B*tch, Smile: Taylor Swift’s Female Rage

Who’s afraid of little old me? On her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poet’s Department (2024),Taylor Swift warns: Well, you should be. Swift is no stranger to the reductionist binaries often ascribed to powerful women: bitch/boss, monster/Madonna, whore/hero. This course will take an interdisciplinary approach to close reading and analysis of Swift’s extensive repertoire—songs, music videos, documentaries, journals, The Eras Tour concert film— to unpack the anatomy of her self-proclaimed “rage” directed at a litany of male targets. Students will contextualize their analysis of her work and the social construct of “female rage” through the scholarship of Sigmund Freud, Gloria Steinem, Hélène Cixous, Adrienne Rich, and Naomi Wolf, in addition to cultural critic Jia Tolentino, among others. As media is composed of complex rhetorical ecologies, this class will work in various modalities, such as visual, audio, spatial, gestural, and written. Students will have the opportunity to learn research strategies and acquaint themselves with various theoretical frameworks to compose two analytical essays and a culminating, multimodal presentation. In addition, students will keep a tortured poets journal to reflect on course readings and experiment with their own creative voices. This course will appeal to anyone who is a Swiftie and/or interested in creative writing, women and gender studies, sociology and culture, literature, psychology, and media studies.