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Affective infrastructures of fandom: Swiftie videos, participatory authorship, and the co-production of celebrity culture in Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour
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Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has become a defining popular-cultural event of the 2020s not only through its unprecedented scale and commercial success, but through the participatory practices it generates and intensifies across digital platforms. Beyond the official stage production, the tour circulates through vast quantities of fan-made images and videos that transform live performance into a distributed archive of feeling and a shared repertoire of belonging. This paper examines how Swifties use fan-recorded concert videos as forms of participatory authorship and how these vernacular audiovisual practices visually encode collective identity across online and offline contexts. Building on scholarship on participatory culture and convergence (Jenkins, 2006), connective fandom (Fuller, 2017), and affect as a social force in networked publics (Ahmed, 2004; Papacharissi, 2015), the study approaches fandom not as a passive audience response but as a set of cultural practices through which meaning, emotion, and collective identity are co-produced. In line with recent work on choreographed participation in contemporary celebrity culture (Bengtsson & Edlom, 2023), we argue that fan engagement during the Eras Tour is simultaneously structured and expressive, shaped by the affordances of the live concert setting and by shared interpretive frameworks circulating within Swiftie culture. Empirically, the study draws on a qualitative corpus of 130 fan-generated videos collected between June 2024 and February 2025 through an international online questionnaire administered in Portuguese and English. Participants were asked to upload a short clip recorded during an Eras Tour concert that they considered emotionally significant and to explain why that moment mattered to them. This dual-layer dataset captures both the embodied, sonic, and visual dimensions of the concert experience and the reflective narratives through which fans articulate meaning, memory, and attachment. The analysis follows a thematic approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006) using a hybrid deductive–inductive logic informed by theories of participation, affective publics, and popular culture. Two research questions guide the study: (1) How do fans mobilise video-making and sharing during the Eras Tour as practices of participatory authorship and affective expression? (2) In what ways do fan-generated videos and their accompanying narratives construct and visually encode collective identity within Swiftie culture? Findings show that fans’ filming choices are patterned rather than incidental. Many clips foreground affective intensity through close framings of faces, hands, and bodily gestures, while unstable or “shaky” camerawork operates as a material trace of embodied emotion. Recording is frequently synchronised with climactic lyrical or musical moments, suggesting that fans treat the performance as a participatory script and translate private emotion into a culturally recognisable resource. At the level of collective identity, videos repeatedly turn the lens towards the crowd, capturing choral singing, coordinated gestures, and ritualised practices such as the display and exchange of friendship bracelets. These moments function as visual proofs of belonging and reposition fandom as a co-protagonist of the concert narrative rather than a background presence. Circulated on social media, such videos extend the temporal and spatial boundaries of the live event, allowing individual memories to be re-inscribed within a shared affective archive. Conceptually, the paper argues that fan-recorded concert videos operate as affective infrastructures: micro-narratives that connect peripheries and centres by stitching embodied experience, digital circulation, and collective myth-making. In doing so, Swifties contribute to the co-production of celebrity culture and demonstrate how contemporary popular music events are archived, narrated, and sustained through networked participatory cultures.