queering the Eras era

This Tumblr page serves as a final project for my Queer Rhetorics course. This project aims to explore and engage with the concept of queer time through Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, and her rerecording era, or Eras era. The goal of the project is to see how Swift's Eras era enacts queer time to challenge hetero-temporality and the normative ideals of life progress and flexes time to speak to moments as they hold space in the past, present, and future simultaneously.

In her original song "Better Than Revenge" on Speak Now, Taylor's lyricism cuts deep as she belts a line that talks about a girl stealing her boyfriend, "she's better known for the things that she does on the mattress". The lyric is slut-shaming and misogynistic at its finest, but represents the core of the album being that of not holding back, speaking up and out about things you didn't say. However, given Swift's own slut-shaming experiences, this line doesn't represent who she is now and what she believes in, or her identity as a feminist. In rerecording, she's able to rewrite how she talks about certain experiences. Rather than the original (pictured on the left above) focusing and blaming a girl for Swift's wandering boyfriend and reducing the girl down to her sexual behaviors, the rewrite (pictured on the right above) shifts the focus back to the interaction of this specific situation and the boyfriend's behavior of wandering. The girl becomes more of a passive actor than one that stole or directly impacted Swift's relationship. This song remains what it was originally, a song written from a type of raw emotional that you may only feel in your teenage years, but now it holds Swift's identity as a feminist and a writer who stands next to and uplifts women rather than participating in the same slut-shaming she experienced.

In it, there's a lyric "all they keep askin' me/is if i'm gonna be your bride/the only kind of girl they see' is a one-night or a wife". This is a message on society's view of women as a binary: a Slut! (iykyk) or respectable, wife material. This is a rejection of this normative binary by Swift. It's not the first time she makes remarks or addresses marriage and societal expectations regarding women getting married either. In her "Bejeweled" on Midnights she has sarcastic criticism of this ideal (see Bejeweled Easter Egg breakdown post on my blog).

"For me, this song has turned into a story of what the fans did for [it] really," Swift said. "It's such a special thing to look back on for me and sort of get to relive. It is pretty cool."