds). Its fervor comes near implying disgust at queerness itself, and to shaming listeners for bringing their very own interpretation to Swift’s work. However a few of these listeners actually do want a actuality test: Shortly after the Occasions article was revealed, I scrolled via Gaylor scorching spots on-line and noticed individuals theorizing that Swift’s personal crew had planted it to arrange for her popping out.
Swift’s crew can also be asserting her want to take care of management over her picture; they understand how simply misinformation and innuendo can undermine a profession. In spite of everything, Marks’s column prompt one thing that would fester right into a full-fledged public backlash towards Swift if left unaddressed: It positive can be nice for the world if Swift embraced her (supposed) queerness. In November, Swift’s publicist issued a fiery condemnation of a gossip web site for spreading unconfirmed reviews about Swift covertly marrying a former boyfriend. After this newest clapback, different retailers is perhaps much more cautious about prying into Swift’s private life.
The unlucky factor about this case is that Taylor Swift means lots to LGBTQ listeners for good causes, ones value discussing. You don’t want to take a position about Swift the human being to be able to queer her music. There’s a lot to research about her reconciliation of energy and femininity, her storytelling about love that evades surveillance, her rejection of “the Nineteen Fifties shit they need from me,” as Swift put it within the track “Lavender Haze.” Marks may have invoked the scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who as soon as argued that queer refers to, amongst different issues, an “open mesh of potentialities.” Swift’s songs shift for every listener, reflecting their picture again like a mirror ball—dazzling whereas guarding what’s beneath.
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