ABSTRACT
This chapter examines several types of Taylor Swift fan sites – the forum section of two popular Taylor Swift websites, the r/TaylorSwift subreddit, and comments on official Taylor Swift YouTube channel videos – at three different time points in Swift’s career in order to trace the development and deconstruction of the Swiftian “good girl.” Amidst an American cultural and political focus on teen abstinence, Swift’s early music represented a nostalgic longing for “traditional values” such as monogamy, propriety, and chastity – values that are historically and inextricably tied to whiteness, heterosexuality, and normative femininity. Fans in 2009–2010 valorized Swift for her “good girl” behavior and judged her lyrical bad girl foils harshly for sexual impropriety. After the release of Reputation in 2017, however, fans were ready to endorse Taylor’s own sexual subjectivity, and in 2020, fans embraced an understanding of the “other woman” as simply a woman in love. This shift in perspective represents an important shift away from propriety discourse; however, I also assert that it is essential to acknowledge the ways in which Swift’s shifting musical sexual persona is enabled by whiteness – sometimes through juxtaposition to the people of color featured in her videos.
