The Hunger for Intimacy with Taylor Swift: Fandom and Girlhood Insights

These days, the closest any Swiftie can get to Taylor Swift herself is the front standing section of the Eras tour. Gone are the days when she did fan meet-and-greets backstage, often sending her mum Andrea around stadiums to pick out the most enthusiastic fans. Unless you’re royal progeny, meeting Swift around the Eras dates has become nearly impossible. Fans may know she might be smuggled in and out inside a flight case. There have been no exclusive advance fan-listening parties for her new albums, known as the Secret Sessions, since Lover in 2019. Naturally, the pandemic meant there were none for 2020’s Folklore and Evermore, and they weren’t resumed with 2022’s Midnights, this year’s The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD), or any of the “Taylor’s Version” re-recordings in between.

In Munich last week, an estimated 45,000 fans sat on an artificial hill outside the Olympiastadion as Swift performed to 74,000 fans inside. Picnicking, trading friendship bracelets, and singing along, the night unofficially became the best-attended Eras date, with a combined audience of around 113,000. From the stage, Swift acknowledged the “beautiful people” outside.

Meanwhile, the Camden New Journal reported on a different kind of grassroots Swift fandom. In June, as the Eras tour hit London, a group of six teenage girls were “spotted acting eccentrically” on Hampstead Heath, digging up soil with a spoon. When pressed by a passerby, they confessed that Swift had just sat on a nearby bench and that they wanted to keep the earth she had walked on.

That feeling also echoes in the Victoria and Albert (V&A) museum’s thoughtful new walking trail of Swift’s outfits and artifacts, which places her archival pieces in conversation with the museum’s exhibits. “I presented it as feeling like she’s just left the room, which feels true to the way that she communicates with fans,” curator Kate Bailey said. In a room of landscapes by Constable and Turner, the titular cardigan from the song’s music video was laid on a stool next to a piano wreathed in moss because it’s more expressive. “There’s a sense that she’s been here, as if it’s about to come to life,” Bailey added.

In one sense, this desire to be in any kind of proximity to Swift is obvious: millions of people couldn’t get tickets to the Eras tour and will take any chance to be part of the action. Pop stars have always commanded communal fervor and a collector’s mentality. Fans crave intimacy with Swift, and this craving feels extreme and full-hearted, suggesting something more profound is going on.

All this hopeful, almost desperate conjuring of her presence made me think about two great critical texts. In “The King’s Two Bodies” (1957), political theorist Ernst H Kantorowicz suggests that in medieval times, kings were thought to have one physical incarnation and one spiritual body. A star such as Swift embodies both the human and the divine, with followers desperate to be close to her physical form while seeing her as having a transcendent, all-encompassing aura.

It also revisits Hannah Ewens’ excellent book “Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture,” where she writes that Lady Gaga does not possess an ordinary body – she’s a living, breathing performance-art piece. Ewens notes that fans crave organic in-person meetings, making pop stars’ bodies even more prized when they experience bodily intimacy with them. Swift once cultivated this possibility, offering free meet-and-greets and moving around arenas to surprise fans. However, these moments are now rare, replaced by collective fan experiences like the Eras tour confetti keepsakes and shared friendship bracelets.

Fans have constructed and made themselves part of a kind of collective Swiftian body. They hungrily consume and catalog every detail to make her more vividly real, bound together by friendship bracelets and shared references. Swift herself has created a sense of a shared mind with her fans, “training” them to read her cues and allowing them to complete her thoughts. A recent study highlighted the ties between Swift’s body and those of her fans, noting that her candor about her experiences with disordered eating inspired fans to positively change their behaviors.

The scenes from Munich reminded me of photos from the Lilith Fair touring festival in the 90s, where thousands of women convened to watch an all-female bill led by Sarah McLachlan. That run became the highest-grossing US touring festival one year, a precursor to the Eras tour’s record-breaking run and a political assertion of the cultural significance of fans and musicians. Everyone at the Eras tour is presumably there because they are a giant Swiftie, but it’s also a celebration of largely female community and closeness amid societal challenges.

When Swifties discuss their love for their idol, they talk about her kindness and how much she cares. This tour honors and reflects the stages of their own lives. The Munich pictures reminded me of images of Woodstock and Joni Mitchell’s song lyric of beautifully naive optimism on the cusp of a dark new era: “We are stardust / We are golden / And we’ve got to get ourselves / Back to the garden.” A fake hill, a spoonful of soil, a moss-festooned piano: it’s all enough.

Source: Frankfurter Allgemeine, Camden New Journal