While Taylor Swift is being painted as problematically conservative to a liberal audience, she is simultaneously being painted as problematically liberal to a conservative audience.

So, what’s going on here? And why is it Taylor Swift lends herself to both sides questioning and pushing her into a particular label?

I thrive on the thrill of finding, my heart beats to the sound of discovery. Research is not a means to an end. Its a way of being, a definition to the soul, a lens through which to see and experience the world. It’s a call to be curious and to want more, to constantly find more, to always ask questions.

As much as we’re going to be talking about ghosts today, we’re going to be talking about Taylor Swift’s ghosts specifically. Monsters are context specific, so let’s look at the context. For Swift, her ghosts are representations of alterations in time. They represent the lingering presence of something that is already dead still clinging to life in the corners of the mind. Ghosts here are demonstrations of the way things can be present and not present simultaneously, alive and dead simultaneously. It’s the crossing of boundaries and categories which typically cannot be at the same time.

So, let’s talk about it.

What makes loving to hate so much fun isn’t necessarily the emotive experience (though there is some of that, as we’ll talk about in the next section), but also the communal experience of that. Jonathan Grey describes how this community identification and participation, even when centred around a figure of hate, can make anti-fandom quite pleasurable of an experience. Similar values can also be fostered here, which is why we see such powerful extremes in group mentality and cohesion in comments online which are aggressively racist or sexist in nature.

After getting over 100 survey responses, I thought I’d take some time to go over a few notes I’ve gathered from these first 100.

Taylor Swift thinks about her albums as full pieces of work in themselves, and also think about how her discography all works together. Actively, we have a single song working as a myth, a larger album as a complex making a mythology, and her discography creating a larger complex of these mythologies - a mythos.

This isn’t the first time I’ve worked on a survey, but is the first time in many years. Surveys are always a little more complicated than people think. You need to be direct, but not so direct that it’s leading. You have to ask a lot, but not demand too much of their time. You need to get numbers, but also specificity when you need. Saying, for example, twenty percent of people think this, that’s great - but why?

Taylor Swift, therefore, is a Corn Wolf. She is human, and idol, and symbol all at once. She is the music and the performer. She is the writer and the topic, and even the theme. All of these are possible, and it is because all of these are possible that she is the figure she is.