Communication, Culture & Critique ISSN 1753–9129

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

From “Mine” to “Ours”: Gendered

Hierarchies of Authorship and the Limits of
Taylor Swift’s Paratextual Feminism

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Myles McNutt
College of Arts and Letters, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA

This article analyzes paratextual strategies deployed by Taylor Swift in her transition from
country to pop in the context of her articulation of her authorship as a female songwriter.
This was a transition complicated by the gendered hierarchies of pop music, wherein
male producers carry significant discursive weight. The article frames the “Voice Memos”
included with her 2014 album 1989 as a form of paratextual feminism, reiterating the
authenticity she developed as a country star and pushing back against claims her collabo-
ration with male producers like Max Martin and Ryan Tedder threaten her autonomy as
a female voice in the music industry. However, the article goes on to consider how these
and other paratextual feminisms are inherently tied to neoliberal values of post-feminism,
demonstrating that their potential as a gendered critique of the media industries is limited
by the lack of actualization within Swift’s broader star text and industry practice.

Keywords: Taylor Swift, Feminism, Authorship, Music Industry, Paratexts, Post-Feminism,

Pop Music

doi:10.1093/ccc/tcz042

In August 2014, Taylor Swift partnered with ABC News and Yahoo! News to
livestream the reveal of her upcoming album, 1989, debuting the lead single “Shake It
Off” and answering questions from invited fans in the studio audience as well as those
connected via Skype. She appears alone on the living room-like stage, the studio’s
small space communicating an intimacy between Swift and those lucky enough to be
in attendance (see Figure 1).
After a fan asks a question about the deluxe version of the album—which would
eventually be sold exclusively through Target—during the Q&A, Swift speaks to her
desire to allow fans intimate access to her music. Swift notes “I’ve gotten a lot of
questions about songwriting, about the process, about what happens when you get
an idea. The answer is the first thing I do is grab my phone ( . . . ) and I play whatever

Corresponding author: Myles McNutt; e-mail: mmcnutt@odu.edu

Communication, Culture & Critique 13 (2020) 72–91 © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on
72 behalf of International Communication Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
journals.permissions@oup.com
M. McNutt From “Mine” to “Ours”

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Figure 1 Taylor Swift addresses a fan question regarding the deluxe edition of 1989 featuring
the Voice Memos during her livestream on August 18, 2014. Screenshot from https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=7seCLu8QLWU.

melody/gibberish comes to my brain first.” Swift then pauses slightly for effect. “I’ve
never released any of that before,” she says as excited murmurs can be heard in the
studio audience, “but actually I have three bonus tracks that are just voice memos
from my phone.” The crowd erupts into applause, thrilled at the prospect of getting
direct insight into Swift’s songwriting process.
However, to view the 1989 “Voice Memos” exclusively through the lens of satis-
fying fan curiosity fails to reflect the complexity of the work within these paratexts
(Gray, 2010), designed to frame the album for both fans as well as critics, journalists,
and industry professionals. It is true that the Voice Memos give devoted fans one
more way of observing Swift’s intimate songwriting process, provided they are
enough of a fan to purchase the deluxe version of the album. However, the Voice
Memos also have to be understood as paratexts explicitly focused on Swift’s labor,
and on her place within gendered hierarchies operating within the music industry
that have historically perceived the writing and production of popular music as a
masculine space even while pop music itself has been feminized. And they must
simultaneously be placed in conversation with Swift’s broader relationship with
popular feminism, in which her personal articulation of her feminized star text
has evolved not as a fully developed feminist identity, but rather as a neoliberal
co-opting of feminist values.
By placing the Voice Memos within these overlapping and at times conflicting
contexts, this article explores the role and capacity of paratexts to contribute to and
generate feminist critique within popular celebrity frameworks. Through analysis of

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From “Mine” to “Ours” M. McNutt

the 1989 Voice Memos and other similar efforts tied to two of Swift’s other albums
(2012’s Red and 2017’s reputation), I will demonstrate that the performative intimacy
of these paratexts is part of a longer reclamation of authorship, a feminist act in
industrial contexts due to the gendered hierarchy of pop music production Swift
entered when shifting toward pop as a genre. However, viewing the Voice Memos
within Swift’s larger star text reveals that the feminist underpinnings of Swift’s actions

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are limited by the artist’s broader self-representation, and the Voice Memos ultimately
fail to develop an explicitly gendered critique of the music industry’s masculine norms
even at a time when popular expressions of feminism are more visible than ever
before. The article therefore positions the paratextual feminism of the Voice Memos
as a symptom of paratexts more broadly, arguing that they represent an ideal venue
for branded manifestations of popular feminism but fail to extend to systemic issues
of gender hierarchies evident in these and other case studies.

Literature review: Gendered hierarchies of the music industry and

paratextual feminisms
When only a single female artist won an award during the main broadcast of the
2018 Grammy Awards, Recording Academy president Neil Portnow was pushed
by Variety—in an article prefaced by “Grammys So Male?”—to explain the lack of
representation for female artists. He responded by arguing “it has to begin with ( . . . )
women who have the creativity in their hearts and souls, who want to be musicians,
who want to be engineers, producers, and want to be a part of the industry on the
executive level ( . . . ) [They need] to step up because I think they would be welcome”
(Angermiller, 2018).
Portnow’s comments were roundly criticized by women within the recording
industry (Sisario, 2018), and highlighted the gender hierarchies that permeate the
industry writ large. This is particularly true within the space of popular music, a genre
that has been historically feminized (Coates, 1997) but which has been dominated
by masculine forces behind-the-scenes. Seabrook’s The Song Machine: Inside the Hit
Factory (2015) details a shift in pop music’s production culture beginning in the
2000s toward producers like Max Martin and Dr. Luke whose mechanical approach
to hit production reshaped the pop landscape. Assessing “contemporary hits radio,”
Seabrook argues the mechanized nature of production pushes even the artist to the
background of a song’s identity: speaking of performers like Britney Spears and Katy
Perry, he asks “What do they stand for as artists? Their insights into the human
condition seem to extend no further than the walls of the vocal booth. And who
really writes their songs?” (p. 5). The primacy of male producers in the discourse
surrounding pop music extends to the Grammys, where only seven women have ever
been nominated for the Producer of the Year (Non-Classical) award (George, 2016).
While this reflects a lack of women active within music production (Newman, 2018),
that reality is a byproduct of institutional pressures that push women away from these
technical roles.

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As a result, female artists like Taylor Swift who take an active role in the writing
and producing of their own work are forced to navigate an industry that obfuscates
their labor in favor of their male collaborators. This is not a new development:
in his research on authorship and the popular song, Keith Negus uses the case
of Madonna, arguing “Madonna’s authorship of songs has still been marginalized
even as feminist scholars have stressed her independence and editorial power and

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argued for her control over her commodification and self-representation” (2011,
pp. 610–611). Negus’ analysis reveals that while female artists can be successfully
positioned as authorities within the space of publicity and personal branding, where
gender hierarchies are less dominant, the masculine space of pop music authorship is
comparably impenetrable. The aforementioned rise of producers like Martin and Dr.
Luke within pop music authorship has only made it more challenging for artists like
Madonna and Swift to be seen as authors of their own pop songs, although the same is
not true in other genres. Country music’s core value of authenticity (Peterson, 1999)
historically offered few industrial roles for women as producers or engineers (see
Bufwack and Oermann, 1993) but coalesced around a culture of authorship rooted
in songwriting, becoming a space where women like Lori McKenna, Hillary Lindsey,
and singer–songwriters like Dolly Parton and Swift herself have enjoyed considerable
success (Yahr, 2017). But within pop music, Madonna and Swift each faced an uphill
battle to be perceived as the author of their own songs.
While Madonna’s struggles remind us that these issues within popular music are
not new, the rise of social media platforms give artists like Swift more space to explore
these inequities. As Rosalind Gill (2016) notes, “feminism has a new luminosity
in popular culture” (p. 614), as evidenced by the “Grammys So Male” discourse
referenced above. Swift is among those artists who have integrated feminist practice
into their public image on platforms like Twitter and Instagram: Elizabeth Affuso
positions Swift’s social media support of the January 2017 women’s march as her
“using popular feminism to rebrand” (Glatsky, 2017), an extension of her branded
relationship with girl friendship and girl power (Affuso, 2018). Swift’s engagement
with popular feminism has come through her use of social platforms as a form of
paratext, which Gray (2010) identifies as surrounding texts that “establish frames
and filters through which we look at, listen to, and interpret the texts they hype”
(p. 3). These paratexts become part of what Ellcessor (2012) identifies as a “star
text of connection,” in which social media feeds and other paratexts are central to
the construction of both a celebrity persona and an intimate relationship with a
star’s audience. The “performative intimacy” (Marwick and Boyd, 2011) of social
media platforms gives artists a space to assert authority over their careers and their
relationship with their audiences (Baym 2018) at a perceived distance from the
industrial hierarchies that marginalize them, creating a sense of agency with which
artists like Swift can engage with feminist reframings of her career.
However, this agency can be misleading, as the relationship between paratexts
and promotion reveals their limitations as a space for feminist practice. Vesey
(2015) writes about pop star fragrances as simultaneously empowering the artists

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and reinforcing the “contradiction between empowerment and erasure of agency”

(p. 992) based on the capitalist branding practices inherent within the develop-
ment of scented paratexts. I argue here that we can extend this contradiction to
all official paratexts—meaning those produced by the artist or the artist’s rep-
resentation in support of their professional output—insofar as they embody the
neoliberal sensibility of contemporary popular feminisms. In writing about recent

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social media-based feminist activism, Gill (2016) argues that “sexism is gener-
ally framed within the media—even when it is taken seriously—as an individual
rather than structural or systemic issue, let alone connected to other inequalities
or located in the broader context of neoliberal capitalism” (pp. 615–616). Celebrity
paratexts—whether in the form of fragrances, social media feeds, or bonus con-
tent added to the release of albums—are crucial parts of their star text (Dyer,
1991) broadly, but are also inextricable from the capitalist systems designed to
sell and promote their albums. While paratexts influence how we understand that
artist and their music, their capacity to manifest as activist practice is limited by
their supportive rather than transformative relationship to the industry in which
the artist operates as an individual. The same distance that allows paratexts to
evoke feminist practice also limits the ability for that feminist practice to trans-
late to industrial issues like gendered authorship faced by artists like Swift and
Madonna.
Paratexts are therefore natural conduits for neoliberal post-feminism, which Gill
defines as “an individualistic, entrepreneurial ideology that is complicit rather than
critical of capitalism, and of other systems of (classed, racialized, and transna-
tional) injustice” (2016, p. 617). Banet-Weiser (2018) argues that feminism becomes
brandable in cases that “emphasize individual attributes such as confidence, self-
esteem, and competence as particularly useful to neoliberal self-reliance and capitalist
success” (p. 13). Paratexts embody this branded feminism, functioning as valuable
spaces of articulation for celebrity figures to negotiate issues of gender inequality as
it relates to their own career that ultimately cannot be unlinked from the capitalist
systems in which that gender inequality is reinforced. Banet-Weiser notes that “the
visibility of popular feminism ( . . . ) is important, but it often stops there, as if seeing
or purchasing feminism is the same thing as changing patriarchal structures” (p. 4).
Positioning Taylor Swift as a case study for paratexts functioning as a conduit for
popular feminism within the music industry underlines how this particular form of
textuality enables careful negotiation of gendered hierarchies by individual artists, but
fails to make the critical connections necessary for this visibility to extend to larger
systemic changes outside that artist’s place within the industry.

“Everything has changed”: The patriarchy of the pop transition from

Taylor Swift to 1989
Taylor Swift’s paratextual feminism emerges in response to her transition from
country to pop, in which her agency over her songwriting process came into question

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in critical industry paratexts—reviews, popular articles, etc.—and resulted in the

decentering of her authorial voice in discourse around her music.
At the point of her breakthrough at the age of 16 in 2005, Swift’s authorship
leveraged the value placed on the songwriter within country music. In a CMT.
com profile by Edward Morris (2006), Swift walks through the inspiration behind
her self-titled debut album, and anchors it in her teenage experience: she wrote

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lead single “Tim McGraw” in her freshman year, where she “got the idea in
math class,” while album track “The Outside” was written when she was only 12.
All told, Morris emphasizes that “Swift wrote three of the album’s 11 songs on
her own and co-wrote the rest,” and the article only mentions the album’s lead
producer Nathan Chapman because Swift tells the story of how she asserted her
authority by insisting Chapman produce the record, and never identifies co-writer
Liz Rose.
With subsequent records, Swift’s control of her authorial image only expanded:
she earned a producing credit on her follow-up Fearless in 2008, which the Boston
Globe argued “separates her from the pack of teenage starlets who rely on big-name
producers, songwriters, and Disney shows for a music career” and earned Swift her
first Grammy win for Album of the Year (Reed, 2008). On 2010’s Speak Now, she
took the step to eschew collaboration entirely, penning each of the album’s songs
on her own rather than working with Rose and other Nashville collaborators—while
Chapman remained the producer on the entire album, his contributions never earned
him a writing credit, allowing Swift’s words to “speak” for themselves. Reviewing
Speak Now, Village Voice writer Theon Weber (2010) observes that “like a procession
of country songwriters before her, [Swift] creates characters and situations—some
from life—and finds potent ways to describe them.” Weber goes on to analyze Swift’s
authorial voice in a detailed way that is only possible when her authorship is perceived
as being free from collaboration, regardless of whether or not Chapman or anyone
else contributed to the songs in question without credit.
Across her first three albums, Swift’s authorship becomes enmeshed with her sense
of authenticity. While the country production of her records may be questioned,
particularly as Fearless and Speak Now led to crossover success on the pop charts,
country music’s songwriting tradition anchors Swift’s authorial voice in discourse
around her albums, and the genre’s absence of mega-producer figures allows for Swift
to be perceived as the sole author of her songs if not necessarily the sole architect of
her career.
However, this sole authorship ended with Taylor Swift’s choice to more actively
move beyond her country roots, a decision that muddled her authenticity due to the
distinct hierarchies of authorship in contemporary pop music. When Swift released
her album Red in 2012, the New York Times (Caramanica, 2012) identified it as
“a transitional album,” centering its analysis on Red’s “most blatant stroke of pop
engineering”: the hiring of Swedish producers Max Martin and Johann Shellback,
which Caramanica characterizes as “the clear choice for any singer looking for a loud

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From “Mine” to “Ours” M. McNutt

pop splash.” And while the album features a range of songs produced by Chapman
and written and produced by Swift—including a reunion with Liz Rose on “All Too
Well”—its lead single “We Are Never Getting Back Together” was co-written and
produced by Martin and Shellback, who are responsible for the fact that—according
to The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones—“the Swedish sound may now be the reigning
pop language everywhere” (2014).

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The musical impact of these pop producers was noted immediately within
popular discourse: the Times, breaking down the Martin-Shellback produced “I
Knew You Were Trouble,” notes “a dubstep wobble arrives about halfway through
like a wrecking ball, changing the course not just of the song but also of Ms. Swift’s
career” (Caramanica, 2012). However, the Times also notes that “each moment
of pure pop breakthrough is tempered immediately afterward by a contemplative
country moment,” a strategy that allowed Swift to continue to straddle generic
boundaries (Caramanica, 2012). Still, articles surrounding the album’s release
raised the question of Swift’s generic status: the Wall Street Journal outright asks
“Is Taylor Swift Still a Country Artist?” in a profile focused on her duets with
Ed Sheeran and Gary Lightbody on Red (Farley, 2012) and others highlight the
country music industry’s struggles to grapple with her lean away from country
(Sciafani, 2013). But the album’s genre mixing ultimately gave Swift space to
dismiss the question, noting that country music “feels like home” but telling
the Wall Street Journal that “I leave the genre labeling to other people” (Farley,
2012).
The same was not true for 2014’s 1989: when Swift introduced the album on
the ABC/Yahoo livestream, she explicitly acknowledged that it was her first pop
record, cutting ties with country and expanding her collaborations with promi-
nent pop producers. Martin joined Swift as executive producer on the album, and
alongside Shellback produced over half of the album’s 13 songs—Swift also collab-
orated with mega-producer Ryan Tedder, singer–producer Imogen Heap, and co-
wrote two songs with friend and future mega-producer Jack Antonoff. Only two
albums removed from the solo-authored Speak Now, only one song on 1989—
ballad “This Love,” the only song on the record produced by Chapman—is Swift’s
and Swift’s alone. The rest of the record is Swift making pop music with the same
collaborators as the “starlets” she was considered so distinct from earlier in her
career.
Although 1989 was generally well-received critically, and would go on to win Swift
her second Grammy for Album of the Year in addition to three number one singles, it
escalated ongoing questions about Swift’s authorship. In Frere-Jones’ rumination on
Swedish pop (2014), he argues that
Swift has a brand as familiar and visible as the Batman signal. It takes a lot of
noise to blanket that signal, but 1989 somehow does that. Many of its songs could
have been written for other people, and that’s the real first for Swift here, not any
alleged move from one style to another.

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Meanwhile, Forbes contributor Nick Messitte goes a step further: in an article titled
“If Taylor Swift Is So Genuine, Why Does ‘1989’ Sound So Fake” (Messitte, 2014) he
argues that
( . . . ) while it’s clear that many of these songs trace their genesis to Swift’s acoustic
guitar (sometimes the producers even decide to leave her strumming in—imagine
that!) the window-dressing becomes too all-encompassing: there’s too much

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Shellback identifiable in the Shellback songs, too much Tedder present in the
Tedder ones, and the result is exactly the opposite of what she had intended.
In both cases, the suggestion is that Swift’s sonic evolution has erased her authentic
voice. The same industry discourses that had originally supported her authorship
within country music no longer perceived Swift’s authorship in the same light, raising
questions of her autonomy in a space dominated by male producers like her collabo-
rators as opposed to songwriters. And while it is possible that discourse would have
been different if Swift had worked with female producers with similar power within
the industry, the fact those producers do not exist makes this a gendered dialogue.
Notably, neither of these articles acknowledges the work that Swift did with Heap on
the album’s closing song “Clean,” erasing the one female collaborator on the record
while simultaneously eliding that Swift herself is credited as an executive producer on
the record alongside Martin. Although Swift successfully transitioned her commer-
cial success to pop as a genre, her identity as an artist was inherently threatened in
ways that speak to both the distinctions between country and pop as industrial silos
and the masculine hierarchies created by the producers within pop music specifically.

“I knew [they] were trouble”: The paratextual feminism of the 1989 voice
memos
While the discourse surrounding both Red and 1989 threatened Swift’s sense of
authorship, Swift did not allow these industry paratexts to stand on their own:
acknowledging their threat to her identity as an artist, Swift worked from the begin-
ning of her collaboration with these producers to push back against the marginaliza-
tion of authorship that female artists face within pop music by spreading her own
narrative regarding these collaborations. When she first collaborated with Martin
and Shellback on Red in 2012, she did an interview with MTV News, which was
posted with the title “T Swift Sets Red’s Tone” (Vena, 2012). In the video, the reporter
mentions the presence of dubstep on the record, referring to the song “I Knew
You Were Trouble,” produced by Martin and Shellback. Acknowledging this, Swift
responds, but does so in ways that consciously foreground her authorship within the
process:
I brought in this chorus to Max Martin and Johann Shelback and just kind of
played it for ‘em and it was just piano, vocal. And I was like “At the end of the
chorus I want it to just explode.” It ended up having a little bit of a flare to it that
is reminiscent of dubstep, it’s like very subtle, but I’m really excited because it
actually sounds like the intensity of the emotion I wrote about.

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There are two key articulations happening in this interview, and in others like it (see
Dobbins, 2012). The first is Swift’s focus on the fact that this was a chorus that she
brought into the studio with Martin and Shellback, suggesting that their contributions
were about engineering the sound she was hoping for rather than manufacturing a
song for her to perform. The second, however, is that Martin and Shellback’s role is
to engineer a sound that captures the emotions she was writing about, rather than

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replacing those emotions with radio-friendly production. The message is that Swift
may be collaborating with producers that work with other artists, but she is doing so
on her own terms.
Interviews like this one would be seen by only a small portion of fans, serving as
paratexts that would be part of popular discourse but over which Swift herself has
minimal control. However, when making the generic transition official with 1989,
Swift takes these same principles and applies them to “official” paratexts with the
aforementioned Voice Memos, part of the Deluxe version of the album released
exclusively at Target (see Figure 2). While this does mean that not all fans would
necessarily have access to the Voice Memos at the time of the album’s release, their
position as value-added artifacts for the deluxe package reinforces their importance,
as evidenced by the fans’ enthusiastic response to the livestream announcement
outlined earlier. Regardless of how widely they were distributed, however, the Voice
Memos unquestionably function as a rejoinder in an ongoing conversation about
her authorship—although Swift herself does not frame them in that light in favor
of positioning them as a gift to her fans, their discursive function is linked to
her existing rhetoric surrounding authorship within the contested space of pop
collaboration.
These Voice Memos are also not explicitly framed in feminist terms, but they
are presented as intimate glimpses of Swift’s creative process, and thus part of her
larger brand and its relationship to popular feminism. And while an average fan
may not necessarily perceive them as a part of ongoing discourses surrounding her
role as a female songwriter in a music landscape dominated by male producers,
Swift’s choices in how she presents the Voice Memos suggest an awareness of those
conversations, and thus assert her own “voice” with both her audience and those
within the music industry who might question her authorship over her music in light
of her relationship with Martin, Shellback, and the other collaborators.
Voice Memos for three songs on 1989 appear on the deluxe version of the
album: “I Know Places,” “I Wish You Would,” and “Blank Space.” The choice of the
three songs is positioned as an explainer of the different options for how she has
written songs on the record: “I Know Places” was written on piano, the lyrics for
“I Wish You Would” were written based on an existing track, and her voice memo
for “Blank Space” features her performing the song on guitar. However, they also
happen to highlight Swift’s three primary collaborations on the album, meaning that
they allow the listener to understand Swift’s role within each of the partnerships
that were framed discursively as a threat to her authorial control of her musical
output.

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Figure 2 The back cover of the deluxe edition of 1989, featuring the three Voice Memos along
with Swift’s often ignored credit as executive producer of the album alongside Max Martin.
Retrieved from https://www.amazon.com/1989-Deluxe-Taylor-Swift/dp/B00OY74JYS.

Although Swift’s general introduction to these paratexts at the beginning of the

memo for “I Know Places” does not acknowledge her collaborators by name, the
Voice Memos are not an attempt to erase or necessarily even diminish their contribu-
tions: each of the individual memos are careful to negotiate the politics of authorship,
equally reverential to her male production partners and assertive of her primary
role in crafting the songs and their meanings. This is most prominent in the voice
memo for “I Know Places,” a song produced by OneRepublic frontman and prolific
producer Ryan Tedder. Having produced songs for artists like Beyoncé, Adele, and
Ellie Goulding, Tedder carries a strong authorship discourse within popular music,
including a 2014 cover story for Billboard accompanied by an article highlighting
his songs “for” those artists, as opposed to “with” (Hampp, 2014). Swift notes his
prominence in her introduction to the voice memo, knowing “I always wanted to
work with him, and finally we scheduled some studio time.” However, she then
emphasizes that she came into the studio with a fully developed idea, albeit one that

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she sent him the night before “just in case he wrote back and said ‘I can’t stand that,
I want to work on something else, think of something else.’” She then plays the voice
memo, which she recorded at her piano, where she plays an unfinished version of “I
Know Places.” The song is missing some lyrics, but the basic melody is in place, and
Swift prefaces the voice memo by noting they recorded the song the following day.
This voice memo demonstrates the careful balance of Swift’s self-disclosure, which

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foregrounds her own authorship while avoiding disrupting the power hierarchies
in which she is necessarily operating within pop music. The memo reinforces that
Swift’s songwriting has been filtered through the power structures of popular music
production, given that Tedder had to be willing to work with a particular song, and
ultimately would earn a writing credit on the song that emerged. However, at the
same time, Swift’s self-deprecating post-script to the song itself in the memo serves to
assert her vision for the song on multiple fronts. She ends the song abruptly, noting
“or whatever, I don’t know,” as if to acknowledge the song is unformed. She then
points to her goals for the song’s meaning, emphasizing, “it’s about how like everyone’s
trying to get into or ruin a love or whatever.” But she also refers to its “lyric bridge
thing,” noting that “the chorus would just go to that major,” reinforcing that she is
entering the studio with clear ideas of what she wants the song to do musically. And
while she notes that “it wouldn’t be a piano thing,” the song ends up prominently
featuring piano on the record, suggesting that Tedder preferred to work with the
musical aesthetic Swift generated. The song even seems to open with the click of a
tape recorder, as though the sonic qualities of the voice memo became the component
parts of the production. While Swift does not explicitly acknowledge this, the voice
memo works in conjunction with a close reading of the song’s production to assert
that even working with a producer as successful as Tedder, Swift’s original demo of
the track remains influential in the final product.
The remaining two Voice Memos also function as paratextual contributions to
Swift’s sense of authorship. While the memo for “I Wish You Would”—where she
writes lyrics over an existing guitar track written by producer Jack Antonoff—could
threaten Swift’s authorial control, Antonoff had not yet established himself as a
prolific pop producer at the time, and the song is framed as a collaboration with a
close friend rather than a professional. The same is not true for “Blank Space,” the
third and final memo, which is a record of Swift’s collaborative process with Martin
and Shellback, whose introduction into her career first challenged her authorship.
Introducing the memo as “from a session that I had with” the two producers, Swift
reinforces that the trio has developed a clear collaborative process:
( . . . ) what we like to do is run a recording on our phones of everything we’re
doing when we’re putting a song together just in case someone blurts out a cool
melody and then we forget about it, we want to go back and then replay the tape
so we can remind ourselves what exactly we were saying.
Whereas Swift had not worked with Tedder previously, this voice memo introduc-
tion emphasizes her existing relationship with Martin and Shellback, one that has

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M. McNutt From “Mine” to “Ours”

evolved into a shared creative process wherein they are a “we.” However, despite this
established collaboration, Swift still reinforces that she is the catalyst for these ideas,
sharing the recording of her first playing the idea that would become “Blank Space.”
By asserting the nature of this collaboration, Swift implicitly pushes back against
popular journalism claims that the songs could have been written for any artist,
given that the session began with her idea and was part of a pre-existing workflow

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developed between the three contributing writers.
Swift gives further attention to helping her listeners understand the nature of her
songwriting process alongside Martin and Shellback, prefacing the memo more than
in the case of “I Know Places” or “I Wish You Would.” The memo itself features
Swift playing her acoustic guitar, working through the first verse of the song and
then its chorus. Throughout the clip, Martin and Shellback can be heard responding
in real time, reacting to things they like and throwing in vocal elements, extending
the intimacy of these recordings by giving an unedited glimpse of the soundscape
of the recording space (including some coughs). But Swift prepares the listener for
their contributions, explaining in her introduction that “they’re shouting out these
production ideas,” a choice of words that deemphasizes what role they might play in
the writing of the song itself as opposed to simply its production. When she finishes
playing the chorus, her vocal choice of a clicking sound spawns excitement from
Martin and Shellback, who encourage her to repeat it, and one reiterates that “every-
one’s going to kill” her for how successfully annoying it is. While it is possible—even
likely—that Martin and Shellback contributed to the lyrics and melody of the song,
Swift does not share those moments, focusing instead on their role in taking her vision
and helping sonically translate it, albeit in ways that are still within her control as part
of the collaborative trio, and which are driven by her original vision for the song.
While Swift frames the Voice Memos as a gift to fans, her chosen self-disclosures
foreground her contributions to the collaborative process of pop music songwriting,
and had a direct influence on the discourse around 1989. In his review of the album,
the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica (2014) argues that the memos are
( . . . ) there as gifts for obsessives, but also as boasts, flaunting her expertise and
also her aw-shucks demeanor. ( . . . ) And though the lyrics to “I Know Places”
and “Blank Space” changed a bunch from this stage to the final version, it’s clear
that the melodies were intact, and sturdy, from the beginning.

The ability for these paratexts to influence Caramanica’s understanding of the album’s
authorship speaks to their ability to preemptively cut off any narratives that seek to
subsume Swift’s authorial voice under that of her male collaborators. Swift would
continue this work into the launch of 2017’s reputation, where she released a series of
videos on her app Taylor Swift Now detailing the genesis of songs, typically beginning
with her home demos on piano or guitar and continuing into the studio with either
Martin and Shellback or Antonoff. The deluxe edition of reputation did not include
Voice Memos, but it did feature two distinct “Zines” that feature photos and artwork
from Swift herself, alongside handwritten lyrics that anchor the songs on the record in

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From “Mine” to “Ours” M. McNutt

the intimacy of her songwriting process. In both cases, the same principles evident—
although not explicit—in the 1989 Voice Memos apply: gifts for obsessives that also
reassert her authorial voice within these now ongoing collaborations, allowing even
an album that heavily taps into contemporary pop trends like rap to be read as an
authentic representation of Taylor Swift, songwriter. These paratexts may not be
directly positioned by Swift as a rejoinder in the ongoing debate around her transition

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into pop music and the questions surrounding her authorship within these collabora-
tive spaces, but her choices of what to share and how to frame that content allow them
to enter into the discourse around 1989 in ways productive for her authorial brand.
Similarly, while the Voice Memos are not explicitly framed in feminist terms, these
paratexts embed a feminist narrative of authorial control within the discourse around
1989 at a time when such narratives were challenged for other female artists who
also serve as writers and producers of their own work. At the 2014 Grammy Awards,
Beck’s Sea Change defeated Beyoncé’s self-titled 2013 release for Album of the Year,
sparking criticism from Kanye West and a subsequent online discourse debating the
decision: in a meme distributed online (see Figure 3), its creator notes that Beck
“wrote produced, arranged all 13 songs on his last album,” whereas Beyoncé “plays
zero instruments” and “needed 16 songwriters, producers, and composers on her last
album,” arguing that the collaborative nature of popular music is antithetical to the
artistry represented by Beck. This ignores that Beyoncé Knowles was the executive
producer of the album, has a writing credit on each of its songs, and guided the story-
telling for the visual album accompanying the record, or rather frames these outside
of the masculinized ideal of music authorship purported by the meme’s author.
It is therefore significant that Swift was able to center herself in the discourse on
the making of 1989 the following year, extending from the paratextual Voice Memos
to a Recording Industry listening session in Nashville, where she spoke directly to the
Grammy’s Producers & Engineers Wing without any of her collaborators alongside
her. While Swift’s established relationship with country’s songwriting tradition and
her whiteness function as privilege that Beyoncé and other artists may lack, these
paratexts were still necessary in order for those privileges to prevail against dominant
discourses facing female pop stars in general. When 1989 eventually won Album of
the Year, Swift’s speech emphasized the fact she became the first female artist to win
the award twice (having won in 2009 for Fearless), all while speaking on behalf of the
gaggle of male producers who remained mostly anonymous in the background. The
Voice Memos were a critical place where this narrative was able to germinate, a pivot
point around which the conversation around her record would evolve to ensure her
reputation as a female singer–songwriter remained intact.

“Dancing with [her] hands tied”: The limits of Swift’s post-1989

post-feminism
The Voice Memos demonstrate the popular feminist potential of paratexts, emerging
from within Swift’s relationship to branded feminism to serve as an implicit response

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M. McNutt From “Mine” to “Ours”

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Figure 3 The meme distributed following the 2016 Grammy Awards, questioning Beyoncé’s
authorship of her music as compared to Album of the Year winner Beck. Retrieved from http://
postconsumereports.blogspot.com/2015/02/art-is-not-weight-lifting-why-beck-vs.html.

to masculine hierarchies she navigated when transitioning toward pop music pro-
duction within her career. However, the fact that these discursive moments emerge
within paratexts embedded within the capitalist promotion of her record pulls her
further away from any deeper form of feminist action, revealing the post-feminism of
the Voice Memos. The Voice Memos have the potential to situate Swift’s authorship
above that of her male collaborators if read through this lens, but the feminism of
this act is obscured by an appearance of hypocrisy: when Swift won Album of the
Year, writer and activist Janet Mock took to Twitter with a photo of Swift accepting
the award, writing “the first woman to win Album of the Year twice but no women
producers standing behind you” (Mock, 2015).

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From “Mine” to “Ours” M. McNutt

The optics were a bit misleading: as noted, Imogen Heap co-wrote and produced
the song “Clean” on 1989, but was not present at the ceremony. Heap even posted
a blog post where she wrote that “I had assumed Taylor didn’t write too much of
her own music” but notes Taylor defied expectation, stating that while “there are
many artists who just get trampled on by various producers. ( . . . ) Taylor wouldn’t
let that happen in a million years” (Heap, 2014). However, Swift did not share a voice

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memo of her time in the studio with Imogen Heap on the record, an absence that
limits the producer’s place within the narratives surrounding 1989. While “Clean”
is among the songs discussed at the Recording Academy listening session, Taylor
still put more work into detailing the collaborations with male producers on the
record than emphasizing her collaboration with the sole female producer, who even
acknowledges in her blog post “I’m not exactly Max Martin, you know!” While Swift’s
decision to work with Heap places a female producer into the same conversation as
Martin, Swift had the opportunity to assert this more strongly by including a voice
memo of “Clean” and discussing the experience working with a female producer, but
ultimately did not do so.
It extends a larger conversation about Taylor Swift’s relationship with feminism,
in which choices and statements that are explicitly feminist must be placed in
context alongside a carefully controlled post-feminist star persona. On the one
hand, Swift has often used her fame to confront the gender bias of the music
industry. TIME Magazine identified Swift as one of its People of the Year in 2017
thanks to her testimony regarding a 2013 sexual assault during an interview with
Colorado radio DJ David Mueller—positioning her as a “silence breaker” along-
side Ashley Judd, Rose McGowan, and other women tied to the rise of “#MeToo
movement,” the magazine argues “her clear-eyed testimony marked one of sev-
eral major milestones in the conversation around sexual harassment this year”
(Dockterman 2017). Swift’s ability to negotiate her resistance to the power struc-
tures of that industry and their intersection with the patriarchy is evident in her
choice to take the case to trial, and echoed in the discourse surrounding her public
frustration with the sale of her master recordings to Scooter Braun in June 2019
(Grady, 2019). These fights against the masculine hierarchies within popular music
make it easier to understand the Voice Memos within the same lens of feminist
activism.
However, on the other hand, Swift’s place on the cover of TIME’s Person of the
Year issue was highly contested by those who argued that Swift’s general silence
speaks louder than her choice to break that silence by taking her case with Mueller
to trial. Indeed, Swift has often been criticized for the lack of intersectionality in
her feminism, whether through her defensive response to Nicki Minaj’s critique
of award shows for failing to represent black artists (Griffiths, 2017) or in her
threatening of legal action against Meghan Herning after the PopFront writer
(Herning, 2017) publicly called on the artist to condemn white supremacy within
her fanbase (Grady, 2017). Swift also drew significant criticism for sitting on the
sidelines during the 2016 Presidential Election while fellow pop stars like Katy

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M. McNutt From “Mine” to “Ours”

Perry and Lady Gaga campaigned for Hillary Clinton—The Daily Beast wrote of
“Taylor Swift’s Loud Election Silence” (Zimmerman, 2016) and “spineless feminism”
(Zimmerman, 2017). After Swift reemerged from relative seclusion to promote
the release of her album reputation in 2017, The Guardian (2017) published an
unsigned editorial arguing Swift’s silence reinforces President Trump’s values, noting
the inconsistency between her commitment to feminism and her apolitical star

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image.
Speaking to the pressure placed on Swift to acknowledge political causes, media
scholar Elizabeth Affuso points to Swift’s social media support for the January
2017 women’s march, but notes that Swift not actually attending the march rein-
forced the incompatibility of such statements with the apolitical brand she had
developed (Glatsky, 2017). Swift’s celebrity has been defined by these types of half-
measures, wherein small acts that reinforce her feminism ultimately fail to manifest
as a reorientation of her larger celebrity brand toward explicitly feminist causes.
These same principles apply to the paratextually feminist Voice Memos, which
complete work that allows Swift to be framed as challenging patriarchal hierar-
chies of the music industry but never extends to Swift actively questioning those
hierarchies, and fails to evolve into an explicitly activist framing of her author-
ship or an extended partnership with female producers. Taylor Swift’s negotiation
of her authenticity as a songwriter is not about threatening the existing politics
of authorship within popular music, but rather sustaining her existing authorial
persona, fundamentally limiting the Voice Memos’ impact on the music indus-
try writ large by containing their impact to promotional—rather than activist—
contexts.

Conclusion

When TIME named Taylor Swift as a silence breaker, Twitter user Genie Lauren
asked a question: “how are we calling Taylor Swift ‘silence breaker’ when the only
time she bothered to break her silence is when shit happened to her?” (Grady,
2017). It is a question that points to Swift’s complex relationship with popular
feminism, but also raises a larger question of whether or not individual acts by
celebrities of Swift’s status are capable of carrying influence without becoming
actualized as a more significant part of that artist’s brand. This article has explored
the Voice Memos as a space of paratextual feminism, wherein Swift’s self-disclosures
regarding her songwriting process enter into dialogue with discourses around
her authorship in a male-dominated field of pop music production. However,
it has also pointed to the limitations of these self-disclosures coming within
the form of official paratexts, and the challenge of reading the Voice Memos
through this lens when—as Lauren points out—Swift’s larger star text lacks an
investment in deconstructing gender hierarchies and engaging with feminism
outside of these branded, neoliberal spaces. And while Swift’s decision to break
her political silence ahead of the 2018 Midterm elections by endorsing Tennessee

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From “Mine” to “Ours” M. McNutt

Democrat Phil Bredesen in an Instagram post suggests a shift in her public persona,
which continued into an endorsement of the Equality Act in June 2019, whether
this will extend to areas closer to her career is much less certain given past
precedent.
However, while Swift has not yet explicitly acknowledged the political dimensions
of her work as a songerwriter, the Voice Memos nonetheless demonstrate the

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value of paratexts to the negotiation of masculine hierarchies that has been central
to her professional career. Her successful maintenance of her sense of authorial
control is evidenced by the discourse around her 2017 album reputation: despite
admitting that the album raises “the existential question of what, exactly, constitutes
a Taylor Swift song in 2017,” the New York Times’ Caramanica (2017) attributes
this to Swift’s intention, rather than a byproduct of the influence of producers like
Martin, Shellback, and Antonoff. Swift’s ability to do this was never guaranteed,
and the Voice Memos on 1989 were a crucial paratextual bridge between the “Old
Taylor” referenced in reputation’s lead single “Look What You Made Me Do” and
the “New Taylor” in terms of her authorial control over her musical output. That she
managed this as a female artist navigating an environment where other female artists
have been historically stripped of authorship is significant, and places Swift at the
center of efforts by female artists to push back against the masculinist industry they
operate within.
Because Swift has failed to integrate the feminism of these paratexts into other
areas of her career or acknowledge their feminism more directly, they embody the
neoliberal post-feminism that has defined her relationship with issues of gender
inequality. Her work articulating her own authorship over her music did not extend
to advocacy on behalf of female producers like herself and Imogen Heap, and her
choice not to work with any female producers on reputation (at least in the tracks
that made the album) would seem to reinforce the dominance of producers like
Martin, Shellback, and Antonoff rather than challenge it. The Voice Memos can be
read as Swift herself navigating the challenges facing her as a female artist in this
situation, but that reading remains limited to a branded feminism, paratexts that
give Swift agency but fail to lay a path for other female artists to do the same, or
advocate for more significant changes to gender discrepancies in the production of
popular music.
Much as there have been limits to Swift’s broader relationship with feminism, the
paratextual feminism underlying her negotiation of authorship serves a particular
function, and is curtailed (if not erased) once that function has been served—
the Voice Memos are inextricably linked to her self-branding, and to capitalist
systems that perpetuate the same gender hierarchies that Swift consciously works to
deconstruct within her own career through these paratexts. And so while Swift may
have successfully asserted that her musical output was “hers” through this work, the
absence of meaningful extension into other areas of her career has made it difficult to
imagine these or other paratexts evoking the type of meaningful feminism that could
impart real change on the music industry.

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