Why the media’s obsession with Taylor Swift’s wedding plays into far-right tradwife ideology

If you’ve read the news lately, you might have heard: Taylor Swift is getting married. Coverage of the impending wedding is updated daily, coming not just from gossip sites but from mainstream journalists, too. From wedding venues to plus-ones to inviting exes to The Dress, the topics of speculation seem endless.

It’s not limited to CNN, New York Times, and Fox News, either. Mainstream media from India to Aotearoa is covering this regularly, including the New Zealand Herald and Stuff. Should we care about where Taylor Swift’s wedding will take place, what her “bridal manicure” will be, or whether Blake Lively got an invite? Absolutely not. And I say that as a long-time fan. Should we care that serious media outlets think this is important or in any way newsworthy, and have been covering it for 10 months? Yes, we should.

It’s the latest example of coverage of Taylor Swift revealing the rivers of regressive sexism flowing through our wider cultural landscapes. The spotlight on The Wedding takes the conversation from Swift’s impact on the world as an artist and worker, to her pending role as a wife and potential mother. This distorts the positive impacts of Swift’s own artistic body of work for her many female fans and her public quest to keep creative control of her work – her songs, videos, and brand. Focusing on the wedding also plays into current far-right tradwife ideology, which links femininity with inferiority, motherhood, and unpaid domestic labour.

Swift has long been linked to femininity, but over two decades in the industry she has connected that femininity more and more to her status as a working woman, which for her is inseparable from being an artist. I recently published the first comprehensive study of how Swift has used songwriting and music videos to present gender, sexuality, sexism, and misogyny over the last 20 years. I found that since 2014, contrary to the common claim that Swift has rarely included political material in her songs, Swift increasingly used her songwriting, music videos and documentaries to critique examples of sexism, especially in the workplace.

Since her debut Swift has consistently foregrounded images of femaleness and femininity that are positive or neutral, but which have triggered some women’s internalised sexism. Throughout her discography, she has written five songs that include a slur against women, but the vast majority of her discography (250+ songs) presents women as intelligent, whole people: complex, nuanced, capable of doing harm as well as good, agents, creators, and communicators. Although Swift has been critiqued for not being a feminist, research has shown that her representations of womanhood have had powerful positive impacts on her female fans.