Tolerate it: Miss Americana and The Politics of Feeling by Natalie Hawkins

I remember being seventeen, heartbroken for the first time, speeding down a country switchback in rural Massachusetts, blasting Taylor Swift’s All Too Well. I remember screaming at the top of my lungs and feeling so encouraged, so validated in my pain and longing— this is a moment in my life, and there have been many since, when Taylor Swift has felt like the only person in the world who understands me. Taylor Swift is objectively a musical anomaly— her albums consistently break sales records, her songs compete against each other for number one on the music charts, and the persistence of her fame spanning over 15 years is unprecedented for a female artist. But Swift is also one of the most publicly ridiculed artists in the cultural zeitgeist; her lyrics are dismissed as juvenile, and her seriousness as an artist is routinely questioned. Her public stature will erratically fluctuate from “God” to “Try-Hard”, and this status seems uncorrelated with her commercial rise. Her latest album, Life of a Showgirl, is generally regarded by young people as a flop; the advertising rollout, down to her lyrical choices, is felt to be derivative, cringy, and unprestigious. Despite its cultural distaste, Life of a Showgirl sold more albums in the first week than any album in the history of the United States, and immediately became the best-selling album of the year within a few hours of its release. The most poignant example of Swift’s cultural phenomenon is Donald Trump’s grievances that she is more popular than he is. Swift channels enough backlash as a cultural figure to get an explicit complaint from the president, and incidentally, that complaint being she’s soaring way above his celebrity status. This dissonance—between cultural dominance and cultural contempt— has become the defining feature of her career. Swift is a paradox: she is simultaneously one of the most commercially successful artists in history and one of the most publicly dismissed and ridiculed figures in pop culture.

Much of the conversation about Swift frames this tension as a normal or inevitable part of reaching her level of fame. But her polarizing career suggests something more interesting to me. This contradiction is not a coincidence or an inevitable byproduct of fame, but the result of Swift’s defining artistic trait—her emotional vulnerability— which fuels her success while making her uniquely susceptible to backlash. It is the same concentrated emotional catharsis I felt listening to Swift at seventeen; her connection to her fans is defined by her openness as an artist. The experience of emotional connection with her music is subjective, deeply personal, and sometimes even spiritual— the problem is, her existence is not contained to my car sound system. Her vulnerability is not tailored to me, and this openness, once scaled to Swift’s level of fandom, can become unsettling. Taylor Swift occupies a cultural position where intimacy and mass power collide. Her songwriting is rooted in confession—romance, insecurity, longing—and yet its reach is global, political, and economically transformative. When vulnerability moves from private expression to mass influence, it stops being read as personality and begins to register as power. And power rooted in feeling, rather than domination or distance, is culturally destabilizing. Swift’s backlash is not the cost of fame, but really the consequence of a culture with no infrastructure for feeling, or an ability to embrace its power on a large scale. 

Before her openness is perceived by her fans and by the public, it first appears as a form of discipline– shaping her rehearsal process, leadership style, and intense commitment to her work. Swift’s neurosis and her artistic intensity are all-consuming; she is a perfectionist by any measure. The Eras Documentary (which I binge-watched recently) captures Swift in her safe place: rehearsing and perfecting her craft. After a final rehearsal of the show for the last leg of the tour, Swift monotonously remarks, “I made three mistakes.” All of them were minuscule dance steps, or a misplaced microphone (keep in mind, this is an almost four-hour show.) This level of professionalism is expected from performers at the top of their field, but Swift is not a dancer or an actress, and she is rarely ever part of an ensemble. Yet, in the documentary, you see her consistently differ from the teachings of the background dancers and singers to improve her performance. She looks for feedback, and she asks questions when she’s wrong. Of course, Swift is the boss by any measure, but her earnest desire to perfect the show and do well for those around her equalizes the playingfield, if just a little. Her staff seem to be comfortable around her, and Swift and the dancers will even exchange an “I love you” at the end of a conversation. Swift seems to surround herself with people who want to really care about her, and who want to be deeply cared for back. I also don’t get the impression that her camaraderie with her staff is put on for documentary cameras— I get the impression that Taylor Swift is very lonely, and her call for connection colors all her professional relationships. This model of care and attentiveness functions effectively in small spaces—but Swift’s fame ensures that her sensitivity is never fully contained.

It is only when this same sensitivity is scaled beyond controlled environments that its consequences become overwhelming, a dynamic the Eras documentary captures as Swift confronts the complex relationship between her artistry and fans. There is a moment capturing Swift sitting in her hotel room, after having to cancel her shows in Vienna due to an ISIS terrorist plot, reckoning with the tragedy of three young children stabbed to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the UK. This moment feels surreal as a viewer— something heavy sets in when you realize the cataclysmic aftershocks of Taylor Swift’s fame. Her output stems from her most intimate self, her romances, her insecurities, her deepest fears and moments of isolation--- her thoughts and feelings, inadvertently, can lead to the death of a six-year-old. You see Swift fully understand this in real time, and you see her choose to accept this reality as intrinsically related to her; you see her take responsibility. In this moment, Swift’s vulnerability stops being expressive and becomes infrastructural: the same openness that forges intimacy with millions also binds her to consequences no individual can fully contain. Her willingness to absorb that responsibility helps explain both her power and the resentment it provokes—she has a persistent desire to make her relationships personal at a scale that both relieves her from that ethical duty, while punishing her for her lack of closeness with those she emotionally affects. 

The hostility toward Taylor Swift reflects a broader cultural discomfort with the kind of emotional vulnerability her songwriting refuses to disguise, particularly when contrasted with female artists whose work is more carefully armored. When compared to an artist like Sabrina Carpenter, whose lyricism is much more emotionally boundaried and suggestive, Swift’s ranges from euphoria to profound devastation. Carpenter, however, performs a hardened femininity— a tactical sensuality that reins superior over her male romantic counterparts. A ‘fuck men’ in both ways. Many successful female artists lean into this ‘empowerment’ trope (Beyonce, I think, performs a font of this), and it allows fans, especially women, to conceal their own insecurities by mirroring this nonchalant sexual bravado. The ‘empowerment trope’ is socially legible because it doesn’t challenge the assumed conflation between power and emotional detachment. Swift, on the other hand, admits she is not a “bad bitch” (a line that makes me cringe every time I hear her sing it, but is surprisingly self-reflective). Swift cares a lot. And she’s sensitive, leaving her vulnerable to the opinions of others and open to being hurt. Swift’s emotional candour is read as embarrassing or excessive because she subscribes to a facet of femininity that we are culturally skeptical of, particularly when it proves to be powerfully responsive. She’s not hard, and she’s not cool— but it’s not her sensitivity itself that sparks so much scrutiny, but the fact that it works—that emotional exposure, rather than detachment, becomes a viable and influential mode of power.

 When vulnerability becomes a source of mass influence rather than private expression, it stops being read as personality and starts being treated as ideology—a shift that has made Taylor Swift a lightning rod for conservative anxiety. Swift is instrumentalized in public consciousness, a projection of political paranoia, particularly centered around the maintenance of heteropatriarchy. As a woman who has the power to alter world economies and the breadmaker in ostensibly all conceivable relationships, Swift pushes a confrontation between the conservative (particularly Christian) right and gender expectations. Given Swift’s Christian background, her southern roots, and her relative modesty—coupled with her earnestness and desire to please— she has all the makings of a perfect mouthpiece for Christian Family Values. Unfortunately for the right, Swift disowned any notion of conservative alliance relatively early in her career. However, as her social influence grows, her representation of femininity and liberal progressivism grows with her, brought to a head recently as her relationship with Travis Kelce became public, integrating the NFL fans into the world of Swifities, causing a masculinity meltdown within conservative media. A mass hysteria broke out due to Swift getting airtime at Chiefs’ games. This, coupled with Swifties becoming football fans, led conservatives to counter any notions of changing gender roles by simply abandoning Travis Kelce in the struggle: it’s not that a Real Masculine Man can have a wildly more successful liberal girlfriend who writes about her feelings, it’s simply that Kelce is gay. It’s gay to date Taylor Swift, because she wields power from tapping into the emotionality of young women, her financial and cultural success directly implicates what conservative men strive to squash within themselves: being susceptible to hurt feelings. Taylor Swift, as a widely successful female artist, is a target for political projection regardless of who she is or the music she creates, but Swift also uniquely threatens the gender order because her money and power come from an emotionally reactive process, one that signals the potential of sensitivity outside of feminine spaces. 

My goal is not to persuade everyone to love, or even like, Taylor Swift. My goal is to make a persuasive case that Taylor Swift taps a cultural nerve, producing backlash disproportionate to her artistry. She exposes a contradiction: we celebrate vulnerability when it’s brief, interpersonal, and contained. When it becomes influential enough to reorganize political and public life, it is manipulative. Her critics often insist they are reacting to her omnipresence, greed, or political ambiguity— but what underlies their criticism is discomfort with her unabashed validation of big emotional expression, and her invitation for her fans to emote too. Swift is not uniquely responsible for the projections placed upon her, but she is uniquely positioned to absorb them; as long as her emotional openness is treated as a liability, rather than a skill, her success will continue to provoke disproportionate scrutiny. Her vulnerability is not incidental to her power; it is the condition of it. As long as Swift scales cultural poignancy, her success will continue to be difficult for us to tolerate.