{"id":309,"date":"2024-04-03T09:20:49","date_gmt":"2024-04-03T08:20:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/hellohumanities\/?p=309"},"modified":"2024-04-03T09:20:49","modified_gmt":"2024-04-03T08:20:49","slug":"swift-backlash-taylor-swift-vs-the-nfl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/hellohumanities\/swift-backlash-taylor-swift-vs-the-nfl\/","title":{"rendered":"Swift Backlash: Taylor Swift Vs. the NFL"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Between now and the summer we are going to be showcasing the best of our original research by students in the School of Humanities at the University of Westminster. If you are a Humanities student at Westminster and would like to publish your research on our blog, please do get in touch! Hannah, the author of our third post,<\/em> is a third year BA English Literature student. She spent last year studying Literature in America whilst on academic exchange program and is now back at Westminster for her final year. In her free time, she enjoys exploring London, reading and drinking matcha. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI have no awareness of if I\u2019m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads […] Football is awesome, it turns out\u201d \u2013 Taylor Swift, interview for TIME\u2019s 2023 Person of the Year<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taylor Swift\u2019s attendance of the NFL games of her boyfriend Travis Kelce, who plays for the Kansa City Chiefs, has provoked a huge and unjustifiably aggressive backlash against her, including Giants fans booing at a Swift commercial and TikTok users insisting that Swift is less well known than the America\u2019s National Football League (Swift has 276M Instagram followers, while the NFL has 28.7M). At first sight, it seems strange that her attendance of a major sporting event, which has always promoted the presence of celebrities, should prove to be so contentious. When viewed through the perspective of the Second Wave feminism of the mid-twentieth century, however, it is possible to see how the presence of an unmarried, childless, financially independent, publicly outspoken, and globally successful woman within this traditional male sphere is felt as a threat to the established patriarchal national order, exposing a broader backlash against the progressive gains of the last century, and confirming how \u201csocial attitudes towards women exist as the overt expression of centuries of female oppression\u201d (Hildebrand et al., 1971).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whilst women\u2019s rights today have moved on from those of Victorian women, expectations of women are still partially informed by an ideal of domesticity inherited from the traditional family structure, most notably the heteronormative structure of \u2018the nuclear family,\u2019 where a husband is the patriarch and breadwinner, married to a stay-at-home mother who takes on the domestic role of cooking, cleaning and looking after their children and are discouraged from having career or personal aspirations outside the home. In the mid-twentieth century, Second Wave Feminism \u201cengaged millions of constituents in a dialogue about heretofore unconventional topics, including the relationship between the nuclear family and the industrial economy, \u2026the politics of sexuality, and the meaning of gender\u201d (Zeitz 2008, p.676). The idealization of \u201cThe Happy Housewife Heroine\u201d (Friedan 1963, p.1) in magazines, fiction and politics was challenged by feminists such as Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique<\/em>: \u201cIt is more than a strange paradox that as all professions are finally open to women in America, \u201ccareer woman\u201d has become a dirty word […] Why, with the removal of all the legal, political, economic, and educational barriers that once kept women from being man\u2019s equal, a person in her own right, an individual free to develop her own potential, should she accept this new image which insists she is not a person but a \u201cwoman\u201d\u201d (Friedan 1963, p.17).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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