Taylor Swift, Wominimizing, and the Opposite of (White) Mansplaining
Taylor Swift’s single “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” has been all over Charlotte radio for quite a while now. Every time I hear it, though, I wonder about why she chose to go up an octave in the second syllable of the “We-EEEE” in the chorus’s key hook, “We are never getting back together.” While the octave jump/almost gliss up to “eeee” is the most exaggerated version of this move, it happens throughout the chorus: there’s also the “ooooh-wo-o-o-ooh-oh”s, for example. Musically, the vocals are very sing-songy and light, but verbally they’re very sarcastic, bitter, and firm.
Think about it: this sing-songy character is really inconsistent with the imma-put-my-foot-down tone of the rest of the song. There’s the sarcasm and self-awareness in lines like “some indie record much cooler than mine.” There’s the resolve in lines like “We are never, ever, ever/getting back together. Like, never.”
Swift’s song uses the musical aspects of singing to do what patriarchy requires all white women to do when they make assertions, criticisms, or posit any sort of claim, really: they have to qualify and couch it, making it appropriately nice, polite, toothless. In other words, they have to make their speech act performatively feminine, using feminized rhetorical gestures. My female students who are white or pass for white do this all the time. They say things like:
- “Well, I may be wrong and I may have misunderstood, BUT, X seems wrong for this reason.”
- “I don’t want to sound mean or anything, and I really like your overall point, but I have you thought of [brilliant and fundamental criticism that points out a significant flaw in interlocutor’s claim].”
- “I don’t know, but, XYZ. I’m probably wrong, or maybe it’s just me, but XYZ seems true.”
Put simply, femme white women must rhetorically perform in ways that undermine the authority of any claim they make. (I want to emphasize that this is a racially-specific, and gender-presentation-specific claim). Feminization—care, empathy, self-doubt, etc.—happens at the rhetorical level, mirroring and reinforcing the feminization (read: dismissal) of their epistemic authority in patriarchy. The flip side of a culture that supports and encourages mansplaining (the overestimation of men’s epistemic authority) is femme-quivocating (as christian.ryan suggested), or femme-doubt, or wo-minimizing.
Swift’s song is a perfect example of wominimizing. As strong as the verbal content of her lyrics are, the musical performance of them undermines their authoritativeness. Or, perhaps rather: Swift intentionally performs wominimizing rhetoric so that she won’t be dismissed as bitchy, irrational, angry, etc. Strong sarcasm isn’t something we often hear in vocals by white female pop stars, though, as Angela Davis has noted, it’s a longstanding convention in black women’s blues-based vocal performance traditions. So, there might also be some need to raciallyqualify the sarcasm (which could be coded black) with appropriate forms of white femininity in the chorus’s vocal delivery.
Finally, a few things about the video: (1) Note the infantile imagery of the animal/furry backup band. Swift’s character breaks up with her boyfriend and retreats to the safety of her bedroom and stuffed animals (paging Angela McRobbie’s 20-year-old analysis of teenybop, gender, and the domestic). So, the video uses images of immature femininity to further wominimize Swift’s sarcasm. (2) The hipster glasses. Over on Rogueish, Voyu has written about the presence of the hipster glasses in this video. One thing we need to pay close attention to is their removal in the bridge. This is the one sincere, unsarcastic moment in the lyrics. Hipsterism relies on irony and sarcasm, making glasses that are otherwise nerdy uebercool. The glasses are a hint for us at the beginning of the song that we’re supposed to hear Swift’s vocals as sarcastic double-speak. This is reinforced in the end by Swift’s wink (3:14 in the video).
I think it’s important to mention that these particular rhetorical gestures have not to do just with race/ gender, but also with class — that is, these mannerisms have notoriously worked to distinguish bourgeois white women from working class and working poor white women who are seen as “hard,” “mean,” “bitter,” “sarcastic” and, in this, coded not just as not bourgie, but also as both potentially “masculine” and as possible betrayers of whiteness/ white men. This works in many ways not just to suppress angry speech of white women directed at white men, but to suppress the speech of poor/working class white women against affluent women.
sorry, don’t agree. the ‘wee-eeee’ is catchy, the animals are very much part of her persona and are just the crazy kind of thing taylor swift would do, and also as a woman, i’d prefer if men talked to me without being blunt and rude, so i treat others as i’d like to be treated.
You sound psycho. And really really racist. Because black women of course don’t have that same struggle as the white women. I guess we don’t have to feminized our opinion in a white male society. Nope because we are forever the angry black women. Which is why this seems racially specific for you. Right black are just barbaric when making their statements known.
Want to hear more about this black sarcasm. In the classroom. Teacher, won’t you leave these kids alone?
“Strong sarcasm isn’t something we often hear in vocals by white female pop stars, though, as Angela Davis has noted, it’s a longstanding convention in black women’s blues-based vocal performance traditions.” I wonder if you’ve considered the use of sarcasm in country and country pop by white women? (Of course white; it’s actually hard to think of a whiter genre of music.) I’m only dimly aware of Taylor Swift (I’m living in a bubble, I know!) but doesn’t she have some country influences? Because there’s quite the tradition of women in country and country pop talking back, talking about fighting back, etc. A recent example from country pop would be “My Give a Damn’s Busted” by Jo Dee Messina, or maybe Miranda Lambert’s “Baggage Claim” (“Gunpowder and Lead” is more about fighting back than talking back, I suppose–though there’s also good use of sarcasm, as in “well don’t that sound like a real man?”), and of course none of us will ever forget “Goodbye Earl” by the Dixie Chicks. Though again with the fighting back, and that really is a theme: there are lots of classic country songs about women fighting back against abuse, some which are also really sarcastic: I’m thinking esp of “My Big Iron Skillet.” And for that matter, it may be the specific crowd I hang out with, but I sure have seen a LOT of drippingly sarcastic karaoke performances of the classic counterexample, “Stand By Your Man.” There it’s really interesting how those femme-y vocalizations lend themselves so readily to sarcasm.
Hi Shiloh! Your comment is really interesting, and definitely right. Swift is country crossover; I don’t know how much country audiences really embrace her as one of their own anymore, but her roots are definitely there. I approach her from the perspective of Top-40 radio pop, where she’s *definitely* read as teenybop. IMHO her country/pop crossover helps ground/explain the tension between the sarcasm, on the one hand, and the “wominimizing,” on the other. Country’s close relationship with the blues also genealogically explains the relationship to black female vocalists’ use of sarcasm in similar ways. Thanks for pushing me to think more carefully about this 🙂
I think that marketing is a big part of this too. The wee-eee is literally her singing the sound of enjoyment we’d make at an amusement park ride, sending the clear message that Swift and her fans have incredible amounts of fun ALL the time–even when breaking up with someone. While I don’t think this necessarily cuts against your analysis, your reading would be strengthened by attending more to the ways that Swift’s song conscripts the listener in singing along with her, literally making her own words theirs. For me, that part of the performance has more to do with the affect she is peddling in the music than the content of the lyrics.
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