Washington (CNN) The gauziness of Taylor Swift's celebrity is such that when people talk about her, they tend to reveal less about her and more about us, as a society.

Swift has become a political and cultural cipher of sorts -- at once nothing and everything. Between her fans and her detractors (there's rarely an in-between), she holds numerous, often dueling meanings about the perceived state of America at any one moment.

To understand the distinct space Swift occupies in Americana, consider the 2016 presidential election, of which she, at the time, said virtually nothing. The backlash was fast and furious. As Vox's Caroline Framke wrote on Election Day 2016, "(Swift's) absolute silence on anything politics-related, in an election that saw a higher than usual number of celebrities, public figures, magazines, and even TV shows endorsing -- or at the very least discussing -- the candidates, is extraordinary." (Interestingly, there was a Twitter account dedicated to Swift's silence.

"Unfortunately in the 2016 election you had a political opponent who was weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement," she told Vogue. "(Then-candidate Donald Trump) was going around saying, I'm a man of the people. I'm for you. I care about you. I just knew I wasn't going to help."

Her gay-friendly, among other things, political reemergence now comes as the nation gears up for what's sure to be a bruising 2020 election, one in which President Trump is already pulling at the cultural fabric in order to cement his reelection. Swift surely won't swing an election, but if her stepping-in-from-the-sidelines approach to 2020 reflects a broader trend compared with 2016, it could be a difference-maker.

And yet, despite Swift's ostensible centrality in certain parts of the election chatter, so little, looking back, actually seemed to be about her. Once you peel back a layer, she was a totem of something else: many people's broader anxieties around a high-stakes political contest. It wasn't so much that she was mum during an election as it was that she said little during that election -- one that made various social and political ills key planks of the White House.

Similarly, the blowback against Swift's 2017 album, "Reputation," is perhaps best understood as a response not to the singer but to an oft-cited data point: Fifty-three percent of white women voted for a man who was heard on tape crowing about assaulting women.

The fact that Swift was silent on political conversation but then released a record that underscored her personal feuds seemed only to aggravate a deep historical wound that had recently been torn open again: that of wealthy or otherwise privileged white women choosing to protect their supposed economic security over the welfare of others.

In other words, it's about Swift -- but also, it isn't.

Consider, too, the times Swift has taken on the man -- in the corporate and literal sense -- and what those occasions have shown about sexual politics. In 2017, she received a $1 settlement in a case she brought against a DJ who had groped her, with her lawsuit saying that the move would be "an example to other women who may resist publicly reliving similar outrageous and humiliating acts." That same year, Swift, along with several other women, appeared on the cover of Time magazine's Person of the Year issue (to a significant amount of controversy ) as a "silence breaker" who had stepped forward to speak about sexual violence.

In those instances, Swift was once more a kind of simulacrum. Writing for The Washington Post, Lavanya Ramanathan connected Swift's at times humiliating lawsuit to "the burden women endure -- this probing and hand-wringing and point-blank disbelief and shame and self-doubt," and she argued that "it was as if (Swift) really was speaking for every woman."

Likewise, for all the disagreement it triggered, the Swift/Time dispute helped to pull into focus that no woman -- not even a multimillionaire -- is necessarily protected from systemically empowered men.

Now, jump to 2019 to see how a related dynamic has been on display, this time regarding LGBTQ rights. In the run-up to "Lover," Swift completely jettisoned her past political coyness, in ways both subtle and obvious.

Unsurprisingly, queer people's reactions have been mixed . Some have been scratching their heads over whether Swift is queer-baiting (for profit or for her, well, reputation), while others have been arguing that she's just trying to put her massive platform to good use. (Her friend Todrick Hall, who's gay, told BuzzFeed News' AM to DM podcast last week that it's no little thing for someone like Swift, whose fan base straddles the political spectrum, to be vocal about LGBTQ rights.)

Again, however, the conversation seems to be less about Swift than the climate of the current political season. In particular, the praise and critiques both grapple with questions of what queer audiences expect from their gay icons at a moment when LGBTQ rights are under siege : Should their art be explicitly queer? What if it smacks of the cringeworthy portrayals of queerness that were so common in decades past? Does that matter if these figures also support their queer fans in other, more directly political ways? It's about Swift -- but also, it isn't.

This isn't to strip Swift of her own singular agency. One of the words perhaps most attached to her is manicured. Beyond her sizeable musical talents, Swift is a smart savvy businesswoman . It's fair to assume that she has a firm grasp of the complex pas de deux between Swift the person and Swift the persona, and how this relationship fits into the culture at large.