Excerpt: The romance of a white woman’s settler childhood seems innocuous enough when sung in a Taylor Swift lyric. After all, who could fault her for a memory of swinging in the trees over a creek at age seven, “too scared to jump in”? “Please picture me in the trees // with Pennsylvania under me,” sings Swift, as she laments lost loves and childhood friendships of rural U.S. America. Disconnected from the pressures of adult womanhood, Swift’s 2020 hit album Folklore returns her to playing in the weeds of her white settler girlhood, the storytelling site of a simpler time and place “before I learned civility.” The land romanced as a folk song turned mass-media pop album acts as both memory and mimesis for childhood girl innocence. It becomes a placid backdrop to settler experience, rather than a source of settler colonial capitalist accumulation accomplished through the cis-heteronormative making of white femininity.
