Swift

The Life of a Showgirl‘s opening track, “The Fate of Ophelia”, alludes to the Shakespeare character who is rendered marginal in this patriarchal world and who, eventually, commits suicide. Ophelia, like future showgirls, is a tragic figure whose life is dictated and determined by the men in power surrounding her. Most prominently, Ophelia believes she is in an intimate relationship with Hamlet.

However, in Act 3, Hamlet famously and cruelly negates their relationship, ordering Ophelia, “get thee to a nunnery”. In Shakespeare’s age, “nunnery” was sometimes used ironically to mean a “brothel”. In today’s parlance, Hamlet may be slut-shaming a woman who believes she is in a love story.

In “The Fate of Ophelia”, Taylor Swift confesses that if her beloved hadn’t entered her life, she would have suffered a similar fate to Ophelia. Just as the showgirl is a type, so too, Swift posits, is Ophelia. Put differently, Ophelia isn’t simply a tragic character in a play, but a prominent role for women to occupy; a role in which women believe they are in a love story when, in fact, they are in a patriarchal narrative in which women are tools and objects that can be disposed of and discarded.

After the opening song, Taylor Swift names one of the most prominent showgirls of the 20th century, Elizabeth Taylor. For all of Swift’s material success, she presents the titular icon as a tragic one.

The song presents the showgirl’s fame as perpetually precarious. Such success, such recognition, is predicated on staying atop a mountain created and maintained by patriarchal capitalism, an impossible task, one from which all must eventually fail and fall. A showgirl is perhaps the most tragic icon because, as the final song makes explicit, young women strongly identify with and aspire to become such icons. “Elizabeth Taylor” is an icon with whom Taylor Swift both identifies and communes.

The Life of a Showgirl explores multiple icons, and in “Father Figure”, Taylor Swift assumes the role of a patriarchal icon. In the song, Swift assumes the persona of a producer who can manufacture showgirls. The song details how such patriarchal producers— such “father figures”—manipulate and ultimately destroy the desiring stars they promise to protect and nurture.

As the producer promises the young woman who desires to become a showgirl, they “can make deals with the devil because” their “dick’s bigger”. The producers who manufacture the dominant culture industry, one in which young women are paraded and celebrated for their hyper-sexualized appearance, are male figures who feign the role of paternal, protective “father figures”. Such father figures promise to be icons of love, but they are icons of destruction.

Thus far, we’ve explored how The Life of a Showgirl is about cultural icons. To be more precise, however, it’s about cultural idols. The French phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion makes an important distinction between idols and icons. Whereas idols are false gods, icons are signifiers of the sacred and of love. As Marion elaborates, icons and idols are not fixed features of the world, but rather, modes of seeing.

Marion writes, “The gaze makes the idol, not the idol the gaze” (God without Being). Our gaze creates idols. Put differently, people become idols when we project our desires upon them and reduce them to means. The dominant culture that sees and sorts young women into showgirls is a form of idol-making. In this economy, such women become idols in a culture of patriarchy.

Conversely, to see someone as an icon is to recognize and honor their inherent dignity and intrinsic value. Icons help us recognize an ontology of love (Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon). That is, icons help us recognize that love is what binds us and makes life meaningful.

The Life of a Showgirl is replete with idols. What makes the album even more meaningful and important, though, is Taylor Swift’s turn towards icons. She conspicuously identifies and critiques a range of patriarchal idols, but the album’s intent becomes even more apparent if we recognize how it is also replete with icons, signifiers of love and sanctity.

Consider, for example, the song “Eternal Daughter” in which Swift critiques the dominant digital culture that encourages subjects to troll, gossip, tease, bully, humiliate, and harm others. The dominant digital culture, we can say, encourages subjects to participate in a violent idol culture, one in which we emulate other subjects who gain fame by hurting others through memes, tweets, and posts.

In contrast to this culture of idols, Taylor Swift vows to love her beloved forever. In this relationship, love does not end when looks fade, and love is not a pawn for patriarchal power to profit from and abuse. Rather, love is figured as eternal and sacred.

This is a different mode of being and becoming. This is the opening to a culture of icons, which can include intimate partners, friends, and even unexpected connections, such as the one in the closing song when the veteran showgirl reveals her pain to a fan, dropping the facade of glitz and glamour.

The power of The Life of a Showgirl is how the album dialectically explores the relationship between idols and icons. In the album’s explored world, idols are conspicuous and pervasive. It will be the work of Taylor Swift’s millions of fans to think more about the implied icons and how such icons gesture towards a world beyond the one that manufactures showgirls for public consumption.

Works Cited

 Grondin, Jean. Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer. Yale University Press. February 1977.

Marion, Jean-Luc. The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. The University of Chicago Press. November 2006.

– God without Being. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. The University of Chicago Press. July 2012.

Michel, Johann. Homo Interpretans: Towards a Transformation of Hermeneutics. Translated by David Pellauer. Rowman and Littlefield. April 2019.