After kicking off the European leg of her Eras tour, the musician trademarked the phrase ‘Female Rage: The Musical’. But Swift’s corporate-friendly liberal feminism is something we should rage against, not with
On Thursday (May 9), Taylor Swift kicked off the European leg of the Eras tour in Paris. During the first show, she referred to the new setlist from her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, as ‘Female Rage: The Musical’. TTPD is an album littered with what Swift believes to be feminist sentiments; in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”, she cathartically screams the title of the song in the chorus, asserting that she and all other underestimated women, seen as tame or gentle, should be feared.
On Monday, TMZ obtained information that Swift’s company, TAS Rights Management, had reportedly filed a trademark application for the title ‘Female Rage: The Musical’. It’s not yet known how Swift’s team plans to use the phrase, but many assume that it will be used in musical recordings, video recordings, and potential merchandising for the tour.
Both Swift and the phrase ‘female rage’ have become synonymous with the word cringe as they have become associated with empty liberal feminist politics. Swift has been calling herself a feminist since 2014, telling the Guardian that she’s a feminist because “women deserve to have the same rights as men”. It wasn’t until Swift started to re-record and re-release her albums that the media began to praise her for “stepping into a feminist identity” by reclaiming her first six albums after they were acquired by Scooter Braun in 2019.
But as Hannah Williams asserts in her viral article on Swift for the New Statesman, “Swift’s re-recordings could have been a demand for collective change [in the music industry], but in reality, they seem like little more than an exercise in egotism and greed, repackaged as ‘empowerment’”. She continues: “The blazing light of her moral crusade is dimmed considerably when you look at the myriad ways Swift profits off the exercise, which include encouraging her fans to buy multiple vinyl and CD editions of the same albums in different colours to access ‘collectable artwork’ and bonus tracks, and charging £15.99 to rent (not buy) her latest tour film.” Here, Williams highlights how Swift’s feminism never goes beyond protecting, defending and serving herself.
Similarly, ‘female rage’ or ‘good for her’ media became popular in film and television post #MeToo. From films like David Fincher’s Gone Girl (2014), Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) to Emerald Fennell’s controversial Promising Young Woman (2020). On television, shows like Big Little Lies (2017), Yellowjackets (2021-present), WandaVision (2021), Swarm (2023), and more started to emerge in full force. Within these pieces of media, women fought back against patriarchal domination, killing their abusers and acting outside of traditional feminine ideals. Through their unfiltered rage, they would release all the pent-up fury they’d acquired from living under patriarchy, a system that forces them to keep that anger hidden to ensure they are performing their gender identity correctly. There is merit to media like this, as author and video essayist Alice Cappelle explains in her video ‘Why female rage is here to stay.’ “Female characters [in the media] are becoming increasingly more complex”, she asserts. “We’re progressively stepping away from the innocent woman versus strong woman binary to explore what it means to be an average woman.”
As important as this representation is in media, ‘female rage’ starts to feel like an empty political slogan that fails to translate into the real world. Those who watch programs like Big Little Lies can understand why Celeste (Nicole Kidman) and the other women of the show would kill wife-beater and rapist Perry (Alexander Skarsgård), but can’t understand why those suffering under colonialism and displacement would want to fight back against their oppressors. Not only can they not understand it, it doesn’t have any space within their so-called ‘feminist’ practice. Those oppressed and marginalised are only allowed to express anger in fiction, and still it is often white, straight women who are praised for expressing said anger. Through this understanding, ‘female rage’, as a genre, starts to lose its edge and importance within media.
Female rage does not have to be a political or constructive tool, as Megan Nolan wrote for Frieze last year. Women’s feelings do not always have to be useful. Still, that argument becomes harder and harder to reckon with when there are complete abortion bans in 14 US states, when pregnant women in Gaza are forced to give birth without basic supplies, and when Israel has imprisoned hundreds of Palestinian women across the occupied Palestinian territory. Beyond women, this is also happening to all of those in Gaza, and this should not only make us angry, it should make us act.
Women’s anger, and all those who are treated unjustly, has historically led to practical political action. “My response to racism is anger,” writes Audre Lorde in her poignant essay on the subject ‘The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism’ from 1980. “I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste… Anger is loaded with information and energy.” The rage Swift speaks of is not loaded with information and energy. While her songs may empower some young women, empowerment rarely changes the material conditions of those suffering worldwide.
At the end of the day, Swift is a billionaire continuously trying to sell her fans corporate-friendly liberal feminism with the sole purpose of strengthening her bank account. We should be raging against greedy capitalists, not with them.