Possessive body
The possessive body, in Taylor Swift's songs, is the body claimed as property, the parts of the self a relationship has taken over. In Death by a Thousand Cuts she lists "my heart, my hips, my body, my love", hunting for any part of herself the relationship didn't already own. In Maroon the mark on her collarbone reads as a claim staked on her body in public, even as the partner won't commit in private. In Peter the rib cage is the body's own defence, the protective cage built around the heart. The common thread is ownership written onto the body itself, the speaker measuring how much of her physical self has been given away, taken, or walled off.
Mapping a relationship onto body parts makes possession physical and total, not just emotional but written into hips, collarbone and ribs. The recurring anxiety is running out of unclaimed self, the fear that no part is left that the relationship hasn't reached. When the mark is visible, like the collarbone, it also exposes the gap between being publicly claimed and privately valued.
Appears in 3 songs
“My heart, my hips, my body, my love Trying to find a part of me that you didn't touch”
The cataloguing of body parts and emotional investments represents the speaker's attempt to find any part of herself that wasn't given to or consumed by the relationship. The progression from heart (emotional/physical) to hips and body (physical) back to love (emotional) brackets the physical with the emotional, showing how completely the relationship colonized every aspect of the speaker's self.
“The mark they saw on my collarbone”
The mark on the collarbone, read as a hickey, functions as a mark of possession. The partner claims her body publicly but refuses to invest in the relationship privately (won't pick up the phone).
“My ribs get the feeling she did”
The rib cage as the body's own architecture of protection around the heart, the speaker registers feeling 'penetrating through the barriers she sets up.' The image operates within Possessive body's broader register of the body claimed or breached by another, with the specific anatomical variant where the body's own protective structure is named and felt. Pairs with the catalogue's other Possessive body observations as the variant where the body's defensive architecture is foregrounded rather than the body's ownership.