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"Who's afraid of little old me?": A Swiftie theory of monstrous femininity

Chloe Bond

University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

[0.1] Abstract—An analysis of what fans' responses to Taylor Swift's latest album The Tortured Poets Department can tell us about how young people define, conceptualize, and operationalize monstrous femininity.

[0.2] Keywords—Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA); FSNNA 2024; Monstrosity; Popular music fandom; Taylor Swift

Bond, Chloe. 2025. "'Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?': A Swiftie Theory of Monstrous Femininity." In "Sports Fandoms," guest edited by Jason Kido Lopez and Lori Kido Lopez, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 45. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2025.2839.

1. Introduction

[1.1] One prolific fan is the modern Swiftie, an "acolyte" of American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift (Corbin 2024). Across an eighteen-year career spanning multiple musical genres, creative projects, and legal battles, Swift has established herself as a significant sociocultural tastemaker and, as Chris Willman for Variety has noted, "the world's greatest community organiser" (2024). Her unique capacity for "creation, evolution, and revolution" of her public persona (Allan 2019) has allowed Swift to story monsters in multifaceted ways—as both a victim of patriarchal treachery and as a perpetrator of abject feminine power.

[1.2] Monstrous figures have long served as surrogates for sociocultural anxieties around the unknown. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen emphasizes the monster's heightened temporality and its inextricable connection to culture: "A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read" (1996, 4). The "monstrous-feminine," the innately abject female figure who, by flagrantly disregarding the bounds of normalcy, rejects "the [violent] social and cultural 'rituals' the patriarchal symbolic order has constructed to protect its borders" (Creed 2022, 12), represents an affronting, but nonetheless compelling, form of monstrosity for contemporary audiences.

[1.3] Swift's The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD) (released April 19, 2024) is a potent example of this. Despite receiving "Instant Classic" status from Rolling Stone (Sheffield 2024), several of the album's lyrics have proven to be publicly controversial, with Swift's bold proclamation that listeners "wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised [her]" on its tenth track—"Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?"—becoming an immediate flashpoint. For instance, one X (formerly known as Twitter) user expressed outrage at the lyric, writing: "wait 'you wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me' is a taylor swift lyric? GIRL DIDN'T YOU GROW UP RICH??? ON A CHRISTMAS TREE FARM???? YOU HAVE A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP WITH BOTH YOUR PARENTS. THEY'RE STILL MARRIED!!! WHAT ASYLUM MA'AM" (@wellsbering, April 23 2024, https://x.com/wellsbering/status/1782613573241295029). Contrastingly, another user defended Swift's use of the asylum metaphor, captioning screenshots of excerpts from an earlier Rolling Stone article, titled 2008's Country Lolita: Taylor Swift, with the following response: "we literally have an interviewer being handsy when she was a teen and people think she's being dramatic about the asylum" (@bloodmoonlit97, May 15, 2024, https://x.com/bloodmoonlit97/status/1790822158504972379). These drastically opposing reactions spark intriguing questions: What does a monster look like? Who has the right to claim or make reference to monstrosity?

[1.4] My research aims to examine how fans use Swift's work as a guide for coconstructing their own vocabulary and conceptual language of monstrous femininity through affirmational fandom practices, by applying André Brock's model of Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (2018). This poster outlines two key themes that have emerged from analysis of a sample of 128 Tumblr posts detailing fans' responses to TTPD: use of monstrous language by Swifties and tension among Swifties around consuming versus curating the monstrously feminine body in fan-generated content. To respect fans' privacy, all usernames have been anonymized in the screenshots shown in my presentation.

[1.5] The analysis revealed that through the language choices made and typographical features used, fans' posts seek to imitate Swift's embodied monstrousness on TTPD in an attempt to bring themselves into closer proximity to the power that Swift seemingly wields, namely, her perceived ability to say "f*ck the patriarchy" at every opportunity. In this dataset, some fans defend Swift's right to be unpolished and reject what feminist phenomenologist Emily Douglas terms "edibility" (2013). There's a certain appeal for Swifties in her willingness to be unpalatable. Contrastingly, other fans actively contribute to the practice of displaying Swift for consumption via the reactionary edits they create. The aesthetically pleasing nature of this fan art reinforces the conventional notion that "freakery" (Garland-Thomson 2021) and the visibly different or monstrous body exist to be viewed as spectacle.

[1.6] Ultimately, monstrous femininity is viewed by Swifties as being both performative—a facet of Swift which can be strategically deployed as a branded "era" when needed—and also viscerally truthful in its ability to serve as a powerful metaphor that exposes and legitimizes the intense emotions Swift (and her fans) experience.

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