Monsters and Madwomen: A Queer Gothic Reading of Taylor Swift

Duc Dau, Hannah McCann

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference paperChapterpeer-review

Abstract

Pop icon “Miss Americana” Taylor Swift is not often associated with the Gothic. Yet, across her body of work there are numerous references to Gothic elements such as hauntings, monsters, and the undead. This chapter offers a queer reading of Swift’s lyrical corpus and music videos by identifying these Gothic themes. As many others have explored before, queerness is intertwined with the history of the Gothic. Queerness has often been invoked in the context of the supernatural or demonic because it is viewed as transgressive, deviant, or other. Analysis of Swift’s oeuvre reveals the continual conjuring of a sense of haunting. Like Terry Castle (1993) and others, we read hauntings as queer coded and culturally queer. Furthermore, Swift’s ghosts and other creatures of Gothic tropes exist outside of what Jack Halberstam (1995) refers to as the norms of time, humanness, gender, and sexuality. In this chapter we suggest that whether Swift as a celebrity is LGBTQ+ or not, her lyrics and music videos suggest queer Gothic tropes that cannot be denied, though are rarely explored. We consider the prolific thematic presence in Swift’s work of the following: death and the undead; ghosts and hauntings; the doppelgänger; witches and mad women.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationTaylor Swift: Culture, Capital and Society
EditorsHannah McCann, Emma Whatman, Eloise Faichney, Rebecca Trelease
PublisherRoutledge
Publication statusAccepted/In press - 2025

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