CULTURE
Girl Squads: The Subversive Potential of Female Friendship
WORDS BY SHELLEY BUDGEON | 20 DECEMBER 2023
The media frenzy surrounding Taylor Swift’s massive 2023 Eras tour is to be expected given her status as one the most prominent cultural figures of the 21st century.
However, rather than focus on her singular talent or myriad achievements, the media has repeatedly drawn attention to her female friendship group.
As one of the most prominent cultural figures of the 21st century, Taylor Swift’s massive 2023 Eras tour is generating considerable media interest. With 12 Grammy Awards to her name, she is among the most successful and celebrated female musicians in the music industry today, and her ability to sell out stadiums is seemingly unstoppable. Since beginning her rise to fame in 2006, her superstar status has made her a subject of constant scrutiny. However, any online search of the Eras tour will produce pages and pages of stories that do not centre on her singular talent or myriad achievements but instead focus on who she is hanging out with.
One newspaper reported that she may be “globally renowned for her music catalogue but she’s arguably just as known for having some really, really, famous friends. Specifically, her female friends, or her ‘girl squad’ as they’ve been referred to”. The so-called ‘girl squad’ – a group of similarly wealthy, famous, and high-profile women – became a subject of interest around 2014 when the media began to highlight Swift’s ‘public display’ of her friendships whether while on stage, in her music videos or as the company she kept on nights out. Reading the media accounts that have turned ‘the squad’ into an object of interest, one is led to question why it is this aspect of Swift’s persona that is constructed as newsworthy. Afterall, why wouldn’t she choose to spend time with a group of female friends?
It is difficult to think of an example where high-profile men’s friendship groups have similarly received such intense attention – references to the ‘bromance’ being the closest comparator. Granted, media fascination with Swift’s girl squad likely stems from their status as glamorous, instantly recognisable, famous celebrities. Subtract those elements and the squad would probably generate fewer column inches in the press, if any at all. The level of fixation and extent of media reporting suggests that something more profound may be at play, for it can be shown that female friendships have the power to potentially unsettle the status quo.
Friendship is a distinctive type of social relationship because, compared to relations defined by formal institutionalised bonds such as family or work relationships, friendship is entered into voluntarily. Formed on principles of trust, support and loyalty, Mary Wollstonecraft declared friendship to be “the most sublime of affections”. Women turn to friends for material support and practical assistance, as well as emotional resources such as intimacy, belonging, validation and mutual recognition. Beyond these functions they also play a significant role in troubling the normative constraints of patriarchal cultures. Firstly, female friendships enhance, and shape opportunities women have for self-transformation and self-determination.
Secondly, female friendships undermine the expectations of hetero-patriarchal societies that demand women prioritise their relations with men at the expense of other interests. Historical research illustrates how female friendships in 19th century England allowed women to exercise agency not possible in contexts where men were present and while these friendships were enjoyed primarily within the private sphere, by the mid-19th century, social conditions had shifted to enable new forms of female friendships. As women entered the public sphere a ‘modern principle of association’ between women developed which created the possibility of professional friendships such that “women encouraged each other as never before in the public sphere, nurturing ambition, encouraging independence, and fostering artistic aspiration and talent”. The movement of women, with the support of other women, into the public sphere represented a significant reorientation of femininity towards opportunities available beyond the domestic realm and the dominance of heterosexual relations that governed that sphere.
One hundred years later when it became apparent that gender inequality remained firmly intact, Western second wave feminism promoted the image of ‘sisterhood’, albeit in problematic ways that obscured important differences in women’s lives, to build a collective political movement that challenged the oppressive structures of hetero-patriarchy. Calling on women to act in solidarity with each other, through an ethic of friendship, was central to the second wave ideology. The association between women was understood as a potentially revolutionary relation that could enable women to exercise agency both personally and politically.
The subversive potential of women’s relationships still factors into how female friendship operate today. These associations offer the opportunity to reflect upon, question, and reject existing gender roles and stereotypes. In a patriarchal culture where knowledge is filtered through a male lens and femininity is defined by what suits men, friendships between women offer the opportunity to build alternative understandings of one’s identity and to validate different versions of the self that may not be valued by male dominant culture. Despite increased gender equality in some social spheres, women continue to encounter a steady stream of societal expectations associated with idealised versions of femininity. A significant body of research demonstrates that according to the demands of neoliberalism women are increasingly expected to perform a wide range of qualities and competences including resilience, positivity, confidence, self-reliance, congeniality, optimism and authenticity in order to maximise their potential as part of a programme of self-management that will lead to both professional and personal success. Reprieve from the anxiety produced by these relentless exhortations can be found in the company of close female friends as a space that generates strong critical counter-narratives to those messages and validates non-compliance.
Female friendships may also offer respite from relations with men, allowing women to develop a deeper understanding of the role that gendered structures play in restricting their lives. One study, for example, demonstrated that transformations to self-understanding facilitated by female friendships manifested in women’s increased confidence when negotiating a salary increase comparable to a male colleague, attempting to speak at a meeting monopolized by men, or letting go of appearance and body-related concerns. The space created by female friendship groups challenges hetero-relationality – the tendency to define women via their relationships to men which ultimately denies women autonomy, discounts the value of relationships between women, and assumes that women identify their relationships with men as a number one priority.
Stories about the Girl Squad recycle this construction of women’s friendships when pointing out how Swift chooses to spend time with female friends over a male love interest. For example, one magazine report commented that, “Over the weekend, Swift eschewed spending evenings in New York with her new boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, for a blatant display of female empowerment by taking a group of celebrity friends for dinner”. This is represented as a rebellion against the requirements of hetero-relationality with the implication that the ‘normal’ choice would be for a love interest to take precedence.
Whatever the reasons for media fascination with Swift’s life offstage, given the benefits female friendship offers, is it really that surprising that she chooses to make the ‘Girl Squad’ a central part of it?
i. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/taylor-swift-friendships-sophie-turner-b2443736.html. Accessed November 15, 2023.
ii. Suzanna Rose, “Women’s Friendships,” in Variations on a Theme: Diversity and the Psychology of Women, ed. Alyce Huston Hemstreet and Joan C. Chrisler (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp 79-106.
iii. Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007).
iv. Pauline Nestor, “Female Friendships in Mid-Victorian England: New Patterns and Possibilities”, Literature & History, 17, no. 1 (2008): 36-47.
v. Marilyn Yalom with Theresa Donovan Brown, The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2015).
vi. Eileen Green, “‘Women Doing Friendship’: An Analysis of Women's Leisure as a Site of Identity Construction, Empowerment and Resistance.” Leisure Studies 17, no. 3 (1998): 171-185.
vii. Pat O’Connor, “Women's Friendships in a Post-modern World,” in Placing Friendship in Context, ed. Rebecca Adams and Graham Allan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) pp. 117-135.
viii. Maree Martinussen, Margaret Wetherell, and Virginia Braun, “Just being and being bad: Female friendship as a Refuge in Neoliberal Times,” Feminism & Psychology, 30, no. 1 (2020): 3–21.
ix. Laurence Bachmann, “Female Friendship and Gender Transformation”, European Journal of Women’s Studies 21, no. 2 (2014): 165–179.
x. https://graziamagazine.com/articles/taylor-swift-squad-2023/. Accessed November 15, 2023.