Examining Blank Spaces and the Taylor Swift Phenomenon
An Investigation of Contingent Identities
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:9th Aug '24
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Blank Space: Taylor Swift and Contingent Identities examines Taylor Swift’s art, her public image, and Swiftie fan communities. It features discussions of several Swift songs, with attention to the poetic effects created by their lyrics. The author argues that these songs offer a consistent focus, throughout Swift’s career to date, on personal identities that evolve through relationships with particular other people. He shows how in Swift’s songs, narrators reflect on how their identities change over time—even in some cases, over the course of the song. The book builds on this discussion of Swift’s art to consider the artist’s image, exploring how multiple forces interact to shape this image and give it meaning—forces including the artist’s management team as well as critics and fans. According to the author, the distinctive characteristics of Swft’s art and Swift’s public image help to create the unique Swiftie fan communities that have emerged and flourished. The book includes two different studies of Swifties’ communication practices, one centering online interactions and the second in-depth interviews with Swifties. It concludes with attention to the implications of Swift’s selection as Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year.
Scholarship examining Taylor Swift and her fans is still relatively new for studies in popular culture. In Blank Space: Taylor Swift and Contingent Identities, Keith Nainby presents a multi-layered look that juxtaposes his own experiences as a Swiftie with others who have found solace in Taylor Swift’s music. It is a noteworthy addition to the gender and pop music genre. -- Adrienne Trier-Bieniek, Ph.D. editor of the forthcoming book In the Swifte Era
“Keith Nainby creates a mosaic of how we can understand the construction of the self and the other in relationship to larger social discourses, this time embedded in a pop culture phenomenon. Blank Space reifies how identities are contingent, in flux, enabled, and constrained by the boundaries that are outlined in social discourses. Aca-Swifties (Swiftie-demics?) can find refuge in Nainby’s analysis of the musical communities we are allowed to be a part of and what that means for rhetoric, pop culture, and cultural studies. Drawing from a range of scholarship from interpersonal communication to critical rhetoric, to musicology, Nainby, demonstrates how Swift’s narrators recognize how identities unfold over time, always contingent on context, culture, and community.” -- Brandi Lawless, University of San Francisco
Expertly blending textual analysis of songs and qualitative analysis of fan interviews, Blank Space: Taylor Swift and Contingent Identities answers the question so many are asking: How should we understand the Taylor Swift phenomenon? Rejecting simplified notions of pop music fans, Keith Nainby locates the power of Taylor Swift in a complex intersection of communication, identity, and ethics. In Blank Space, Taylor Swift fans will find a book that centers their voices, and in doing so, takes Taylor Swift and her fan community seriously. Scholars of popular culture and fandom will find a rich study of Taylor Swift’s song-writing, public image, and fans. -- Ashley Hinck, Xavier University
ISBN: 9781666942712
Dimensions: 237mm x 156mm x 24mm
Weight: 544g
242 pages