For Status or Solidarity? Commodity Allyship in Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down” (2019) and Macklemore’s “White Privilege II” (2016)

Abstract

In 1991, Robert Goldman, Sharon Smith, and Deborah Heath coined the term “commodity feminism,” broadly referring to the ways in which advertisers de-politicize and appropriate feminist discourse to support commercial interests. In this process, the cultural energy of feminism is emptied of political content and sold back to consumers. However, I argue that the commodification of equality debates reaches further than feminist discourse alone. While recent research shows a growing interest in popular feminism (see, for instance, Halberstam 2012; Zeisler 2016; Tennent and Jackson 2019), allyship––generally understood as the practice of supporting marginalized groups without being part of these groups oneself––and the commodification thereof remains undertheorized. There still exists a seemingly dominant belief that every spark of attention for marginalized communities is positive, thereby ignoring the damaging features that are so often included. In this thesis, I introduce the term “commodity allyship,” which refers to how unmarginalized people literally sell their allyship as an easy and emptied political activist energy, while centering the self in a debate that is not theirs to claim. In commodity allyship, unmarginalized people look at others to blame for the inequality at play, and through the use of stereotypes and simple iconography depoliticize equality debates as part of their commodity. Lastly, commodity allyship exploits marginalized communities through the veiling and appropriation of their labor. Chapter one forms the foundation through its focus on the debates that exist around allyship. Chapter two focuses on Karl Marx’s “commodity fetishism,” the term “commodity feminism” by Goldman, Heath, and Smith, and their similarities to my new term, “commodity allyship.” Addressing two case studies, Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down” in the third chapter and Macklemore’s “White Privilege II” in the fourth chapter, I conceptualize “commodity allyship” and demonstrate how this phenomenon is manifested in recent popular music practices. I contend that ally politics are complex and call for a critical approach to the commodification of allyship. Ultimately, this thesis adds to recent debates on celebrity and commodity feminism, as well as broader discourses on marginalized communities, and presents a discussion of the detrimental features of “commodity allyship.”