Gaga Stigmata

GAGA : MANNING

2012-01-14T10:58:00.000-08:00

By Eddie McCaffray, Devin O’Neill, and Meghan Vicks

May 25 or 26, 2010, 02:14:21 PM

Bradley Manning: listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltratrating possibly the largest data spillage in american history ...

Introduction

Lady Gaga’s music was used both as a mask and as a canvas when Bradley Manning downloaded classified national defense information: he lip-synced “Telephone” as the files were burned onto erased CD-RWs that originally contained Gaga’s album The Fame Monster. In effect, the “largest data spillage in american history” figures as a kind of digital palimpsest, comprised first of Gaga’s music erased, and then re-inscribed with the classified data. The leaked information carries with it the analog specter of Lady Gaga, and, in particular, an echo of “Telephone” – the latter features Bradley Manning as Gaga’s lip-syncing ventriloquist’s dummy who has come into its own consciousness, while the former positions Lady Gaga as the erased vessel upon which deadly and shameful state secrets are inscribed.

It’s a beautiful detail, but it is also incidental. This throw-away connection between Manning and Gaga probably deserves no more attention than that allotted in a footnote. Yet there’s something uncannily appropriate about this piece of trivia that places Lady Gaga hand in hand with Bradley Manning and his alleged crimes, appropriate not just in the context of Manning, Wikileaks, wartime acts, politics & aesthetics, and the public’s right to know (or the government’s right to keep secrets), but also in the context of Lady Gaga’s project – her anti-bullying campaign (DADT), identity aesthetics/politics, play with spectacle, manipulation through images, advocacy for equal rights, power grabs via pop, and rewriting of the past.

Image : Truth

Both Manning and Gaga demonstrate how uncomfortable we are with the image’s relationship to truth, albeit in dramatically different ways. Gaga embraces the spectacle as truth, heralds performance and construction of identity as one’s “born this way” birthright, rewrites her past as she wished it had been and declares that rewriting as her reality. In doing so, she eliminates distinctions between the essential and performative selves, between reality and fiction – completely implodes these binaries.

Most people think this is bullshit: they still operate in a system that opposes one’s birthed identity with one’s performed identity, and so they don’t get how one can simultaneously be a performance and “born that that way,” or how one can rewrite one’s past and thereby make it truer than its original lived experience.

So Gaga gets reamed for being a faker: she wasn’t born that way, they sneer; why can’t she just dress like a normal, real person? The irony is that Gaga’s performative birthed identity, and her insistence on the power of the image, are worshipped in the operations of the state. What people chastise in the pop figure (why can’t she just get real, cut the crap) are essential to the construction of the country’s identity. And what country performs freedom, human rights, and respect-for-life more aggressively than the United States? The country’s grandiose, ostentatious, chest-beating performance is the perfect analogy for that of Lady Gaga. But the point of Gaga’s project is to call attention to the performance as such, and to celebrate and uphold the performance as just as real as anything else not performed – and it is precisely here the comparison ends. If you try to make the country get real, to cut through its bullshit and show us how it really is, to show the nature of its performance, then suddenly you’re a traitor and a terrorist.

You’re Bradley Manning.

This distinction reveals something interesting about how performance and image function. Art and entertainment can thematize their use (and abuse) of representation. In fact, calling attention to itself as representation is a fundamental trait of art. But truth, especially of a political or ideological nature, and especially when called to exercise real power, must reject, deny, forget, and hide its nature as a constructed representation. Both art and politics require artifice, but where one requires that artifice to be recognized and discussed (art), the other requires that the artificial process be stricken from the record (politics). And when the distinction between politics and art is damaged or lost, the results are explosive.

The results are Bradley Manning.

The public has been given the palatable, performative version of the U.S. occupation of Iraq; they’ve been given the spectacle, and a rewritten, more-beautiful version of events as the U.S. government wished it had been. Sound familiar? But in this instance, the tables are turned: people take the side of the spectacle. Because neither the public nor the government want the real story about Iraq; they want safer images. No one wants to see that Apache Helicopter shooting Iraqi men and, later, children. But Bradley Manning wants you to see it cause he’s obsessed with the truth before it’s been rewritten: “i want people to see the truth … regardless of who they are … because without information , you cannot make informed de /cisions as a public.”

But nobody wants the truth, Bradley Manning. We all think we worship the truth, and we proclaim we love honesty and authenticity; meanwhile, the Enlightenment pushes us to illuminate any and all truths, Modernity witnesses those truths turn out to be monsters, and Postmodernity (sometimes) laments the nonexistence of truth. Even so, through this all, we adore the truth, but here’s the hypocrisy – I bet not one of us has the guts to really tell the truth about ourselves. Didn’t the Underground Man say this? It’s impossible to write a truthful autobiography, he hissed. And even if you manage to do so, it will look too ugly and vile and decrepit and … well … in short, it will be too repulsive that you’ll end up smudging, you’ll prefer a more “literary and beautiful” version of events – a performance, if you will – to the truth that probably resembles more an Apache helicopter gunning down men than a redeeming story about freedom and democracy. The truth? “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards.” “Nice.”

They destroy Manning for revealing the truth, but they sneer at Gaga for not being real, for celebrating the performance (lies) as truth. Do you understand why this is? Why do they loathe Lady Gaga (but she’s FAKE!) for what they require of the State (tell us sweet lies)?

Again, this is about the power of the image, and its relationship to the truth. Both Manning and Gaga demonstrate how complicated and urgent this issue is. And the apparently-happenstance nature of their conjuncture reveals that their positions on image/truth are two sides of the same coin.

“Telephone”

What is “Telephone” about? The lyrics are about someone fleeing the shackles, the hook-up, of a ubiquitous piece of modern communications technology. The video is about an uncontrollable, destructive principle (murder, public health risk, feminism), first captured and contained by society, but soon enough breaking free and rampaging across unsuspecting, defenseless, virgin Americana.

This is the song Bradley Manning listened to as he leaked information from SIPRNet (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network) – essentially the US Department of Defense’s classified military version of the Internet. Manning worked long hours in a dark room crammed with computers, files, and cables. He was very much at the beck and call of modern global communications, awash in e-mails and combat videos, sifting through reefs of documents, tripping over terminals, entangled in cables and cords. Much of the information horrified him and continuously forced him back to the moral dilemma he eventually solved with his leak. The frantic half-plea, half-declaration of “Telephone” – stop calling, stop calling – could hardly have been more appropriate.

At the same time, Manning fulfilled the other paradigm of the song (rather, of the video). He released carefully-controlled material on an unsuspecting (world) public. In the same way that Lady Gaga and Beyoncé tore across the countryside, Manning’s documents and videos raced around the world. They ignited controversy, caused embarrassment, and even – in the minds of his condemners at least – left the United States vulnerable to real attack: terrorism and sabotage of just the type depicted in the “Telephone” video.

Thus, Manning reveals the connection between these two “Telephone” paradigms. The (referential?) mania, the frantic, desperate madness inflicted on Manning by the constant bombardment of media found its natural response in his paroxysms of moral guilt and, eventually, confession. In an extreme version of what we all face in a telecommunication, audio-visual, hi-def-drenched world, Manning lashed out against the apparatus that endlessly subjected him to its profusion of chattering digital effluvia, and he did so in the only way that seemed natural: he turned its process back on itself. Manning took over the subject position – he stopped tuning in and started broadcasting. His reclamation of the seat behind the screen, instead of in front of it, was the greatest rebellion possible, which demonstrates just how powerfully image and truth are regarded in modern civilization. Manning’s punishment for this transgression will fit the weight given it by the civilization against which it was directed.

Trauma

In the worldwide economy of memory, perception, trauma, and communication, Bradley Manning is perhaps as sick, as dysfunctional, as schizophrenic as the big movers. If governments represent means that have supplanted the ends they were intended to attain (tyranny in pursuit of freedom, war in pursuit of peace, the strength of the state in pursuit of the common good), classifying first and asking questions second, keeping secrets habitually, reflexively, compulsively, what is Manning but the compulsive, obsessive insistence of trauma upon its own place in experience?

Perhaps this will be clearer if we take Lady Gaga’s “Marry the Night” video as a blueprint. Gaga is the country, or the world of people – the entity struggling to both know and live despite all indications that the two may be mutually exclusive. The story we get from our government, our military, and our media-entertainment complex – that’s the stable narrative of our experience, our memory. That story is the one that appeals to our desire to remember things “exactly as they happened” while forgetting the unpleasant parts; it claims to show us everything we need, leaving out the parts we can’t or don’t want to know and asserting that they aren’t really necessary to the truth anyway. We forget that we forgot. It’s the packaged deal in which the editing and plastic-wrap are both denied (it’s the true story) and a selling point (it’s deliberate, explained, legal, professional, entertaining, reassuring).

In contrast, Manning is the trauma, the shattered and disorderly train of remembering it with all those ugly parts included. He threatens, breaks, nauseates, compulsively vomits up what our covert media-apparatus of a government makes dangerous or unprofitable to remember. Manning and Wikileaks don’t offer a workable alternative; they represent a negative image of our obsessive-repressive cultural order, all the more dangerous and unstable because they are the scar-tissue of a violent and rigorous lifetime.

This is how Manning shows us that the system is broken, the massive multiple system of perception and memory and self-knowledge of a giant human community. Not because it has secrets or skeletons, not even because it punishes (and punishes him). What reveals this breakdown is the production of Manning and his actions themselves. He cannot negotiate, he cannot compromise, he cannot agree that some secrets should be kept and others brought to light. He can only demolish compulsive, manic secrecy with compulsive, manic exposure. The system produces two madnesses and no sanity.

Play

One of the central problematizing issues in the gradient of sanity between Gaga and Manning, and one of the fascinating ideological consequences of Wikileaks, is the extreme pornography of modern political entertainment. Gaga is an entertaining entity, and one of her goals is to entertain, to play. But there’s clearly also a playful element to WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange is clearly, on some level, enjoying himself and his trickster role. And we enjoy it too.

This dynamic is metastasized when fed into the news cycle, where Manning becomes an entertaining figure, a figure for cultural consumption, and his extreme penetration and exposure of the governmental body becomes a pornographic act. We can talk about the parallels between that and Gaga’s penetration of quotidian norms with her highly disruptive sexuality, but it may be even more interesting to place the two along a spectrum of degree: Gaga plays with certain semiotic memeplexes, rearranging large blocks of visual and aural culture into forms broken and terrifying and stimulating; Manning, in his neurosis, did the same with entire governments. I’m reminded of the shift in extremity of perception I experienced when I sat down to read Ballard’s Crash for the first time while eating a particularly messy sandwich – suddenly car crashes were porn, and porn never looked the same again. The “Telephone” video points in extreme directions, but Gaga’s never actually killed anyone. As far as we know.

The element of play and entertainment becomes even more inextricable when one considers Anonymous’ role in the defense of WikiLeaks. As an amorphous entity bounded only by the ideology of unrestricted “lulz”, their involvement and necessary disengagement through the mediation of cyberland turns the entire thing into a media event for them, albeit an interactive one with material consequences. Indeed, what we’re talking about here is all media: WikiLeaks and Manning dealt, fundamentally, in information. Do we have the authority to say that the ideological and material consequences of the release of that information outstripped the violence and deforming cultural influence of “Telephone” or Born This Way or Gaga just because the consequences were more linear, the effects traceable by government, the causalities more literal?

What is information composed of? What is art composed of? The obvious answer might be meaning, but that response does indeed reveal just why Gaga and Manning have both upended information and art. By scrambling the way meaning is supposed to operate, both have introduced new values into its economy: new principles of distribution, new combinations, new authorities. In Gaga’s sphere, that of art or entertainment, this scrambling, this play, can introduce confusion, irritation, even anger. It can also introduce all the new ideas that art, at its best, is concerned with: new ways of conceptualizing the economics of meaning and form, new ways of understanding or imagining beauty, or individuality, or whatever their opposites are. In Manning’s sphere, his revolutionary playful economics of meaning, his short-circuiting of the way information is gathered and distributed, has many of the same effects: it caused confusion, irritation, anger in the American people, in the American government and military, and in other governments as well. But it is also provoking, perhaps weakly, a re-evaluation of the rules of the form, of the genre – not of art per se, but of government, of war-fighting, of state secrets, of diplomacy.

We are taught that one of these two forms of play is acceptable, and one is not. One gets people killed, the other is a basic part of being a producing-consuming “free” subject. One is disruptive and dishonorable, the other is expressive and harmless – maybe even beneficial! Why the hell not! Just as long as we play in the sandbox we’re allowed in, and stay out of the other. The idea that any idea is acceptable for discussion is predicated on the distinction that the same is not true of any action. In this way freedom of expression functions as a release valve for all those pesky urges to actually do something. Concerned about the way things are going? Write your congressman! Or call!

But performative identity doesn’t work that way: there, the concept only exists in the action (and vice versa). Maybe the Manning/Gaga comparison indicates that we should stop treating art as the place to play around, get messy, distract yourself, it doesn’t matter anyway. Maybe it’s time for a little art in government.

Identity Politics

In many ways, Bradley Manning begins where Lady Gaga ends: she presents the safe, consumable, legitimate (even acknowledged and celebrated) version (proponent, iteration) of an ideology that Manning takes to an extreme. Perhaps Manning pushes so far that he loops around, ends up embodying something that is antithetical to Gaga? Gaga has, so far, performed compliance with, participation in, even something like confidence in and enthusiasm for the political process of American democracy. She’s met with politicians, given political speeches, celebrated the repeal of DADT. At the same time, there’s a real theme of viral anarchism and resolutely non- or anti-political activity in her work. The diner-murder scene, of course, but in a broader sense any project that conceptualizes the individual as Gaga’s does is bound to have grave ramifications for the idea of democracy: Gaga ridicules and de-centers Anglo-American liberal democracy’s individual when she emphasises its fake, trash-pop aspect, or she radicalizes the individual into a dangerously-fertile, unstable principle above any laws or norms. Radical art and continual transformation probably don’t mix very well with rational negotiation and the institutionalized representation of interests.

Taking the former half of Gaga’s circular project of aesthetic identity, Manning disregarded his own safety, his career, his future, and his reputation in carrying out such a dangerous and grave breach of confidentiality right in the belly of the beast. A state built on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has nothing to entice with and nothing to threaten when dealing with a little monster that understands itself as the glittery refuse of a global-political media complex. Taking the latter half, Manning identified himself with his act in an enlightening, even aesthetic way: he had to release the information, the videos, and damn the consequences because he was born this way – there ain’t no other way. His own principles, drives, beliefs, and experiences trumped what the established democratic system had decided should be done. Thus it’s hard – impossible – to correlate either “side” or aspect of Gaga/Manning identity politics with the territory staked out by modern democracy, because neither fits neatly into a straight pro- or anti-ideology. They’re both unresolvable, generative-chaotic principles that are inherently democratic, or at least modern liberal, in some ways, and anti- in other.

Thus, on the one hand, Manning’s actions are radically democratic: the people of the United States, of the world, have to know what their governments are really doing if any of those governments can really claim to be democratic. At the same time, Manning put his own perception and experience above that of the whole “system” – he took matters into his own hands in a unilateral, uncompromising, illegal, even secret way. This bi-curiosity vis-a-vis democracy and the Enlightenment project follows Gaga’s lead: the primary way that she empowers, praises, and defines that most sacrosanct modern concept – the individual – is to render it as meaningless/meaningfull as beautiful trash: worthless, limitless, monstrous, artificial, destined all at once. Is politics really possible with such people, who regard themselves as aesthetic projects, as little monsters? What are the concrete differences between understanding yourself as an aesthetic project and understanding yourself as a moral or ethical one?

Manning shows, quite literally and sacrificially, the weakness in Gaga’s project’s ability to be truly emancipatory. Accepting yourself as the detritus of fate, of gigantic inhuman systems, of birthright (or lack thereof) may lead us all along Bradley’s incarceratory trajectory. But perhaps the point isn’t to mobilize ourselves as a massive, well-trained, fanatical army in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness modeled conceptually on property. Perhaps a truly emancipatory project accepts the limited, contingent role of the “individual” in society, and spends more effort in transforming that individual in its relationship to its world than in mobilizing and manipulating quantifiable resources.

Other points to discuss:

● DADT; “gender confusion”

● Manning allowed one text in prison; he selects Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

● POLITICAL DRAG

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Gaga Stigmata: Yale's The American Scholar Magazine

2011-12-28T10:16:00.000-08:00

Gaga Stigmata was featured in the Autumn 2011 issue of Yale’s The American Scholar Magazine! Editors Kate Durbin and Meghan Vicks were thrilled to speak with AS about Lady Gaga, 21st-century celebrity and scholarship, and Gaga’s relationship to academic studies. Check out the piece below:

Since March 2010, the online journal Gaga Stigmata has churned out the most intense ongoing critical conversation on the singer. The editors are Meghan Vicks, a graduate student in comparative literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Kate Durbin, a Los Angeles-based writer and performance artist. “When Gaga’s videos would come out,” Durbin says, “there would be such a response online. It was frustrating to think that I would have to wait five years to read something about it in an academic journal. So, I thought, why not help criticism catch up? Let’s see if we can shape pop culture and critique it.” Indeed, the digital immediacy of Gaga Stigmata suits the pace of 21st-century celebrity, allowing readings of the singer to update as fast as her own reinventions. “When the meat dress happened,” Durbin says, referring to Gaga’s garb at the MTV Video Music Awards last September, “we posted stuff a week later.”

In academe, Vicks says, she dreams of lecture halls in which scholars dress conceptually, like Gaga: “While I’m in the classroom explaining how the procession of simulacra works, Gaga is showing it on the street. High theory dictates how you view and understand the world, and what is high theory but discursive spectacle?”

Are academics unduly gaga over Gaga? “She’s really adamant about serious meaning and high art,” Durbin maintains. “That may be her one entirely new thing. Warhol brought pop into the museum; Gaga is bringing high art into pop culture.”

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The Warrior Queen: Marry The Night, Trauma, Regression, and Recovery

2011-12-23T15:14:00.000-08:00

By K.M. Zwick

This is the eighth piece in our series on “Marry the Night.” For the previous pieces, click here.

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.

– Sigmund Freud

When I look back on my life, it’s not that I don’t want to see things exactly as they happened. It’s just that I prefer to remember them in an artistic way. And truthfully, the lie is much more honest, because I invented it.

– Lady Gaga, “Marry The Night” Video

Sigmund Freud posited that sex (creation/joining) and violence (destruction/separation) are attractive to the most primal and perhaps truest internal aspects of all of us. He called us “polymorphously perverse,” which means that we are fundamentally pleasure-seeking, through libidinal as well as aggressive drives. What we really want is often considered “perverted,” linking sex, fetishes, violence, comfort, nurturance, joy, and death together in so many different ways and, ahem, positions, that our unconscious is basically a clusterfuck of perversion, desire, and fantasy. Modern-day analysts might suggest there is no such thing as perversion, per se, in terms of what is desired within the mind, because perversion is so ubiquitous. Additionally, what is consensually enacted between two (or more) individuals might not be considered perverse as much as it would be considered honest – an honest engagement with what is often a combination of sex and death. Simultaneous creation and destruction. Our libidinal instincts intertwined with our aggressive ones can create powerful wishes, fantasies, fetishes, and proclivities that are not only intensely sexual but are also intensely mortal; that is, destructive. It is, perhaps, the constant repression of our deepest fantasies that leads to neurosis; it is, perhaps, the denial of the interplay between sex and death – pleasure and aggression – that results in anxious and escapist symptoms in so many. Telling ourselves that sexual and aggressive fantasies are “bad” or “wrong” is likely to lead to puritanical subversion of what is most basic, and therefore authentic, in us. Freud might have argued that we are not sick when we are in touch with our most primal instincts (in safe, consensual fashions) but rather that we are most sick when we deny their existence, relevance, and the pleasurable effect of such instincts.

* * * * *

As I watch the video for “Marry The Night,” I don’t care, particularly, if Lady Gaga knows a lot about psychoanalysis or not. I think that she might, if not because she has read about it then because she has lived it to some extent. But even that – Ms. Germanotta’s autobiography – I don’t care about, per se. I have read the accounts that this video is about the worst day of her life: the day Def Jam dropped her. This video, however, uses explicit imagery related to trauma (destruction) and re-invention (creation) that hits a pre-verbal, regressive libidinal and aggressive chord. And this is what I find so rewarding and authentic about many of her videos, but most especially the video for “Marry The Night.” I care, as a trauma therapist and as a trauma survivor, that the art she makes and the world she inhabits in her music and especially in this video open up a universe for the viewer in which violent trauma, transformation, sex, mortality, creation, destruction, re-creation, and re-destruction are exposed, claimed, and normalized. That gutted psyche is Lady Gaga’s normal world.

To say she glorifies sexuality and mortality, or trauma and sex, would be a mistake. The desire to combine those two aspects of life is so normal as to be quaint, in terms of an analytic reading of basic human psychodynamics. To label what Lady Gaga is doing with trauma, sex, death, and invention “bizarre” misses, I believe, how essentially basic and deeply human her themes are.

What I find perhaps most pleasing about Gaga’s self-transformation in the “Marry The Night” video, which I will explore in more detail below, is that she is bringing to the fore an innocent reveling, often childlike, in fundamental and common intra-psychic processes. Not only is she a gorgeously unhinged libido and aggression, but she is also imaginative, she makes of herself and her world the imaginary, arguably engaging in something akin to pop music play therapy. She aligns herself with her internal complexes and makes art with them. She is pleasure-seeking, even through pain, perhaps particularly through pain. She is polymorphously perverse, but rather than being ashamed of it, she is proud of it.

* * * * *

In small children, psychoanalysis posits that, especially prior to the phallic stage of psychosexual development, wishes to join (sexual) and wishes to destroy (aggressive) are uncomplicated by the superego. The internal life of a small child is, according to Freud, a life of unrepressed libidinal and aggressive desires, many of which are acted out: sucking a mother’s nipple, playing in the mud and water (metaphorical feces and urine, another form of “playing with oneself”), enjoying unfettered nudity, reacting intensely when feeling threatened, attacking others by biting, hitting, shunning. It is a life before shame, before guilt, before punishment, and often before words. This internal life is not erased with the pressures of social and familial norms or with the activation of the superego (or, the conscience); it is, analysts generally posit, repressed.

Such intense libidinal and aggressive desires and actions resurface during the teenage years, when the latency (repression) stage is coming to an end. Teenagers are, in many ways, like small children, activated again by sexual and aggressive tendencies, destroying close bonds with their parents while they create pleasurable bonds with love interests, friends, and activities outside the family. The destruction of the pleasurable parent-child closeness is a necessary component of the creation of a pleasurable self outside the home. Aggression and pleasure are linked. Of course, healthy development will find late-age teens able to hold the two sources of pleasure at the same time – a self that bonds with parents in a new and different way, and a self that bonds with those outside the nuclear family. Re-creation occurs, re-definition, and what was destroyed was necessary to destroy in order to transform and grow. The sexual and aggressive drives, creation and destruction, seem often to be crucially linked and intertwined at turning points for development, self-discovery, self-expression, and transformation, as well as intertwined in developments that help us form bonds with others.

In this, I am merely speaking of normative psychological development. When we add into the mix trauma in childhood, we add new layers of destruction and creation that are difficult to tease apart in a general sense for the purposes of this piece. However, broadly speaking, severe psychic and physical trauma – such as early abandonment by a parent, sexual, physical, or verbal abuse, generalized emotional neglect, divorce – brings with it new forms of joining and destruction. Trauma can be so powerful, and can create such intense (sometimes self-)destructive pure id tendencies in the child or even the grown person, that the desires related to the trauma will be sometimes permanently repressed and find expression in seemingly unrelated feelings and behaviors. Additionally, trauma often triggers regressive states in the victim, dragging a person back to an earlier and more childlike psychosexual stage of development – often oral and/or anal – and again, defensive behavioral patterns may emerge to deal with these regressed states, to both avoid and survive them. Furthermore, pleasure centers are often stimulated even during traumatic experiences, further fusing together destructive and creative drives. Symptoms of self-mutilation, displaced anger, substance abuse, eating disorders, and obsession and compulsion that are seemingly unrelated to anything in particular – all these may arise to help repress the libido and aggression triggered during the original trauma. There are also “socially acceptable” forms the repression might take – e.g. becoming a cop or a soldier as a way to acceptably exert authority and aggression, becoming a doctor who, essentially, invades bodies for a living, or becoming a trauma counselor who bears witness to the trauma of others.

Those deeply in touch with their internal creative forces – like artists – often make something from the destruction they have experienced. I would not argue these artists always repress less, but they may expose more of what is true not just for them but also for many others – expose unspoken truths, histories, pain, and joy that hit the centers of unassuming witnesses. An artist may not even be aware of what she is exposing and communicating; she offers palates to be projected onto, imagery and ideas that may appear disjointed but that nonetheless resonate on some deep, gut level with those creation and destruction forces that are so inherent in human experience, whether one has been deeply psychically traumatized or one has merely experienced the normative trauma and recovery of living in a mortal, unpredictable, pleasurable, and terrifying world.

* * * * *

While the videos for “Yoü and I,” “Telephone,” “Bad Romance,” and “Paparazzi” also conjure the gutted and exposed libidinal and aggressive psyche, in no music video of Gaga’s is her transformation through trauma, sexuality, destruction, and creation so clear, exposed, and moving as it is in her new “Marry The Night” video. I have read a couple of initial reviews that describe her as self-indulgent and navel-gazing in this video, and one that criticized her acting chops in the opening sequence.

To these critics, I say, “For shame.” Her opening voiceover is nothing less than brilliant, as she tackles the slippery psychological process of remembering trauma. She rightly claims that trauma is the ultimate killer; it does something that could be considered worse than death – it allows one to live with a shaken psyche, sometimes without full memory of the trauma and without ability to make any sense of it.

In the opening, she presents herself as a recent victim, apparently assaulted and perhaps raped. She is told she cannot be “intimate” (read: have sex) for two weeks. She notes that she has lost everything. But she notes this in the context of great hope: she says that she will be a star because she has nothing left to lose. She points out that she has created this depicted trauma and has used things that bring her pleasure to do so – the mint gauze caps, the nurse on the right with the great ass, the next season Calvin Klein. She has been, in a sense, destroyed. And while acknowledging this, tearfully, she holds on to a reality within her that tells her she can do something with this destruction; she can create. She can hold death and life, destruction and creation, pleasure and mortality, at the same time.

What she has lost here is her innocence; it has been forcibly taken from her and that is physically manifested as opposed to just psychically manifested. Gaga is fairly genius at making her internal world external. She shows her polymorphously perverse nature, and it strikes me as quite the opposite of self-indulgent: she gives her viewers total permission to enjoy her perversion, thereby owning – not even vicariously, because her cinema is so sensorily pleasurable – their own perversions. She invites the linking of libido and aggression; she invites the dynamic interplay of sex and death. She doesn’t just show you it; she is fairly certain you’ll love it, that you will join her in that linking.

When we then see her in her flat, defending her artistry and essentially displaying a mental breakdown of anguish, anger, and despair – clearly externalizing regressive states of sexuality and aggression – I cannot help but notice that her eye make-up positions her as potentially lending a nod to Amy Winehouse. Whether this was an intentional reference to the deceased pop star who struggled with addiction or not, this is certainly a plausible reading of her internal existential crisis in the flat. Ms. Winehouse was found deceased in her flat; she was a vocalist of epic proportions who brought joy (pleasure) by writing and singing about pain (destruction). The song “Rehab” was at once tragic and impossible not to dance around to, singing along. That Gaga might identify with Ms. Winehouse or feel a need to pay subtle homage to her does not surprise me. They are two women who bare something of the gutted soul for mass enjoyment.

Gaga, in the midst of this crisis in her flat, has two choices: give up or change. She chooses change. Because she has felt through the trauma – has allowed herself to regress as she flails about nearly nude with a box of cereal (here she is in an oral psychosexual moment, the first of the infantile stages of development: grappling with what should nurture her, grappling with trust, using her mouth for pleasure and aggression) – she is empowered to then have these options. She dyes her hair – connoting metamorphosis – in her bathtub, naked, again mixing destruction and sexuality together, primal and pre-verbal (now she is playing at anal stage themes of controlling the body and bodily functions), and we hear a voiceover of Gaga quietly singing some lines to what later becomes an enormously popular hit single “Marry The Night.”

As she later leaves the building (brothel? hotel? hospital?) of women, some prim and proper ballerinas, some indistinguishable, she says, “You may say I lost everything. But I still had my bedazzler.” And there it is. I laughed out loud when she said this, because, hey, it’s hilarious. It’s also another claim on transformation: she possesses the tools – metaphorically a machine that tacks rhinestones onto clothing – to transform harsh and traumatizing realities into something if not conventionally beautiful then at least beautiful to her. Destruction and creation. Sex and death. This burst of laughter and understanding instantly reminded me of Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, wherein humor fashions itself as simultaneously revelatory of inner conflicts and reveling in them. Additionally, she is arguably progressing through the phallic stage of development as she exits a re-fashioned woman, claiming her gender by dressing it up, quite different from the tomboyish brunette we first encountered in the clinic.

Is she navel-gazing? Is she self-indulgent? What human being shouldn’t be, in the midst of internal and external crisis? If one does not feel through such events – which may, in the face of great trauma, include intense regression to infantile stages of development – accepting the destructive forces and the effects those have on one’s intra-psychic and possibly physical self, one represses. One denies. One acts as if nothing happened. And in this way, trauma, violation, and destruction win. When one does this, one loses the opportunity and authority to create in the middle of what is destructive, loses the opportunity to take these new pieces of reality and transform them, to dominate them, to integrate them into a newly made world, and to even find pleasure through them.

Gaga goes on from exiting the building to offer us one of the most gratifying music videos I’ve seen from her. As we see her in her Firebird Trans Am, she is now at the final psychosexual stage of development, the genital phase: she is not merely woman, but sexual, empowered with her ability as a mature woman to create. The video is evocative of not just the music video for “Thriller,” but of the entire movie The Making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which takes us behind the scenes – like Gaga in the dance studio – and onto the street with a crew of dancers who back up her vision for her life, macabre and transformative, creating sex and pleasure in the midst of grit, destruction, and trauma. Just as Michael Jackson somehow made the threat of zombie attacks and death a pleasurable and erotic experience for the viewer, Gaga, in essence, takes back the night, whatever “the night” means to her. She won’t give up on her life. Her story, rather than ending in a clinic with bruises all over her back, surrounded by crazed young women and doped up on morphine, began there. Creation from destruction.

* * * * *

As with the trope that “white” is culturally invisible, so too is it generally true that the “white male” form is invisible, especially in the United States, and is treated in the popular mainstream eye as a blank canvas onto which we can project our fantasies and desires, wild, tangled, and disturbing, joyous and free. Historically, the female form has been more difficult to digest as a blank canvas, as it has been so very objectified and imbued with what that form must mean to the ruling class. For a female pop artist to become a blank canvas – as I believe Lady Gaga is becoming in each of her videos and especially in “Marry The Night” – that is available for all kinds of projections and deeply felt visceral responses is a revolutionary and radical gift to audiences of any gender. We see Lady Gaga in “Marry The Night” as trauma victim, androgynous, naked, costumed many times over, masculine, feminine, sexual, aggressive, innocent, outcast, leader. She is believable in all of these roles.

That Lady Gaga occupies intense libidinal and aggressive drives in a female body – and that her persona more and more presents a duality of masculine and feminine – in a world that traditionally responds primarily to men as having the power and authority to do this is, again, revolutionary and radical. It is not that Lady Gaga has invented this revolution or the themes and complexes she presents in the “Marry The Night” video. Those who have followed transgressive female artists who transform the female body, like Cindy Sherman, would rightfully skewer me if I said Gaga invented this. But what gets me, and why I felt the need to write this piece, is that much of the entire world is responding positively to what Gaga is offering; that level of responsiveness appears unmatched in this time and place.

It seems to me that the world that loves her so inexhaustibly is crying out, in part, for the “radical” notion that the female form (and any minority body) is not simply a subjugated object for white straight men – or anyone else, for that matter – to control, subject and violate. She has made her form a blank canvas in many ways, which she strips down, bares, mutilates, rejoices, births, re-creates.

I refute any claims that Lady Gaga is merely another pop sex object in this video because she struts around half-naked and depicts a primal sexuality, especially in the sequence in the hotel room/flat. As she uses her own form as a carrier of multiple meanings, in this as in many of her videos, it is not a fair assessment to claim that any woman who shows too much flesh is bowing to the patriarchal male gaze. Lady Gaga’s persona is a subject of her own making; it is fiercely in touch with her libidinal and aggressive forces, sometimes mutilating and morphing her own obviously gorgeous female form (throwing a box of Cheerios on her naked body, stuffing her face; bowing to ballerina perfection, which many understand to be painful and sometimes destructive to the ballerina’s body) to present us with an external version of internal conflicts and wishes, fantasies, and desires – perhaps our own. To ask that she de-sexualize herself would be to halve what is so universally appealing about her, just as it would be antithetical for her to tone down the gritty, destructive, masculine forces within her – with which she grapples, and which she so brilliantly enacts.

And while there is arguably a certain level of trauma just in being born female – or “different” – in a society in which minorities continue to be more often objects than subjects, Gaga claims that very trauma as a tool for her own self-actualization. And she offers that claiming of trauma, that re-invention of trauma, to her wildly devoted fans. I believe this all resonates viscerally, not necessarily intellectually, which is, ultimately, its genius and its profundity.

I’m convinced Freud would have utterly loved her and might have claimed she is offering some solution to neurosis and posttraumatic stress through popular art that no other pop star of her generation with her level of success is currently offering. She regresses in the face of trauma, and she imbibes the raw vicissitudes of mortality and sexuality. She aligns herself with fundamental complexes, so essential to the grappling of any trauma, to transform herself, to cathect, and catapult from infantile regression to a position of subject, power, authority, and invention.

Bravo, Gaga. Navel-gaze all you want. Self-indulge. And transform our pain again, as I know you will. I’m a 32 year-old little monster, with my paws up.

Citations:

Freud, A. (1966) The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. Executors of the Estate of

Anna Freud.

Freud, S. (1962) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Sigmund Freud Copyrights

Ltd.

Freud, S. (1960) Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. W.W. Norton &

Company, Inc.: New York, United States.

Freud, S. Quotation.

http://www.apsa.org/About_Psychoanalysis/Freud_Quotes.aspx

Durham, M.G. & Kellner, D.M. (eds) (2006), Media and Cultural Studies. Blackwell

Publishing Limited: Massachusetts, United States.

Mulvey, L. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema.

Rothenberg, P.S. (ed) (2004). Race, Class and Gender in the United States: An

Integrated Study. Worth Publishers: United States.

McIntosh, P. White Privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack.

Figley, C.R. (ed) (1985). Trauma and Its Wake. Brunner/Mazel: Pennsylvania, United

States.

Eth, S. & Pynoos, R.S. Developmental perspective on psychic trauma in

childhood.

Author Bio:

K.M. Zwick, MA, is a psychotherapist specializing in trauma recovery, addictions and group dynamics, a gender theorist, columnist, and essayist in Chicago, Illinois. Find her opinions run amok on http://thehumbleopine.blogspot.com

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MtN’s Tour de Negative Femininities

2011-12-14T20:05:00.000-08:00

By Samantha Cohen

This is the seventh piece in our series on “Marry the Night.” For the previous pieces, click here.

The home-chopped bob with too-short bangs has always been my favorite haircut. It screams teenage theater girl or aspiring mental patient. It makes me think of knives. The girl with the home-chopped bob is so angry she’ll take a scissors to her hair, cut right into it at random, and probably use the scissors on other things, too. The bob chopper’s given up on being a good female – she’s given up on being pretty. She takes her emotions out on the very symbol of her good femininity: her hair. She externalizes her badness, advertises her desire to fail. And so she is institutionalized.

Only she hasn’t given up on being pretty, not really. The scissored-at-random look is different than the razored-all-over look. Her little bangs ask those who gaze upon her to still find her cute. Recognize my anger, her hair says, recognize its manifestation on my body, but adore me. The home-chopped bob externalizes the ambivalence and pathos of being female.

And so, in the mental institution with home-chopped Gaga we begin the “Marry the Night” video’s grand tour of negative femininities.

The mental institution has always been a fantasy space for me. I sort of blame the movie Girl, Interrupted for this.

Angelina's home-chopped bangs!

The mental institution is a place for unchecked feminine expression and sanctioned hysteria, a gathering space for failed females. It’s a lesbian separatist experiment-come-true. In Girl, Interrupted, Winona and Angelina sneak out for acoustic guitar sessions and eye sex. In “Marry the Night,” patients cavort madly in matching thongs, imaginary slumber party-style.

Gaga’s in the institution because she took a knife to her hair and then her body; because she couldn’t be a good female – “a saint” – like her mother.

But one must fail at femaleness in order to create. Creation is a selfish act, and the good female is unselfish. Gaga must accept herself as a failed female before she can be an artist, and so the mental institution is necessarily the first stop on her journey.

Gaga is not at the hospital to be restored to good femininity, like Winona in Girl, Interrupted, but to accept her failure. She just has to turn on some dramatic piano music and waltz into a studio apartment that, bathtub-in-the-kitchen, is the very signifier of glamorous New York artistic poverty, and that’s in some ways, an extension of the institution – a place for expressive seclusion.

And so she finds herself in the next incarnation of failed femaleness: the cloistered impoverished artist. She practices ballet, does performance art involving maxi pads and Cheerios, and writes songs in the kitchen bathtub as she bleaches her hair. Strutting around with a censoring black bar over her nipples, she even has an imaginary audience. Her speech is subtitled.

But Gaga’s already told us she’s beautified her past. Of course, real art poverty is the same as all other poverty. There’s no audience, and after awhile, it becomes difficult to imagine one.

And so, Gaga joins the world again, now as an artist. Which she can do, because she still has her bedazzler. She still has the tool to make herself into her own glittering object. And so she does.

And then she does “what any girl would do.” But what is it that any girl would do? She says it’s “start(ing) all over again” but her face tells us something different.

Do you see it? It’s subtle. It could almost be that Gaga’s gum is stuck in her teeth. But, no. Gaga is going to suck cock. She’s going to embody yet another form of negative feminine: the whore.

Oh yes. She’s entered the capitalist/patriarchal system and she’s ready to sell herself to that ultimate patriarch: the Papa Paparazzi.

Gaga’s subtlety with her cock-sucking face is telling – she’s skilled at making her signals apparent only to those who know how to read them. This kind of coded signaling is itself a feminine form of communication. Men, Real Men (who may of course be women, too), the ones who run shit and to whom Gaga must whore herself are, as centuries worth of jokes and satire tell us, unobservant. Almost intentionally so – they wouldn’t want to be accused of the feminine activity of reading into things. And so, by convincing Real Men, at a glance, that she’s whatever they want her to be, Gaga gains the freedom to speak honestly, if clandestinely.

So Gaga’s a whore, but she can’t just be a whore. Like (Catholic schoolgirl) pop stars Britney and Christina, she must embrace both sides of the Madonna/whore binary. She must, too, be a saint. She clues us in on this in the same moment that she signals her intent-to-whore. Her studded denim, blonde 80s look alludes to Madonna, making a kind of visual pun that allows her to embody both the Madonna and the whore simultaneously, to effectively become a Madonna/whore hologram.

Unlike Britney and Christina, though, whom Real Men turn into whores and Madonnas in image only, Gaga becomes a real Madonna (more on this later), and a real whore. She “throw(s) on some leather and cruise(s)…in (her) fishnet gloves, (she’s) a sinner.” And it’s by embodying at once these opposing figures that Gaga has the freedom to create herself in her own image, to use those shiny patches.

By actually inhabiting both sides of the Madonna/whore binary, Gaga is able to become, while in the world, something that’s almost unfemale. By the time she’s ready for the world of the actual music video, she’s abandoned her uncontrolled, emotional femininity. Her movements have become precise, rigid, fierce. Her gaze is direct and unsmiling. She makes fists. She blows shit up. She’s become something that’s so far from popular representations of the Madonna and the whore that it’s not quite recognizable as female, so far from these representations that, upon her debut, U.S. audiences speculated about whether she was a man. In fact, she’s a Gaga. And it’s once she’s become a Gaga in this video that the actual music video can begin.

Throughout the music video, we see what it is to be a Madonna.

Whoring gives Gaga the freedom to return to the bathtub, to her space of creation, which is also her space of baptism.

Gaga purifies herself in order to “make love to this dark,” to create. In Gaga’s bathtub, the Madonna is not all about piety and selflessness. This Madonna communes with the divine, with the mystical, with the dark, in order to create. This is not a new idea of course – the Virgin Mary herself communed with the divine so hard, got so deeply in touch with the dark otherworldly, that she got pregnant with an actual baby who was part-human, part-divine. Gaga restores the image of the Madonna to what she is: another embodiment of the negative feminine.

Gaga’s Madonna is not a Madonna that the U.S. Christian right (who are almost synonymous with Real Men) would approve. She’s in touch with the dark, with the unconscious, with the frightening spiritual world.

Real Men are content, Gaga implies, as long as their cocks get sucked. And thus, Gaga turns the Madonna/whore binary on its head, making saintliness encompass emotion and darkness and everything scarily feminine, while the whore gives Real Men what they want, gaining freedom as currency.

And the chorus of “Marry the Night” sounds to me like an imperative as well as an invocation. I hear Gaga invoking Mama M-Mary, the night. Mary the dark, Mary the source of magical creation. But I also hear, “Mama m-marry the night,” which sounds to me like it sounds when I hear LA Latina mothers call their daughters mama, a term of endearment, a recognition of their inescapable femaleness. Mother monster is dispensing some advice. She advises us to marry the night. To embrace inner darkness and create from that darkness. To commune with the otherworldly, to reinvent ourselves. To turn tricks and be tricksters. To embrace solitude as well as the bedazzler. To do the home-chopped bob if we need to, but to eventually become so tough and glamorous in the world that we’ll be allowed space to return to our own rooms for emotional/psychotic/hysterical creation.

And with the Mary figure at the end of the video, Gaga offers us a god to worship. This Mary’s hard and shiny, content alone in the darkness, transmitting signals from her satellite head, knowing they'll be properly received.

Author Bio:

Samantha Cohen, creative editor of Gaga Stigmata, is a writer living behind the Scientology building in Los Angeles. Her fiction can be found in PANK, Black Clock, Storyglossia, The New Orleans Review, and Mary Magazine. She teaches a class called Semiotics of Fashion in the Critical Studies program at CalArts.

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The Cross is My Anchor: On Learning to Dance Again

2011-12-08T20:26:00.000-08:00

By Peter Kline

This is the sixth piece in our series on “Marry the Night.” For the previous pieces, click here.

“God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are…God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

– 1 Corinthians 1:27-28, 25

“Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon.”  

– T. Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love

“I wish that I could dance on a single prayer.”

– Lady Gaga, “Scheiße”

“Together, we’ll dance in the dark.”

– Lady Gaga, “Dance in the Dark”

Back in September of this year, we lost a little monster. Jamey Rodemeyer, 14, took his own life because he finally could not shake the messages he heard from his peers that his life was not worth living. Jamey was an avid Lady Gaga fan. Among his last words was an expression of gratitude to Mother Monster for fighting the fight he found he could no longer fight. Jamey was buried in a Lady Gaga t-shirt bearing the words, “Born This Way.”

Suicide, particularly when it strikes young people, forces a mirror up to ourselves and to our world. What kind of world have we created that someone would want to force himself out of it after such a short amount of time? How could it happen that a 14-year-old boy could experience such a profound loss of hope? Why wasn’t this precious and vulnerable child more fiercely protected? I LOATHE REALITY. On September 21, in response to Jamey’s death, Gaga tweeted the following: “The past days I’ve spent reflecting, crying, and yelling. I have so much anger. It is hard to feel love when cruelty takes someone’s life.” During her iHeartRadio set a few days later, she performed “Hair” in tribute to Jamey. “Jamey,” she sang, “you’re not a freak.”

I begin here with a reminder of what is at stake for Gaga in her art: life and death, real bodies, real persons. We miss a great deal in our analysis and reception of her art if we don’t register its driving passion: the yearning to make true the lie that this broken and darkened world is yet worth living in with abandon and joy. I’M A WARRIOR QUEEN/LIVE PASSIONATELY TONIGHT. Just a few days ago, responding to the moving video of another gay teenage boy, Jonah, courageously telling us his story of being bullied and his resolve, despite this, to keep living, Gaga tweeted: “Please everyone, take a moment to watch this. This is why I work so hard, this is why it’s wrong to hate.”

How does beginning here affect how we might view this remarkable new video Gaga has given to us? What we’ve been given is an intimate glimpse into the passion that drives this woman’s work. And I mean “passion” here in its literal sense – suffering. What we see in this video is the story of love being forged through suffering, strength being given in weakness, life finding its anchor in and through death. In an earlier essay, I suggested that Lady Gaga undertakes her art as a work of love for the Jameys and Jonahs of this world, for those who find themselves weak, low, and despised – in a word, monstrous. Where does such love come from? I’M GONNA MAKE IT…YOU KNOW WHY? BECAUSE I HAVE NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE.

Perhaps the answer is this: it is when life ceases to be the pursuit of things and becomes instead the pursuit of nothing – no-thing – that life opens up as hopeful possibility, as new creation ex nihilo, as a movement into the bedazzled darkness of love. LOVE IS THE NEW / DENIM OR BLACK. The line between despair and hope is razor thin. Both face the future anxiously as a kind of empty darkness. The only difference is that whereas despair cowers before the darkness in fear, grasping for some-thing to stabilize the dizzying anxiety (gummy bears? a knife, maybe?), hope leaps forward, dancing into the darkness with an inexplicable expectancy that love is present and that love will come. I’M GONNA MARRY THE DARK / GONNA MAKE LOVE TO THE STARK. Love is the impossible possibility of dancing the night away on the razor, treating it not as the precipice of despair, but as the edge of glory. I’M ON THE EDGE WITH YOU. (And there you have the whole sweep of Born this Way, from its first to its last track).

This video, at its heart, is a story about dancing. It is about losing the ability and the drive to dance, but then finding one’s feet again through love. The video opens with Gaga knocked off her feet, being wheeled into the clinic on a gurney. She comments on her heels CUSTOM GUISEPPE ZANOTTI (a glimpse of what is to come perhaps, a remembering forward), but her feet hang there motionless and stiff. Her whole body lies motionless and stiff. A turn in the video happens when Gaga tells us, “I have nothing left to lose.” “Do you need anything else?” the nurse asks. What does someone who has lost everything need? Some-thing? No, for things will eventually just be lost again. Things don’t bring healing; things don’t bring freedom. “Juste un petite part de la musique,” “Just a little bit of music,” she replies. What Gaga needs are her dancing feet, and so she asks for music, for an invitation to dance. As Beethoven’s Pathétique begins to play, she raises her hands over her head into a dance position and elegantly falls back into her pillow. Even at her bleakest point, stabbed in the back, even surrounded by madness, not least her own, the dance is present, the dance is possible, and she desires its call. But how? How could such possibility be present amid such despair? Notice the crosses on her bed. One at her head (as if a saint’s halo), one at her feet, anchoring her, bearing her burden, loving her. She utters, “I have nothing left to lose,” as the cross cradles her.

(I danced on a Friday when the world turned black

It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back

They buried my body, they thought I was gone

But I am the dance, and the dance goes on)[i]

We are then ushered into a dream-like sequence with Gaga dressed as a ballerina. Ballerinas are the most rigorous of dancers. To be a ballerina requires perfection – physical, psychological, emotional. It is significant that Gaga has said on a few occasions that she regards dancing to be her least developed skill. Compared with her musical ability, she thinks of her dancing ability as something of a weakness. And so we find this ballerina standing in impossible shoes, dancing tentatively a dance we’re not sure she can pull off. Gaga has said these shoes represent the “Everest of [her] existence,” the impossible obstacle that occasioned her downfall. In the next scene, we witness the downfall. The call that knocks her off her feet, the anger, the yelling, the destruction, the nothingness of little zeros filling her mouth and covering her body (h/t Laurence Ross). The whole scene comes across as a dance dissolving into chaos. It is interwoven with shots of ballerina Gaga alternatively falling, hanging upside down, lying at the feet of other ballerinas, looking up at them in despair. She finally falls into her bathtub as if dead, drowning in the waters of baptism – “baptized into…death” (Romans 6:3).

Halfway through the video at this point, the decisive turn takes place. Beethoven’s song ends, and we begin to expect Gaga’s own. We’re not told or shown how the turn happens – one could never see the transition from death to resurrection, for it happens “in the twinkling of an eye” (1 Cor. 15:52) – we just see Gaga sitting in her baptismal/bathtub, somehow raised to life, her hair teal with the transition from brunette to blond, “Marry the Night” gently floating in the background. “And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2). And then the next scene opens and we see them…the heels. Gaga on her own two dancing feet, striding confidently into the dance studio, once again looking up at other dancers, but no longer with the despair of failed perfection. She’s not haughty or over-confident, though; we can still sense some anxiety. But it is an anxiety full of expectancy, not knowing what will come, yet open and ready nonetheless. Notice that the camera focuses on one of the dancers on the balcony, a ballerina. Gaga once again looks up and faces her Everest, the obstacle of perfection. But her face says it all – no downfall this time. I WON’T CRY ANYMORE.

Whence this newfound strength? The courage to “[do] it all over again,” to bedazzle the scraps and fragments of her shattered life? There is writing on the wall in this scene, which typically signals impending judgment or doom. But significantly, the writing here is reversed (h/t Meghan Vicks). What might be a message of judgment is actually a message of hope. But this is hidden from us initially; to see it, we have to look in reverse, a conversion has to take place. The message on the wall itself bears this reversal, this conversion. Flipped around, it reads: “The Cross is my Anchor.” The cross? That instrument of torture, death, and shame? How could this become an anchor, a source of strength? For the New Testament, the cross is a source of strength because the death of Jesus is that moment in history when the tender heart of God is thrown open to the world, never to close. Here God bears eternally the weight and nothingness of the world. Its brokenness and violence are now forever cradled in the outstretched arms of that “man of sorrows, acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). For those who will relax into such love, as Gaga seems to do in the clinic – I’LL DANCE… / WITH MY HANDS ABOVE MY HEAD… / LIKE JESUS SAID – weakness and brokenness become no longer a threat, no longer an occasion for rivalry or mistrust. Rather, you are free, as Gaga has said in a recent interview about her video, to “trust yourself to make mistakes,” free to face your obstacles, internal and external, with expectancy, with hope, even with laughter. (And of course with a bedazzler).

And so we’re taken out into a moonlit night to watch Gaga marry it, to watch her bedazzle it, to watch her dance out into the darkness with abandon. Initially, we come upon what looks like wreckage and carnage – cars burning, Gaga thrown upside down, hanging out of the Trans Am, knocked off her feet. We’re reminded of the opening scene where Gaga’s feet lie motionless and stiff. But here there is movement, restlessness. Then a surge of life, her legs writhing in search of some ground, some anchor, on which to dance. She flips herself over, and the dance begins. TURN ON THE CAR AND RUN.

The video then moves into what is for me its most moving and significant sequence. We’re taken back into the dance studio to watch how Gaga inhabits and lives into her newfound courage and strength. She enters the company of dancers not out in front, but as one of them, with and among them. There is no presumption that she deserves to be a star. She has to prove herself. Before the dance begins, she lies low, nervously looking up and around, but with a quiet determination. She stands, takes a deep breath, and the dance begins. A break in the dancing occurs, and she looks relieved, but still nervous. What will they think of me? Was I good enough? She wanders around looking for someone to say something to her. Finally someone does, presumably selecting her for a smaller dance group in which she is now out in front – next to the ballerina. The dancing begins again. But then a stumble, a fall. The ballerina, that image of poise and perfection, shows herself less than perfect. She is fragile, broken. A reversal has taken place. It is now the ballerina who lies at Gaga’s feet, looking up in despair. And what is Gaga’s response? She bends down, picks her up, and kisses her. The one who could most easily become an enemy, an object of rivalry and contempt, becomes instead a friend, an occasion to give love. I’M GONNA MARRY THE NIGHT. The dance Gaga now dances is one of love, love for the broken, for the fallen, for the low and despised. Significantly, the ballerina Gaga stoops down to help appears to be transgendered or in drag, a “freak” in the eyes of the world. Marrying her own pain and suffering has freed Gaga to give herself to, to dance with, “the least of these,” to those languishing in their own nights of pain, suffering, and rejection. Her kiss says, “You’re not a freak.”

The dance begins again, and it eventually breaks out into an improvised celebration around Gaga, full of joy. Such joy can’t be contained in a dance studio, and so it spills out into the streets, into the night. Gaga now leads a group of dancers unafraid to be out on the streets at night, unafraid to find joy in the darkness, unafraid to be monstrous. I can’t help but notice her teal lipstick here, the same color as the dye she uses to turn her hair blond. Her mouth once full of the zeros of nothing has been freed to sing, now teal with the promise of joy. THIS IS MY PRAYER / THAT I’LL DIE LIVING JUST AS FREE AS MY HAIR. She pulls off her sunglasses and looks straight at us, as if to say: come dance.

[i] Sydney Carter, “Lord of the Dance,” 1963. Hymn.

Author Bio:
Peter Kline is a Ph.D. candidate in theological studies at Vanderbilt University. His real love, though, is a little church in Nashville where he and his wife serve as ministers.

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Let’s Go Crazy

2011-12-07T19:38:00.000-08:00

By Devin O’Neill

This is the fifth piece in our series on “Marry the Night.” For the previous pieces, click here.

There is only one consistently salient factor in artistic creation, and this is insanity.

By this I mean: when creating a new cultural product, the goal is to draw together elements that are noticeable and affecting, and since our attention mechanisms are governed by pattern differentiation, we must create something that does not slot into the automatically processed functionalities of quotidian cultural life. Our eyes must not pass over it unfazed.

This is simple stuff, and covered by everyone from here to Timbuktu, but the frequency with which this principle is revisited by artists suggests a kind of fractal blossoming at the center of the idea. Madness is not a finite thing, and therefore does not produce finite things.

When we speak of madness we speak either of an underfunctioning or an overfunctioning of certain aspects of consciousness. We parse the largely unpredictable world around us into patterns and organizing narratives. We must do this to a certain extent to be sane – we must slot our narratives into the narratives of the social superstructure and oil the juncture well so’s to avoid grinding gears. We become the things we believe in this way, and social life is a thing we all believe together.

If you don’t create enough patterns, you clearly can’t function socially; our society doesn’t leave time for you to process undifferentiated experience and large systems of heuristics are necessary. But you run into problems if you go in the opposite direction too.

If you create too many patterns. If you believe in something else, something the consensus doesn’t cover.

So Gaga has hit bottom. She’s lying (not laying) in that hospital bed and she’s telling that nurse that she’s going to be a star because…because…because she has nothing left to lose. We can safely interchange star with artist, here, I think. We could problematize that too, but we won’t for the time being.

She says she fills in the holes in her life with art. What does that mean? Yes, mean indeed. What does it mean. Any of it.

That’s the point, you know. She’s trying to make it mean something. Her life.

The artist in this case has been rejected by the social superstructure. The ordinary corridors of expression are closed, the tendrils of hierarchical unworthiness tighten their grip. No more dancing for you. So what’s the solution? Where do you go?

You go crazy.

All you need is a bedazzler and some torn denim. And Cheerios. Lots and lots of Cheerios.

This crisis scene is a scene of degradation, because degradation is what is necessary. We assess social value and appropriateness on a relative scale of familiarity, and so to become crazy you must become low. If you want immediate positive social recognition for your crazy, you’re going to be disappointed. This scene isn’t comfortable, and it’s not supposed to be. It has a certain glamor, because of the production value – and she discusses this in her video interview afterward. The cameras do certain things. But she immersed herself in the scene for a half-hour. She lost her mind. Free association. Rejection of usefulness. No social value. Let’s writhe around and play with our food.

Victor Turner discusses how, during initiation, the social role and value of the initiated are removed. They are reduced to being nothing. To being no-one, so that they can build a new social identity on the other side. Or seven.

She goes crazy. But this is the process. And she looks like she could take on the flaming, exploding world at the end of it. She looks ready for anything. Her armor and her makeup, and her makeup is her armor, and her armor is her makeup.

Gaga reclaims, over and over again, the idea of the hero. We’ve spent long decades politicizing and autopsying that kind of rash, egoistic self-confidence. Baptizing yourself in your own worthiness is so hegemonic. So pre-postcolonial. Who are you to hold your own values aloft and obsess over them? You’re a crazy person.

I was, before I saw the video, planning on placing her work in theoretical juxtaposition, antagonism really, with Chris Kraus’s work. Kraus, in Where Art Belongs, talks about the necessity of art as an outgrowth of marginal spaces; the artifacted embodiment of a particular time and place, a local grouping, an immediate culture, a self found in alleyways, a vital street-level or interpersonal dialog. But Gaga has always been about projection of artifice into a monolith of heroism, a kind of collaged who’s-who of Springsteens and Warrior Princesses and other larger-than-life cultural übertropes; in a way not marginal at all (despite her politicizations, she is very pop). There is no space of “real-moment-documentation” a la Kraus’s work in "Telephone" or "Judas" or whatever; they’re almost the opposite of that.

But this bombshell is one of the most Krausian works I’ve ever seen, and the moment I watched it I knew she was fucking my thesis all to hell. In I Love Dick, Kraus transforms her obsessive love, her adulterous madness, into an object that demands recognition in all its size and complexity, and consequently transforms herself into the same. This is what Gaga is doing here – unmediated moments like the ones we see are unassailable in their unconstructedness, like documentary. This is the kind of performance art I love – if a real loss of self occurs, if instinctive, method-actor emotionalities are accessed, we’re assaulted by the aesthetic arrest of the unclothed human animal.

We’re crazy, crazy animals, we are.

Crazy, like I said, can involve building an intimidatingly signifying mythos disconnected from reality, and Gaga’s done that too. But it’s less completely disconnected, and more pathologically disconnected. Her movement and gesture are clearly informed by her pain. This is not some escapist fantasy, but a baptismal reliving; a ritual, in the sense of a really vital ritual, like a drug-addled shaman being ridden by a voodoo loa. She is allowing her past to control her to the point of possession, and she is turning that into a game – a bioanxiety-defying act of existential courage.

But the past is still there, and the sculpture of madness is chiseled with knives of pain. When we stand back and behold it, it’s beautiful. But the painting, the one she’s filling in the holes of, is a tableaux about very egoistically threatening human experiences. This is not an escape from pain, but a bent, schizophrenic compromise with it, the way some of the most agonized religious iconographies are also some of the most beautiful. She made the difficult choice to excavate what pieces she could of her traumas, and made a deal with a devil we all know, because once we were all scared little kids that hated ourselves. She married the night.

This is also a video of celebration, of liberation. But it is a mad celebration, a mad liberation – in our limited lives, perhaps the only kind we can really have.

Author Bio:

Devin O’Neill is a writer, performance artist, and branding practitioner. He enjoys things he shouldn’t, on purpose, and tries to get other people to enjoy them too. Some of his projects can be found at http://www.popocalypse.com and http://devinoneill.blogspot.com.

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Ma Ma Ma Marry the Night: The Streetwalker, The Theologian & The Feminist

2011-12-06T05:24:00.000-08:00

By Ingrid Pruss

This is the fourth piece in our series on “Marry the Night.” For the previous pieces, click here.

Lady Gaga’s performance of “Marry the Night” on the UK television show The X Factor opens with Gaga singing from beneath a lit cross, a sacred symbol that is also a secular mathematical sign, its x and y axes connected with the valentine shape, symbolic both of Saint Valentine who was beheaded and of the only thing that can connect opposition, which is the binding and magnetic force of Love. Lady Gaga’s song manages to link the world of imaginary street-walking, which is the literal meaning of marrying the night, to the world of intimacy with her dark side to achieve wholeness and thereby holiness, or self-actualization, realizing the divine image within. Behind the cross is a full moon. The images Gaga uses in this particular performance of “Marry the Night” carry with them an excess of meaning to achieve polysemy. Gaga uses images and icons from sacred and mythic realms that bring with them residual authority to empower her humanitarian message of not giving up on oneself after facing adversity.

Gaga stands behind an iron grate of a mausoleum, or perhaps the grate of a confessional, her right hand crossed over her heart in profession of truth and/or confession of sin, which St. Augustine believes is ultimately a confession of faith, making her commitment in song to marrying the night, to exploring the streets on her own, to confronting her dark side, to being alone without grieving, to looking at her own otherness and making peace with it, and/or to creating in solitude; she accepts her decision and all the ramifications that go along with it. As the song progresses, she gains ardor and confidence in her words, and acquires the ability to take off the old woman, so to speak, and to put on the new one. She comes to life, resurrected, as her true self, for in her commitment to the Night, she finds her light, akin to those who take the via negativa.

As Gaga exits the crypt or tiny church, like a female Christ rising from the dead, the audience discovers that she, like the medieval Green Knight who exits Camelot’s court in the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight holding his head, holds her own head in her own arm; but unlike the Green Knight, who arrives whole and asks for a challenger to decapitate him, Gaga’s decapitated figure arrives onstage a fait accompli, her audience having no clue of her history. Given the gist of the song, and the mythical female images of moon, heart, and night used thus far, the viewer/listener is lead to believe the figure was a victim of some kind of unspecified tragedy at the hands of patriarchy. Moon, heart, and night are common and repeated images in the sonnet sequence tradition, which are a series of poems that create a narrative usually constituting a long and detailed complaint about love. In light of this, Gaga’s trauma when dropped by her first record label wounded her to the core. And in this performance of the song, Gaga picks up her shattered being and commits to move forward by re-investing in her work instead of buying into that company’s evaluation of her.

The audience surmises the body is upper class because of the lace outfit and ornate necklace, but the blood around the neck speaks of female sacrifice that conjures up both suffering in love as well as religious devotion. Once again Gaga uses a host of icons in this performance – from the cross to the grate and the blood – which provides overtones of the sacred to the lyrics. These overtones provide a great deal of power and authority to the overall message of her performance. Matthew Fox writes that Christ is not just the light in everything but He “Is also the wounds in all things.” Furthermore, the decapitated body image conjures up some early French Feminist pieces of writing by Helene Cixous such as “Castration or Decapitation,” for example, which deal with a time in women’s history when woman was threatened with decapitation if she did not follow male orders. Since woman could not be castrated, given her biology, cutting off her head was the next best punishment. Actualizing this threat on two female leaders in front of 180 women, the Chinese General Sun Tse convinced the 180 to repress their desires and follow the King’s commands. In Gaga’s performance, however, the woman refuses repression. Gaga reverses the narrative by resurrecting the decapitated woman.

Additionally, the movement in the song “Marry the Night” from decapitated female to young, active, whole womanhood parallels what Helene Cixous speaks of in her famous Laugh of the Medusa, wherein she writes about “woman’s seizing the occasion so to speak, hence her shattering entry into history which has always been based on her suppression. To write and thus to forge for herself the anti-logos weapon. To become at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system” (264-65). The song reflects the refusal to allow anyone to suppress her energy and to hold her back from exploring what New York, the streets, and her imagination have to offer.

The first three quarters of The X Factor performance portray Gaga as a singing severed head held by the decapitated corpse; the concept of a singing severed head reminds one of Orpheus, the poet that could make the stones move, whose decapitated head recited poetry while floating down the River Lesbos, after being separated from his body. Orpheus is the primary mythic representative of the great patriarchal poet; here, Gaga is the great Goddess of Pop Music.

Gustave Moreau, Head of Orpheus

Finally, the decapitated head is reminiscent of Kristeva’s concept of abjection, which includes and describes any threat to the integrity of human identity; at the place of the wound, skin breaks open, and what should remain inside – blood – drips outside of the body. Seeing the human body in such a compromised state disturbs people and reminds them of their mortality, making the wound socially unacceptable for public display except perhaps in museum paintings. Interestingly, when individuals hurt, they hole themselves up behind closed doors in hospitals or in their homes to suffer in solitude as if their wounds were something to be ashamed of; however, in Gaga’s performance of this song, she transforms this shame by showing her stigmata so to speak, displaying the major wound of decapitation, the wounding unto the death, and her determination not to allow it to kill her, but to resurrect herself and recover to produce art out of her pain. Her marriage to the Night is a fertile one. The fruit she produces are her performances of her music live, in CDs and on video captured on DVDs. Feeling empowered fuels her excitement at the multiple possibilities ahead of her.

In the lyrics to the song, “Marry the Night,” Gaga refers to the via negativa directly in the words, “Gonna make love to this dark/ I’m a soldier to my own emptiness.”[i] Sheldrake and Fox write, “The negative way is the way of darkness, suffering, silence, letting go, and even nothingness. Emptiness. Emptying. All these are prayer: experiencing silence; being emptied of images, verbal, oral, and imaginative; letting go; and suffering. It’s not just about asking to be relieved from our suffering, it’s about entering into the process, to learn” (Fox & Sheldrake 115). Gaga guards her own emptiness; therefore, emptiness is not something to be dreaded and eschewed, but a necessary ingredient of her creative endeavors. Once again Gaga’s diction carries with it dual associations – secular and sacred. The idea of emptiness connects to Christ’s kenosis – His choice to empty Himself of the Godhead to take on human form. It makes perfect sense, that the next line contains the result of this, i.e. the light, or the assertion “I’m a winner.” Gaga willingly enters into the darkness, into the process of letting go in order to learn, and it is inside of that very darkness that she discovers divine energy.

Ma ma ma marry the night

So begins the refrain, which not only stylistically echoes the refrain of Pokerface (Pa-pa-pa –Pokerface)[ii] and Judas (Jud-a-a Jud-a-a) but also sounds like someone saying either, “Mamama Mary, the night,” or “Mamama, marry the night”; the former functions as an address to the Mother Mary or the Virgin Mary, and the latter represents self-encouragement/self-convincing to go ahead with committing herself to the night, whatever that might mean to her – perhaps something frightening. The syllabic repetition of “Ma ma ma” is reminiscent of what feminist critic Julia Kristeva calls the chora, which reflects the child’s early relationship to the mother’s body and its sounds.[iii] Gaga’s inclusion of the alliterations and rhythms of the prelinguistic state in the song’s refrain is an important part of her song since it is a significant step toward wholeness and healing and it forms a significant part of everyone’s personhood. Furthermore, the semiotic is a subtext of discourse repressed by patriarchy and looked down upon as disruptive, contradictory, and meaningless or nonsensical. Gaga’s use of it in the song’s refrain highlights its true nature – its musicality and poetic beauty.

After the first verse and refrain, the very next stanza Gaga sings is sonically altered. The final syllable of every word is met with an echo, which makes one think of the myth of the female character by that very name. In Echo’s adventures with the self-interested Narcissus, her body is totally destroyed by this male’s rejection of her, and all that is left are bones. Her bones are turned into a cave, and she is only able to repeat Narcissus’ last syllable. Unlike Echo, Gaga will not allow anyone to take her life and power away from her. She will guard and protect it all, even her emptiness. She will not give up on life. If there is going to be any echo, it will be of her own voice, not of anyone else’s. Hence, her echo is not one of powerlessness but one of emphasis. The echo in Gaga’s song reveals that she is her own partner. Not only does she not need a man, she can parent herself. Unlike the mythic Echo, who can never again begin her own conversations, Gaga initiates her own language. She can be both parent and child. Analyzing subjectivity in French psycholinguistic feminism, critic Valerie Cetorelli asserts that according to Cixous, “woman’s writing is also an echo of the voice and body of the Mother who dominates the fantasies of the pre-Oedipal baby, providing thus a link to the pre-symbolic union between the self and m/other” (29). Thus, the first step toward healing in this song is a rapprochement in the mother-daughter relationship within herself.

Similar to the song “Judas” in which Judas, according to Gaga, “was not a betrayer [but] was just part of the over-arching destiny of the prophecy,” (qtd. on dtrtministries.com), so too in “Marry the Night” many opposing forces must be confronted, examined, and included in order for Gaga to achieve her creative dreams; she must marry the night in order to have the time and space to create. As she says about “Judas,” “Those things in your life that haunt you are just part of what you must go through in order to become great” (qtd. in Potter). This rich concept explains the visual symbol of the cross at the beginning of the performance that represents the need to own one’s crosses, the crypt or the need to die to one’s self-centeredness, the decapitated body or the need to confront one’s humanity and thus one’s vulnerability, and the need to marry the night or to couple with one’s darkness, in other words, to embrace one’s own otherness. Yin must love Yang. Anima must make peace with Animus as Carl Jung might say, or as Marjorie Garber, quoting postmodern Cuban writer, Severo Sarduy, puts it, in her book Vested Interests, “Transvestism … is probably the best metaphor for what writing really is: …not a woman under whose outward appearance a man must be hiding, ….but rather….the coexistence, in a single body, of masculine and feminine signifiers; the tension, the repulsion, the antagonism, which is created between them…” (Sarduy qtd. in Garber 150). We must have the ability to cross over to the other side in order to be imaginative creators. Marrying the night is one of Gaga’s metaphors for crossing over.

Many fire lit lamps line the stage and mist rises across its surface creating a mysterious and sacred aura. Dancers are silhouetted to appear – on the cusp of reality and fantasy – surreal. The movement in the song “Marry the Night” begins to change – first in the lyrics and then in the action onstage. The shift from decapitated female to young, active, whole womanhood parallels what Helene Cixous speaks of in her famous Laugh of the Medusa when she writes about “woman’s seizing the occasion so to speak, hence her shattering entry into history which has always been based on her suppression. To write and thus to forge for herself the anti-logos weapon. To become at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system” (264-65). The song reflects the refusal to allow anyone to suppress her energy and to hold back from exploring the streets of New York and all they and her imagination have to offer. The lyrics shift from the negative, “I’m not gonna cry anymore” to “Love is the new denim or black” and “Get your engine ready ‘cause I’m coming out front,” as Gaga returns to the crypt/church in her decapitation costume, only to come out transformed in minimalist clothing.

She takes off the dead self, almost molts, and puts on the living self; at this point the music changes to techno and the lights flash much more like Star Wars saber-lights-gone-to-disco-strobes across the entire stage, and Lady Gaga comes out as we are more accustomed to seeing her in a black lace bodysuit and black knee high boots, energized and dancing full throttle. This is Lady Gaga married to the night, working until all hours, in love with what she does and doing it with panache.

Marrying the night allows Gaga to write and to exorcise the spirit of death in order to move forward with newfound fire. When Gaga sings, I can almost hear Helene Cixous reminding those of us who have had the courage to say “no” to repression, shame and fear, those of us who have begun the process of exploring the scary territory on the other side: “We the precocious, the repressed of culture…we are black and we are beautiful” (878). Have you married the night yet?

Works Cited

Cetorelli, Valerie. Re-Thinking Subjectivity in French Psycholinguistic Feminism: A Path through Irigiray, Cixous & Kristeva. Essex Graduate Journal of Sociology. Vol. 10 (2010). 24-41. Web. 27 November 2011.

Cixous, Helene and Annette Kuhn. Castration or Decapitation? Signs. Vol. 7 No.1 (Autumn,

1981( 41-55). JSTOR. Web. 29 November 2011.

Cixous, Helen and Keith and Paula Cohen. The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs. Vol. 1 No. 4 (Summer, 1976) 875-893. JSTOR. Web. 28 November 2011.

http://dtrtministries.com/2011/04/27/lady-gaga-says-judas-video-celebrates-faith/

Fox, Matthew. Qtd.in Sermon Notes. 22 March 2009. St. Mark’s Anglican Church. http://www.southhurstville.anglican.asn.au/pdf/Sermon%20090322%20Lent%204.pdf Web. 11 August 2010.

Fox, Matthew and Rupert Sheldrake. Natural Grace: Dialogues on creation, darkness, & the soul in spirituality & science. Image: 1997.

Gaga, Lady. Marry the Night. X-Factor Performance. YouTube. November 2011. Web. 25 November 2011.

Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross Dressing & Cultural Anxiety. Routledge: 1997. Print.

Potter, Brett David. Lady Gaga: Monstrous Love and Cultural Baptism. Mediation. 15 May 2011. http://theotherjournal.com/mediation/2011/05/15/lady-gaga-monstrous-love-and-cultural-baptism/30 November 2011. Web.

[i] I did not want to skip the image “warrior queen” in the first stanza, which almost makes one think of an Amazonian queen, but because of the length of the paper, I will put the explication here instead of in the text. When Gaga calls herself a warrior, she is using the term metaphorically, reminiscent of what she said in an interview she had with the Wall Street Journal after her performance of “Bad Romance” at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. When asked to extrapolate upon her idea of art, she replied as follows: “For me, art is a lie, and the artists are there to create lies we kill when we make it true. Francesco and I were like warriors on stage, trying to make a true moment….Art is life, life is art -– the question is what came first?” (emphasis mine). Here, Gaga’s use of the simile is about fighting as artists or investing all they had in their art to get their message across. The image is not one of violence but is simply a depiction of the struggle and energy it takes to make a single moment of “true” art – art that reveals a sincere message.

[ii] The song “Pokerface” begins with the chorus singing the syllables “ma ma ma ma ma.” For the refrain, Gaga sings, “Pa pa pa pa pa pokerface.” Thus, we have both “mama” and ”papa” in this song. It is difficult for me to believe Gaga was not aware of this. This syllabic repetition reinforces the use of Kristeva’s semiotic/chora.

[iii] Kristeva appropriates the term chora from Plato, but unlike Plato, Kristeva does not conceptualize it to be a preverbal space or type of timeless time prior to history. It is more of a liminal rhythmic experience the child has through the maternal body before that child is subjected to societal constraints. Kristeva does not describe the chora in terms of a container or in terms of containment.

According to Kristeva’s understanding of language acquisition, before a child learns to speak, the child responds to the sounds and rhythms of the mother’s body, her heartbeat and her cooing sounds. This is parallel to the stage when a child gets a sense of whether they are loved by the faces mirrored to them from their mother or caretaker, something psychologist D.W.Winnicott called mirroring, which he found very important to a child’s healthy development. Kristeva emphasizes this pre-syllabic or semiotic period, since whenever language is taught the focus is on the symbolic stage of language acquisition and the semiotic stage is looked down upon as nonsense syllables instead of being seen as the roots of the poetic part of our language.

Author Bio:

Ingrid Pruss, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English at Western Connecticut State University where she teaches 16th and 17th century British literature, poetry, critical theory, and women’s studies. Her work has been published in the George Herbert Journal, JAISA, Quay, and online in Seam Ripper. She loves presenting ideas at conferences and is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge through teaching.

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On The Whiteness of the Wail: From Ashes to Ashes

2011-12-05T05:00:00.000-08:00

By Laurence Ross

This is the third piece in our series on “Marry the Night.” For the previous pieces, click here.

“‘Nothing is ever quite true,’ said Lord Henry.”

– Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

It begins with white. All white, all blank, all nothingness. The whiteness is trauma, is horror. We hear the sound of the film reel. We hear the cue that there should be an image here, only there is no image here. Not yet. At first, there is only the whiteness that shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe. Only gradually is this whiteness colored over. Only gradually do we recognize a form that appears before our eyes, a form that appears to be Lady Gaga – the newest version, incarnation, of Lady Gaga.

There are two Gagas in the opening of the film. There is Gaga-as-body, a body that lays unconscious (presumably after the knife), and Gaga-as-mind, a bodiless narrator. While Gaga-as-body is the actor, Gaga-as-mind is the creator. Gaga-as-mind narrates/directs the scene we watch, a scene that, in the beginning, is the whiteness. And thus stabs us from behind. There is no image in the opening of the film because Gaga has not yet made an image. There is, quite literally, nothing to see when beholding the white depths of the milky way. Or, rather, what we do see is nothing – and nothing is not what we want, not what we want to see. We, as spectators, want to see something, we have expectations, and those expectations are not blank, are not blankness. We do not want to stare at whiteness. We want to stare at the spectacle we expect.

In essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors. When we do receive our image (Gaga’s image), there is still a lot of white space. There are (white) holes in Gaga’s memory that she is coloring in before our eyes. Is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows? Gaga and her two attending nurses are wearing white – next season Calvin Klein. And white, the blankness, must be the beginning, the basis, the concrete foundation of creation, the colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink. The blank page/canvas is the basis of creation as Calvin Klein is a label that specializes in wardrobe basics. Calvin Klein is a label that is continuously refining the basics, the underwear, of fashion. One can always rely on Calvin Klein to produce the next incarnation of white, season after season and next season Calvin Klein is always white. We need Calvin Klein to be our underwear, which, at (intimate/hazy/bare/frightening) times, is also our outerwear. We need Calvin Klein and whiteness as a place to begin so that, from there, we may dress ourselves up. All other earthly hues … are but subtle deceits over which we color/cover up whiteness. Though, as Gaga tells us, “the lie of it all is much more honest.”

When the nurse leaves Gaga’s bedside, when Gaga has “nothing left to lose,” she raises her arms, like a conductor/director/ballerina, Gaga again playing the dual-roles of the writer and the performer, the mind and the body. Yes, Gaga’s raised arms signal a collapse, but simultaneously, out of that collapse, the start of the start, a new beginning of a new beginning. And we are given another blank screen of whiteness out of which Gaga creates herself as the ballerina, the one in the spotlight. This is the prelude to the next stage, the stage that Gaga will eventually walk out on in order to play/perform/sing/scream “Marry the Night.”

Gaga throws up her hands, breaks the mirror that would serve her reflection back to her in order that a new self be made. The old self, that particular dream, that particular optimism, that particular cheer is destroyed. Gaga must alter herself, and the creation of a new self necessitates the destruction of the old. And so Gaga destroys, takes up the box of Cheerios and dismantles it, washes herself in the milk (whiteness) and O’s (zeros/nothingness). She pours an innumerable amount of zeros over herself because there is nothing left. She opens her mouth, full of zeros, not to sing, but to show us she has nothing(ness) to say. That the Cheerios/zeros/nothingness is all that there is to see here. Gaga has lost it – it being the everything of the self, all that there was. Gaga is now nothing. As she sings in the song, “I’m a loser.” Gaga must be stripped to a naked nothingness so that Gaga may dress herself up again. And Gaga does dress herself up again. Gaga wreaks havoc on her old denim so that she can make new denim. Gaga bedazzles. Gaga makes herself shine as a spectacle through her own agency. Gaga takes her trauma-tantrum and turns it into clothing, into art. She takes the box of Cheerios, the box of nothings, and, striking a pose, creates a hat for her naked self to wear – a hat which, in its style, predicts the Philip Treacy hat she will come to wear at the end of the film where she appears, posed, as an icon. But in order for Gaga to start singing “Marry the Night,” she needs to start with nothing, with whiteness, with the blank canvas, and she completes the erasure of her former self through the act of bleaching/blanching her hair. Only then does she begin the first notes, the first lines, the first lyrics of her next song/self.

Gaga sits in the bathtub of creation. She has submerged (and continues to submerge) herself in water. And when she enters the dance studio (bedazzled in starfish) and walks beneath the critical stares of the viewers above, the mural that is painted on the vaulted ceiling is a nautical one (Poseidon’s trident, the anchor, the compass in the center of the circular skylight around which, of course, revolve the whales).

It is out of this scene that Gaga emerges in her custom (costume) armor. The old self has been razed to make way for the new and the sea becomes the sky. In the midst of a burning set (a set that burns in spite of the rain), Gaga is perched on the roof of a Firebird Trans Am, wearing a beak-like mask and talon-like nails, her hair bleached, her bangs cut to a beak-like point on her brow. She (trans)forms into Gaga-as-phoenix, rising from the ashes of her former self. Gaga, like the phoenix, has the capacity to resurrect from a death. She takes pills to enter (to create) her altered (new) state. She applies lipstick (color) to her face. All deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot… the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues. Gaga is the siren, ready to sing, ready to wail, ready to marry the night. To marry the night not in the white of a wedding gown but in the color of her own creation. To wear a gigantic diamond on her ring finger, a diamond that is not white, not the absence of color, but a prism, an agent that allows the great principle of light, the white, to be seen as colored spectrums.

In the clinic, in the whiteness, Gaga is not permitted to light/fire/burn her (white) cigarette. She is not permitted the pleasure of starting over, of starting something new, of creating the ashes from which one can emerge. But once Gaga is emancipated from the clinic/whiteness, she is free to smoke, to burn, to turn the white of the cigarette to ash. As Lord Henry says, “A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied” (Wilde 68). The state of being unsatisfied is the state most suited to the artist, to creation. It is the state of craving, the state of want. And it is out of that state that a new pleasure, a new song, a new self is formed.

Gaga tells us we each have the capacity to be the artist of our selves: “And I did what any girl would do. I did it all over again.”

The whiteness is always a horror; the nothingness is never a comfort. The whiteness/nothingness is the latex glove against the cheek, the bleached hospital gown, the blankness before creation begins, if creation begins. Whiteness is the death shroud/killer/trauma from which an artist (a memory) might never resurrect (recover). (“They can be lost forever.”) The palsied universe lies before us a leper … the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. But it is that same horror of whiteness, of nothingness, that also urges the artist to create. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt? That (as Gaga sings) in the face of stark emptiness, we lace up boots, throw on leather, and don the fishnet gloves? That the frightening vulnerability of nakedness is the necessary basis for a created, clothed identity – a costumed-identity that is real and true because it is made? That, in the end (in the beginning), a pair of heels have the capacity to heal?

Note: The italicized portions of the text are lines taken from the chapter The Whiteness of the Whale of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick.”

Bibliography:

Marry the Night. Dir. Lady Gaga. Perf. Lady Gaga. 2011. Film.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2002. Print.

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2007. Print.

Author Bio:

Laurence Ross holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. He lives, writes, and teaches in Tuscaloosa, AL. His essays have appeared in Brevity, Mason’s Road, The Offending Adam, Bluestem, and elsewhere. He has recently completed a tragicomic novel, Also, I’m Dying, rendered in three one-act “plays” in which characters deliver performances of crisis, apathy, education, vanity, alcoholism, sexuality, husband, wife, child, and anarchy, among other things.

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What Lies in Her Wake

2011-12-04T09:32:00.000-08:00

By Victor P. Corona

This is the second piece in our series on "Marry the Night." For the first piece, click here.

From the playful kiddie pool scene in “Just Dance” to the tub of transformative trauma in “Marry the Night,” containers of water, bathtub and otherwise, constitute an important visual motif in Gaga’s aesthetic project. The image of a splashing Yüyi the Mermaid in “Yoü and I,” the reperformative washings in “Judas,” the white tub within the installation-art futurism of “Bad Romance,” and the pool setting of “Poker Face” all point to this interest in wet spaces. Appropriately titled “In Lady Gaga’s Wake,” the new Vanity Fair cover article (Robinson 2012) opens with a photograph of the pop star poised rather precariously on the railing of the Staten Island Ferry, the foamy waves behind her leading to a blurry New York skyline in the distance. A flimsy reading of such imagery would involve casually tossing around phrases about cleansing the self, purifying the body, and so on. I am more interested, however, in linking this motif to what I see at the core of Gaga’s creative ventures: the possibility of an endless renewal of identity and its consequences for contemporary culture.

“The Prelude Pathétique,” the spoken introduction to the “Marry the Night” video, extends the premise that Gaga has already laid out in interviews and her Manifesto of Little Monsters: her career and the persona that enabled it are examples of the essential human struggle to make lies true, to posit future versions of our selves, and to consciously realize desired fictions. In “Marry the Night,” she applies the same logic to her history. If the future can be willed into existence, why not the past? As she declares, “And truthfully the lie of it all is much more honest because I invented it.” Indeed, memories “can be lost forever.” Gaga thereby aestheticizes “memory loss” and upholds its potential for individual agency and boundless creativity. This perspective opens up an alternative outcome for what George Orwell’s 1984 called “the mutability of the past,” the ideological foundation of a dystopia in which any artifact of an event or person deemed inconvenient to Big Brother’s dictatorship was simply dropped into a nearby “memory hole.” “Marry the Night” is thereby the Janus-faced product of Gaga’s artistic remembrance: the Mother Monster is imagining her past self preparing a future that is now her glittering present.

Pop culture offers other instances of fungible pasts. The DC Comics graphic novel The Killing Joke (Moore and Bolland 2008) provides a sinister look at the origins of the Joker, Batman’s great nemesis. The whole attempt at revelation, however, is ultimately cast aside. While taunting Batman about his depraved past, the Joker declares, “Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!” Said to have been influenced by The Killing Joke, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) enacts this preference for imagined histories: Heath Ledger’s Joker gives his victims different accounts of how he was scarred. Here critics may step back and see a slippery slope toward a solipsism that negates the existence of any fixed, commonly shared reality. But in the hypermodern age of social media and mobile technologies, such a concern is as fruitful as discussing the merits of dial-up modems or beepers. What else are Twitter and Facebook, updated incessantly by smartphones, but opportunities to endlessly reboot one’s identity, to self-curate our past and present, to invent and perform new selves as we please?

Whether based on superheroes, revolutionaries, or rock stars, the origin myths of most legends are steeped in the narrative power of a traumatic but necessary moment that elevates the ordinary into something far greater. The murders of Bruce Wayne’s parents and Peter Parker’s uncle trigger the careers of costumed crimefighters. In authoring her own origin myth, “Marry the Night” provides a glimpse of Gaga’s past trauma but culminates in the image of her apotheosis, a red-and-blue superwoman emerging phoenix-like from the fire of her years of toil. That journey has, of course, led to her victorious present, although some have an enduring preoccupation with the ordinariness possible in her extraordinary existence. This tension is lavishly depicted in the Annie Leibovitz photo spread for “In Lady Gaga’s Wake.” She dons couture while standing in a laundromat or eating a hot dog but wears nothing but heels and sunglasses while being sketched by none other than Tony Bennett.

At the beginning of “Marry the Night,” moments after declaring that she will become a star because she has nothing left to lose, Gaga requests a bit of music while mentally disturbed patients prance and stagger around the hospital ward. The scene is reminiscent of the concluding scenes of Amadeus (1984), in which an embittered Antonio Salieri finally accepts the collapse of his own bid for stardom as he stands in the shadow of Mozart’s superior musical genius. Declaring himself to be “the patron saint of all mediocrities,” he assumes the role of champion for the deranged inmates at the asylum in which he resides. The contrast is clear. Salieri’s doomed musical career ended among quivering lunatics. Gaga’s stay in the mint-tinged ward was a mere step in a journey that led to her current place as one of the most celebrated recording artists in recent memory. Although not discussed in the Vanity Fair article, Gaga has also left a string of resentful Salieris in her wake, especially in New York. If they are DJs they do not play her music. They pretend that she does not exist, even when she sells out Madison Square Garden, when her image graces newsstands on every corner, when everyone from my students to my eighty-something Mexican grandmother is interested in what she is wearing.

Naturally, bitter detractors are as much a part of stardom as are magazine covers and red carpets. The curious development we see in “Marry the Night” is Gaga’s willingness to push aside the cloying gripes about authenticity and instead demonstrate her commitment to “show biz.” The aestheticized depiction of her trajectory from rejection and hospitalization to a glowing spot in the pop firmament has demonstrated the irrelevance of preoccupations with perceived realness. This is yet another indicator of why Gaga may appropriately be called Andy Warhol’s greatest inheritor. Films by Warhol and Paul Morrissey have become so celebrated precisely because of their conscious blurring of lines between the Superstars’ on-screen performances and off-screen personas. What was real? Consider the recently re-released biography of Superstar Joe Dallesandro (perhaps best known for the Flesh, Trash, Heat trilogy). As his biographer writes, “With the low budgets and improvisational nature of these movies, with an array of curious personalities parading before the camera often calling each other by their actual first names, as well as with the Warhol brand and the growing mythology of his Factory, the line between what was acting and what was real had been blurred to the point of obliteration” (Ferguson 2011, ii). When being interviewed, Dallesandro himself is said to have told reporters, “Whatever isn’t there, just make it up” (Ferguson 2011, 1).

I once interviewed a Warhol contemporary who expressed concern that Gaga’s stage persona had somehow eclipsed Stefani Germanotta. Definitely, I thought, just as the thirty-year old sociologist version of my self “eclipsed” the high school student version or the undergraduate activist version. I thought back to the interviewee’s comment while watching the enactment of Gaga’s honest lies in “Marry the Night.” Gaga states, “It’s sort of like my past is an unfinished painting and as the artist of that painting I must fill in all the ugly holes and make it beautiful again.” Watching Gaga apply her wet gloss to a bedazzled past revealed the best answer to the question posed by the Born This Way album. Born what way? This way, this particular version of a self that one decided to make real, a fiction that became true. It’s a challenge as much as a question. And that too lies in her wake.

Bibliography

Ferguson, Michael. Joe Dallesandro: Warhol Superstar, Underground Film Icon, Actor. Michael Ferguson, 2011.

Moore, Alan and Brian Bolland. Batman: The Killing Joke. DC Comics, 2008.

Robinson, Lisa. “In Lady Gaga’s Wake.” Vanity Fair 617, 2012.

Author Bio:

Victor P. Corona, Ph.D., (http://victorpcorona.com) is a sociologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. He received a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia and a B.A. in sociology from Yale. He lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

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Soldiering Emptiness : Inverting Crucifix

2011-12-01T21:03:00.000-08:00

By Meghan Vicks

This is the first piece in our series on "Marry the Night."

The origin, argues Maurice Blanchot, does not truly exist, for there’s always something that precedes it as a generative source. He further argues that even if the origin did exist, it would be impossible for us to comprehend or approach it without sullying and thereby destroying the origin itself: it would be irrevocably transformed and changed just by our presence, by our coming into contact with it. What Blanchot is interested in, however, is our fascination with origins in the first place, with our desire for our bare, unaccommodated selves at all. “Man at point zero,” he writes. Blanchot attributes this desire for the zero-point – the chimerical origin – as oriented not so much to the past as to the future: that is, we desire to be made anew, to refresh ourselves, to cleanse our worlds of any and all false myths and ideologies, and in so doing to spiritually and culturally start again, at zero.

It’s incredibly appropriate, therefore, when Lady Gaga tells us at the onset of the video for “Marry The Night” – her “origins mythos” video – that she loathes reality, and that the story of her origin that the video will reveal is just as much her artistic creation as it is a description of what “really” happened. “Marry The Night” isn’t about what really happened; it’s about what “really” happened.

See, when talking about “origins” or “reality,” we can no longer do so without the recourse to quotation marks (as Nabokov so famously claimed). Artistic creation (the quotes) marries reality; analogously, Gaga (the artist) marries the night. And reality is all that shit, trauma, emptiness, and horror that artistic creativity somehow makes beautiful and bearable. Sometimes I think it’s terrifying, what art has the power to do: make palatable and even beautiful real suffering – that kind of suffering that has no redemptive quality or spark of beauty when one’s enthralled in it.

When Gaga, cradled by suffering, dyes her hair in the bathtub, she’s trying to aestheticize that trauma, make it beautiful somehow. In doing so, she transforms the trauma into something redemptive, into something that’s no longer trauma. Again, when she puts on lipstick and blush in the car. When she bedazzles her denim. The hair dye, lipstick, blush, bedazzler become the artist’s brush, the writer’s pen, and Gaga becomes the artistic vision. And the trauma? It becomes the canvas, that blank space or emptiness upon which a pure potentiality of creations may come into existence.

As Gaga speaks about losing everything, and about being a “soldier to her own emptiness,” she articulates an awareness that sometimes nothingness itself can become the ultimate creative force, that even, perhaps, nothingness is absolutely necessary for artistic creation at all. You’re a soldier to your own emptiness, but emptiness allows for a kind of infinite freedom, a borderless space that allows for new things to exponentially be.

Infinite bedazzled emptiness.

So she’s turned that trauma into a creative power, into an artistic vision. And in doing so, she’s inverted the trauma, freed it from its own ontology and thereby allowed it to become something beautiful. You’re watching a video that is trauma mirrored; you’re face-to-face with your own trauma inverted. After all, you’re the one watching the mirrored reflection of Gaga’s trauma; Gaga’s mirrored trauma positions you as its spiritual hologram.

No, seriously: didn’t you notice that parts of the film were inverted (take a look at the writing on the wall)?

When I flipped the shot, I found that the wall reads this:

As we watch “Marry The Night,” we’re watching an inverted cross: Gaga has taken the trauma of her crucifix and transformed it into beauty. And what’s more traumatic than the crucifix? What’s more beautiful than its inversion?

Author Bio:

Meghan Vicks is co-editor of Gaga Stigmata, and holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature.

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The Prelude Interrogatif

2011-11-28T20:17:00.000-08:00

By Meghan Blalock

“When I look back on my life, it’s not that I don’t want to see things exactly as they happened, it’s just that I prefer to remember them in an artistic way. And truthfully the lie of it all is much more honest, because I invented it.” – Lady Gaga

When Lady Gaga first tweeted about her forthcoming video for “Marry The Night” – a song she identifies as both her favorite on Born This Way and significant in that it depicts the moment she decided to make her passion for music her lifelong partner – she referred to it as the beginning of a story she has never told us. And when, over a week ago, she released the first minute and 48 seconds of the The Prelude Pathétique, she revealed the prelude to the yet-untold Prelude.

The effect of releasing the video in layers – first as a tweet unmasking it as an untold story and then as the pre-Prelude itself – is that Gaga leaves us questioning her work in a way we haven’t done up to this point in her oeuvre. The questions we find ourselves asking now, as we await the release of the full video, and why these questions are significant, will be discussed in more detail later in this piece. Thus far, The Prelude Pathétique presents a story that questions what is real and what isn’t – and how we, not only as consumers of Gaga’s art but also as people writing our own stories, perceive the difference between reality and fantasy (if we can, indeed, perceive such a difference at all).

This inquiry is of utmost importance to Gaga and her project. By this point, she has repeatedly underscored her hybrid existence as “halfway between” these two worlds, an existence that was initally declared when she re-created herself as a half-woman, half-motorcycle on the album cover for Born This Way. The album title itself embodies this reality/fantasy dualism that is reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez’s categorical assertion that “human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves” (Love in the Time of Cholera). In the pre-Prelude, this idea of autonomous, creative re-birth reaches a zenith during the first frames, in which Gaga tells us how she creates her lie and why, as the lie is happening before our eyes.

The Prelude Pathétique opens with a shot of Gaga lying on a gurney, her hair dark and cut short, her face pallid and lifeless. The appearance of the brown hair immediately suggests that we are watching a scene from Gaga’s pre-fame past, when she was still Stefani Germanotta. We hear Gaga’s voice booming over the ghastly images, in a recording that sounds like it may have been done on her BlackBerry or laptop computer: it’s gritty, unedited, and eerily familiar, as if she were sitting next to us, watching the video and describing its contents as the reel turns (one can hear the film reel spinning in the background throughout the video). The effect is unsettling in a number of ways that highlight the omnipresent duality of reality and fantasy, truth and falsehood; Gaga has broken the fourth wall by describing her process of creating her music video. (“Those nurses? They’re wearing next season Calvin Klein. And so am I.”) We know we are watching a music video that is supposed to reveal a yet-untold story, a secret – and yet Gaga admits she has created the story of her untold story before the untold story has even been revealed. It’s not unlike sitting in a theater and watching a play based on a true story, and while the play is happening on the stage, the director’s voice booms out over the loudspeakers to share with the audience creative choices such as, “The lead actor stands here with his feet apart to embody that he feels solid and grounded. His female opposite stands far away and facing the other direction to illustrate her fear and shame.” Of course, Gaga means to unsettle us; right from the beginning, she wants us to ask, “What’s going on here?” Because, ultimately, that’s the question she is always asking herself: what’s real, and what’s fantasy?

Immediately, we understand Stefani is in an infirmary of some kind. And Gaga’s voiceover tells us the reason: “Clinical psychology tells us arguably that trauma is the ultimate killer; memories are not recycled like atoms and particles in quantum physics. They can be lost forever.” The word “trauma” is illuminating but also vague, suggesting that Stefani has been hurt in some way but keeping indeterminate the nature of this injury. More is illuminated with the line, “The truth is, back at the clinic, they only wore those funny hats to keep the blood out of their hair.” We know then that the nurses are dealing with physical injuries that may at times include blood. It’s also the first time Gaga chooses to use “truth” language, aside from her stated belief at the beginning of the film that her lie is more honest than the truth because she “invented” it. This is the moment we learn that this video is a depiction of events that “truly” happened; to do this, it paradoxically departs in some ways from how the events really unfolded. And of course, because Gaga’s self-confessed purpose is often interchanging the truth with the lie, it is tempting here to say that it’s still not really clear, even considering her linguistic choices, what “truly” happened and what is a fiction. However, I would argue that because of the peeling away of the video’s layers (which began when she announced that she was telling us an untold story), and because of her choice to break the fourth wall and thereby distinguish between what we see unfolding in the video and what she describes as the process of her creating it, we are indeed dealing with events that, at the very least, Gaga perceives as having really occurred. It is her own choice to distinguish between the untold story and her creative retelling of it that supports this position.

This is, perhaps, the only time in the course of Gaga’s project that she has openly confessed to creation as a mode of expressing a secret – meaning, before seeing the work, we know it is the telling of an “untold story.” One might argue that this is always true of Gaga’s work, and even of art in general – that art inherently depicts a story that has yet to be told. And this may be true, but it is not so common that the artist preemptively admits such a circumstance. And in Gaga’s case, she has never set up the release of a music video by saying, essentially, “I have a secret to tell, and this is it.”

The fact that she released the first part of the Prelude independent of and before the rest is also significant. The effect is that we wonder what happened to Stefani in the past that Gaga has not yet been open about but is still obviously wrestling with (“It’s sort of like my past is an unfinished painting, and as the artist of that painting, I must fill in all the ugly holes and make it beautiful again”). As such, our state of mind as an audience is completely altered – we find ourselves asking questions that we have perhaps never asked before: What has Gaga not told us about her past? How will this information shed a new light on all her prior work? It’s the very idea of her confessing to having a secret, and now wanting to reveal that secret, that intrigues us.

The image of Gaga/Stefani knocked out and being rolled around a hospital with overtones of trauma just increases this state of wanting; the idea that Stefani, (though very open about her history with drugs, alcohol and the underground party scene of NYC), experienced some sort of serious but secret trauma pre-Gaga is intriguing because it has the potential to cast a new light on her entire project. This is especially true if – as the end of the introduction suggests – this trauma was somehow self-inflicted: “That girl on the left, she ordered gummy bears and a knife a couple hours ago. They only gave her the gummy bears. I’d wish they’d only given me the gummy bears.”

This last sentence is crucial not only for its content but because of its future perfect tense – I would wish they had only given me the gummy bears. It clearly distinguishes the Gaga speaking as an omniscient third person narrator, describing not only what is happening, but also what will happen. She knows the future we’re about to watch – because she lived it in the past. This is confirmed by a recent tweet about the video: “It is so true to my life it terrifies me.” She suggests not only that she ordered a knife, but that she indeed got it, which in turn suggests some sort of self-injury. This tense change also re-inforces the argument that what we are about to see in the video is a depiction of something Gaga considers to have really happened.

Many questions remain as we move from the Prelude’s introduction to the Prelude itself. Will Gaga continue to narrate her own story as she tells a visually amplified version of it? Will the trauma revealed therein cast an entirely new light on her work? Will it re-define her artistic concept of “truth”? Most importantly: will it signal a general transition from the world of “fantasy” to the world of “reality” in her project? Or perhaps the opposite – will it be the final piece of Stefani’s puzzle, which Gaga needs to share with us to completely reject the reality she seems to so loathe?

Author Bio:

Meghan Blalock is a writer and editor living in New York City. She edits for Gotham magazine, and has written pieces for the local music blog The Rumpus, Southern Living, Gaga Stigmata, Woman’s Day, and other publications. She is also a certified vinyasa yoga teacher. Her poetry has been published in amphibi.us. Her work is viewable here and here.

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Bled Threads: Chaun Martin

2011-11-22T20:48:00.000-08:00

Gaga Stigmata: You are always so dressed up! Are you going to formal events like all the time, or do you tend to dress up wherever you go?

Chaun Martin: I would say I tend to dress up whenever I go out socially, but I definitely get “dandy” when I really step out on the town! I don’t go to formal events all the time, but when I em cee parties (www.chocolatenwine.com) or go to any type of event I make sure I’m looking my best. Looking my best usually means a suit with a tie or ascot and a nice pointy shoe.

GS: Who are you channeling, fashion-wise?

CM: I like London Mod fashion/culture, old school Rat Pack/Ocean’s Eleven attire and I love Russell Brand’s style.

GS: You, of course, remind me of the dandy – of someone from a time and (sub)culture that lived for leisure, for refined & specific pleasures. How important is leisure to you? What is a typical evening (or daytime) like for you?

CM: I had never heard of a dandy until my friend Elaine Harley introduced it to me. I love the whole “dandy” aesthetic – a person who places particular importance on physical appearance, something excellent in its class. To me it’s a lifestyle. Leisure is very important to me. I work hard to play hard! Depending on the day of the week, the evening would start with dinner and then back to the house for cocktails and getting dressed to hit the town for fun with friends, dancing and continued cocktails.

GS: How do you think your appearance affects the way others respond to you? Are there any positive or negative experiences that stand out, particularly?

CM: People almost always respond to me in a positive way. My friends often tell me they can’t wait to see what I'm going to wear to certain occasions or events. For example, this year my partner and I will attend a New Year’s Eve ball for gay women of color. I plan to wear this odd-colored velvet dinner jacket, I will have my tailor reconstruct the entire collar and add more velvet accents to it. I like to express my dandyism most of the time. I think the only downfall is my friends’ expectation that I will always be “on point,” slacks and blazers. It almost makes it uncomfortable for me to show up somewhere not dressed up!

GS: I’ve seen butch & trans friends have crises over formalwear – they can’t find anything that fits or looks right, etc. Any advice on shopping, tailoring, etc.?

CM: Tailoring is definitely the key component when translating men’s fashion onto women’s bodies. If you’re shopping in the men’s department, a woman’s body shape is not going to fit the clothes properly, so we have to make sure to get our sleeves adjusted and pants hemmed or taken in depending on the size of our breasts or hips. Women’s shoulders are also more narrow than men’s, and that often means costly work on suit jackets. It can be expensive but in the end it’s worth it, because you will have an item that fits YOUR body. Also, even though you’re “butch” don't be afraid to shop in the women’s section from time to time! You’d be surprised how well some of the items fit without compromising your masculine flair.

Elaine and I have a website www.shedandy.com. It’s a work in progress but we are trying to provide a place for butch/stud women to go and view the latest in fashion, accessories, libations etc.

GS: Give us some more advice – on fashion, love, whatever.

CM: On fashion, I’d say accessories are very important. Your ties, pocket squares, tie clips, and scarves can all take a plain shirt and pants and turn the dandy on right away!

On love, I’d say fear is pointless and love like tomorrow may never come.

GS: How many pairs of glasses do you have?

CM: I had to laugh when I saw this question. My babe says it’s over 100 pairs, but I beg to differ. Probably about 75 or so! Lol – I think I might need a glasses intervention.

Bio:

Chaun Martin is a supervisor for the City of Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety. She is 42 years old and lives in Los Angeles with her domestic partner of 6 years, Dana Moore. Chaun also bartends part-time and is the emcee for Chocolate and Wine parties. She is a workout fanatic.

Bled Threads: Constance Sherman

2011-11-09T21:55:00.000-08:00

Gaga Stigmata: When I approached you for Bled Threads, people were rushing up to get their photos taken with you – what does everyone recognize you from?

Constance Sherman: People recognize me from Bar Marmont. I host a night there every Thursday where I dress up and was the host from 1995 to 2002. Plus various other
nightclubs and events too numerous to mention!

GS: What are you wearing on a typical day?

CS: On a typical day I’m in jeans and a tee shirt.

GS: Define “drag.”

CS: Drag to me is looking like you truly desire to and are not afraid to do so!

GS: I love that when you drag, you don’t wear wigs. What’s behind this decision?

CS: I lost all my hair at seven years old due to a nervous condition called alopecia. When I started doing drag at around 24 I decided to toss the wig look because I was getting A LOT more attention bald...back to normal more or less!

GS: Who are your biggest fashion influences?

CS: My fashion influences are many from early glam rock to Marlene
Deitrich and Greta Garbo!

GS: Will you tell us about modeling for Robert Mapplethorpe?

CS: To get me to talk about Robert Mapplethorpe you’re going to have to come up with some cash!!

GS: How does it feel to be objectified?

CS: To me being objectified is my way of life and it’s just fine thank you!

Excerpt from The Ghost Network: The Disappearance and Rediscovery of Lady Gaga

2011-11-05T18:07:00.000-07:00

By Catie Disabato

January 9, 2010

As the overwhelming success of her “Bad Romance” single and music video portended another stratospherically successful year, Lady Gaga disappeared.

Gaga was gone just as we were truly getting to know her. After the premiere of her “Bad Romance” music video, amidst conflicts with her record label about her delayed second album The Fame Monster, Gaga’s following became increasingly passionate and devout. The creativity and ferocity she devoted to what would have otherwise been standard pop songs caught the attention of highbrow critics and thinkers. She insisted on her (and her fans’) non-conformity even as she sold millions of records. She put a punk rock fuck-the-man ethos into commercial, commoditized music.

Music critic Nitsuh Abebe wrote in his “Eulogy for Gaga”: “Consider instead that the greatest trick Lady Gaga has pulled — the thing that makes her a genuinely impressive pop star — is creating an atmosphere where people can legitimately feel like revolutionary all-embracing gender-queering “little monsters” by listening to one of the most popular artists in the country.”

Gaga vanished during her massive Monster Ball tour, leaving 152 tour dates left unperformed, costing her record company millions of dollars in refund and lost revenue, and disappointing thousands of fans. The loss of her presence, the abrupt end of millions of parasocial relationships, became the greatest and most public loss. “I miss her because even though I never met her I felt like she was always here for me!!!” a typical (though with a marginally greater-than-average grasp of grammar and spelling) YouTube commenter mourned. Gaga often Tweeted her exact location, providing a link to a map with a flag indicating her current position, making her physical person even more present in her fan’s realities than all other pop culture phenoms that came before her. With this kind of unparalleled exposure, the public and her fans took the brusqueness of her disappearance personally.

Gaga was scheduled to play two shows at the Chicago Theater, the heart of the ice-covered Loop theater district. Despite a wind chill of ten degrees below freezing and system-wide delays on the EL, ticket holders arrived early and in droves for the first show on January 8. Girls and boys dressed in glitter, feathers, and leotards lined up outside of will call, giggling and jostling each other in excitement. The dance floor was crowded by 5pm, with sweaty teenagers jockeying for the spots closest to the stage. The coat check was full to the brim.

The show began with a pulsating grid of neon blue lights covering the stage. Lady Gaga emerged from behind the grid and performed “Dance In The Dark,” with a team of backup dancers. When a concert-goer is used to the pop shows of artists like Britney Spears, Rihanna, and Christina Aguilera, seeing Lady Gaga perform is an aurally surreal experience. Unlike the other stars who lip-sync album cuts of their hit songs while devoting their stage energy to dancing, Gaga actually sings while she performs.

As with all of Kot’s Lady Gaga coverage, Kot spent a good portion of his preview re-examining the “phenomenon of Lady Gaga” and attempting to draw some satisfying conclusion about the nature of her appeal, while obviously flummoxed by his own appreciation of Gaga. Like a dog staring, confused, at his own reflection, Kot wrote, “Perhaps, in a long year of job loss and economic decline, America needs an oddity to gawk at like Depression-era Americas visiting Freak Shows. Gaga is no Bearded Lady, but she scratches the same cultural itch.”

After the concert, Gaga went with a small group of friends and dancers (including 27-year-old named Nicolas Berliner) to the bar at the Peninsula Hotel on the Miracle Mile. They kept the bar open until 3:00am, two hours after it’s usual closing time, after which, Gaga retired alone to her private suite.

On January 9, Gaga woke just after 9:00am and ordered a breakfast of fruit, yogurt, granola, orange juice, coffee, and the Peninsula’s signature Truffled Popcorn. Later that afternoon, Gaga decided to visit the Museum of Contemporary Art, again with a group of dancers and friends that included Nicolas Berliner, her assistant Regina Nix, and several other members of the Haus of Gaga. Although the museum was less than half a mile from the hotel, Gaga insisted on driving the sporty convertible she had rented for her 36-hour stay in Chicago. She asked her old friend and collaborator, Lady Starlight to ride shotgun. Although the ride was only five minutes, Gaga did not let the conversation topics stay shallow. She told her friend that she treasured the few minutes they were able to have together, apart from the rest of the crew, and wished they were able to spend more time alone. Lady Starlight suggested a “weekend getaway” for sometime after the tour was over. Gaga encouraged this idea.

At the MCA, Gaga had the opportunity to view pieces by Jeff Koons (including “Pink Panther,” “Rabbit,” and “Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank,”). She also signed autographs for fans and art lovers. While they walked through the galleries of the MCA, Gaga convinced her bodyguards that she would be fine driving from the museum to the venue by herself. She craved “space to think.” Her bodyguards relented and she left the museum alone.

By 5:30pm, her staff and colleagues were beginning to worry. She was late for her call time. Despite her flashy, indulgent persona, her collaborators considered her fiercely professional and unfailingly punctual. According to her Tour Manager, Kelly Applebaum, Gaga “never arrived for anything even five minutes late.” Applebaum called Gaga’s cell phone. Several of her dancers also called or sent text messages to Gaga; no one received a reply. Nix, who should have accompanied Gaga to the venue, was also M.I.A. An hour before Gaga’s set was scheduled to begin, the audience was arriving and opener Jason Derulo’s set was minutes from starting, Nix arrived at the venue, breathless from exertion, “emotionally overwhelmed,” and in possession of Gaga’s cell phone.

Gaga had left the phone with Nix at the museum. When it was nearly time to return to the Chicago Theater and Gaga failed to return to the hotel room, Nix had conducted an exhaustive search of the hotel grounds and nearby boutiques, working herself into an anxious fit. Smelling disaster, Applebaum instructed the theater manager, Lilia Greene, to speak to the audience before the second opening act, Kid Cudi. Greene informed the well-dressed throng that Gaga was suffering from food poisoning and the price of the tickets (minutes processing fees and shipping costs, if applicable) would be refunded. Applebaum immediately issued a press release, news outlets reported Gaga’s absence as a sudden illness, quoting from attending fans’ Twittered regrets as often as they quoted Applebaum’s official statements. Someone logged into Gaga’s official Twitter account, using the iPhone Twitter application, and wrote: “To all my amazing Chicago monsters. I would give anything in the world to be with you right now and not cold & sick & alone.”

A quiet search party – consisting of dancers, security personnel, Lady Starlight, Berliner, and Nix – scoured the dark and icy city. Applebaum’s staff monitored news sources and gossip sites for any genuine Gaga sightings. All of their searches found nothing, false leads at best. They wouldn’t even find her car, abandoned in a driveway in someone’s rarely used beach house near the shore of Lake Michigan, for two weeks. All of her clothes, costumes, and personal possessions were left behind at the venue and the hotel, not a single shoe or pair of underwear was missing.

Lady Gaga did not reappear the following morning.

Author Bio:

Catie Disabato is a writer living in Los Angeles. She co-created and writes for the webseries I Hate LA for Comediva.com and blogs for literature/literary culture blog Full-Stop.net. She is currently working on a novel.

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Happy Halloween from Gaga Stigmata!

2011-10-31T11:41:00.000-07:00

What is your name?: Sivan

Where are you from?: San Francisco, now living in New York

What was your experience like wearing the costume?: I am a connoisseur of costumes, and I this was one of my best and favorite ones to date. I wore the costume in New York's West Village on Halloween weekend 2010 and was stopped about every fifteen minutes and asked to have my picture taken. While one might feel self-conscious with their ass hanging out in public, Gaga wouldn't have had it any other way, and thus I had no apprehension as I rocked out with my ass out. It was empowering and one of the most fun Halloweens yet. I wore it again for San Francisco's Bay to Breakers 2011, and it was as awesome the second time as the first.

Creative Destruction and the Model : Gaga contra Gaga

2011-10-24T22:07:00.000-07:00

By Eddie McCaffray

In her own words, Lady Gaga’s most recent work has been, “a deliberate attack on the ‘idea’ of the ‘modern model’ or in my case, ‘the modern pop singer.’” This essay will explore how the short Haus of Ü music videos, her recent VMA performance as Jo Calderone, and her “Memorandum No. 4” in V Magazine have mounted this attack, how such an attack fits into Gaga’s previous work on identity, and how it adds to and pushes forward that work.

In her latest column for V Magazine, “Remodeling the Model,” Gaga suggests that being Jo Calderone in various ways (on stage, on camera, on the cover of Vogue Hommes Japan) allows her increased freedom, even the freedom to be more herself than otherwise. In a certain sense, this is not so surprising: everyone understands the freedom that comes from dressing up as someone else. You’re free to say and do outlandish, even uncharacteristic things. After all, you aren’t being yourself and everyone knows it. You’re just play-acting, or pretending, or joking around. Because you’ve been silly enough to dress as someone or something else, everything you might do or say occurs in a kind of hypothetical non-space. Expectations, promises, memories, hopes, addictions all lose their ability or right to make demands upon the self. Thus Gaga as Calderone – or, more accurately, Calderone contra Gaga – could discuss Gaga’s relationships on-stage.

Or it lets a woman, for example, get onto the cover of a men’s fashion magazine.

But this basic truism – that one is free to be someone else when pretending or impersonating – hides what Gaga’s project is actually about: her point isn’t that dressing and speaking as Calderone allows her the freedom to be someone else, but that it allows her the freedom to be herself specifically. Calderone does not spring from Gaga. He isn’t a kitchen expansion or a mask, but a model, image, or role with as powerful a claim on reality and personhood as Gaga. They’re both valid effects of a more fundamental principle. She writes: “. . . [I]n the fantasy of performance I imagined (or hoped) the world would weigh both individuals against one another as real people, not as one person playing two. Lady Gaga versus Jo Calderone, not Lady Gaga ‘as.’ That would be the intention of the process, to co-exist with an alternate version of myself – in the same universe.” Lady Gaga’s self is thus revealed to be neither Jo, nor Gaga, nor even, by implication, Stefani. Each of these is just one image, one model. The self in which they are unified exists over and above, even because of, their mutually-contradictory natures. It doesn’t proceed sequentially, hierarchically through them; rather, they radiate outwards from it.

Thus, when Gaga writes about the model, about either destroying or reworking it, she is suggesting a project that is creative and destructive at the same time. The model is a useful tool, of course. But the issue isn’t nearly so simple as just getting rid of a model or of models in general. After all, Gaga’s work has emphasized from the get-go that all identity must be artificial. You can only be something on purpose, by putting yourself together. But like most human inventions, the model as a tool also has the potential to enslave those who attempt, who need, to employ it. As Gaga writes in her article, beauty is increasingly “quantif[ied] with a visual paradigm and almost mathematical standard” – because image or model is so useful, humans have aggressively perfected its production and application. Now the iron laws of productivity and profitability threaten to abrogate the very freedom such an institution as the model – as identity itself – once offered. No longer do we use the coherence of the model to call ourselves up into some definite role, ability, discipline, or expression, but the perfected model, which by virtue of that quantified flawless optimization has obviated the need for any other possibility, demands our adherence to it as a jealous god. Means are perfected to such an extent that they have become ends, no longer serving us but being served by us.

Lady Gaga is suggesting that a reinvention of the model is necessary for us to retake control of our tool. The best way to demolish the hold that the perfected, ultimate model exerts over you is to create a very different alternative for yourself and then place it up beside whatever model(s) you already possess – it’s very important that this creative destruction isn’t about replacing what’s come before, but supplementing it. If Gaga simply assumed the Calderone persona all the time, it would only be her new jailer, not something which liberates the broader self through its conversation and confrontation with Gaga (and Germanotta). The revelations Calderone provided for Gaga and for the viewers of his 2011 VMA performance were the result of talking about Gaga, not of pretending she didn’t exist:

It was by remodeling myself into something completely foreign, and in some ways crafting the anti-pop performance, that the complexities of ‘the model’ began to unfold. For someone known as much for her image as for her music – and this has become my model – the presence of Jo in no way eradicated my spirit from the stage. I was still ever-present and, in fact, more myself than ever. Jo had a clean slate. Jo had no past or future to answer to. Jo existed only in that moment, as I chose for him to.

Part of existing as a model or persona – as we all do – involves the avoidance of acting out of character. Foiling expectations in the wrong way is something most people work hard to avoid: strong or brave people don’t want to be seen crying; tasteful people don’t want to be found liking something trashy; someone being attracted to the ‘wrong’ gender. The difficult reality is that such forbearance is necessary for the functioning of the model – of the person – as it exists today. Changing the model isn’t enough, because you’re still left with just one coherent complex of selfhood to which you can aspire – something still has to be edited out, forbidden, denied. Rather, the excavation of sedimentary expectation is accomplished in the introduction of something entirely other, which after all only remains other, new, or unconstrained to the extent that it has something to which it can oppose itself – e.g. Judas & Jesus, pop star & paparazzi, hooker & client. Gaga suggests that freedom (particularly creative, expressive freedom) exists only in the tension between two (or more) poles.

The music video for “Yoü and I,” as well as the Haus of Ü short videos, suggests this in interesting ways. Perhaps the most blatant example is that of Yüyi the mermaid in “Haus of Ü ft. Yüyi.” Here, Gaga versus (not as!) Yüyi is carried out of a trailer, through a Nebraska cornfield into a log cabin and, perhaps, into the director’s chair in which she also appears. I’d like to suggest that this represents the creative power Yüyi is able to wield by forcing herself so far from her natural environment. Bundled through the continental United States in buses by roadies and assistants, she leaves the ocean behind and struggles, flopping and thrashing, into the position of artistic and creative power. If she wasn’t so helplessly out of place, would she occupy such a position? All we know for sure is that neither of her bipedal iterations (the Bride and the Nymph) get a director’s chair!

The Bride and the Nymph also suggest the power of being who you’re not (in addition to who you are). The Bride in particular deals in shifting identities. In the short, after shedding her hat/hair combo – her veil – she becomes increasingly Calderone-like. She goes shirtless on-screen (as only a man can), throws her jacket over one shoulder, crouches, puts up the horns, and sneers. It’s important to recognize that it’s the Bride who “arrives” in Nebraska in the full-length “Yoü and I” video, enacting the signature action of the Bride – to approach on foot – to such a radical and powerful extent that her feet are left torn and bloody after walking hundreds of miles (from New York?). Only someone who isn’t already present can arrive or approach, and every bride requires, assumes, and enables a counterpart (her groom).

The Nymph, either as dream or as dreamer, also enacts a role that is intimately tied to an other of some kind. Either someone is dreaming her, or she is dreaming someone (as is suggested, perhaps, in the full-length “Yoü and I” video). In either case she remains distinct from but completed by her counterpart (the dream or the dreamer).

These works fit in with Gaga’s continuing identity project. They reiterate the idea that true selfhood is achieved in ways that may appear to be something other than fulfillment of a certain ideal: change or transformation, disguise, play-acting, and artificiality (from make-up and drag to the cyborg machinery crawling across the Bride’s face and arm) are some of the factors Gaga wants to introduce to self-expression. But Gaga’s self, and the self she encourages and calls others to achieve, is fundamentally too complex for one image. Because a single image is inherently limiting: the coherence of identity requires the suppression of whatever doesn’t fit the character in play. That’s perfectly fine; it’s even required. The problem comes when only one image – one model – is employed. Then what is meant to illuminate and serve human being becomes its prison cell. Rather, identity requires the destruction of a model, a destruction that is only truly possible by setting up another alongside that model, without throwing down or revoking it. The tension built upon the contradictory demands and promises of each image allows true and creative selfhood.

Author Bio:

Eddie McCaffray isn’t gonna write any more author bios. So don’t ask, Meghan.

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7 Sisters Flesh Dolls

2011-10-14T22:19:00.000-07:00

By Saul Zanolari

Artist Bio:

Saul Zanolari was born in Mendrisio, Switzerland in 1977. He first exhibited in 2005 in a small gallery in Milan and now has works in permanent collections in New York, London, Paris, Milan, Basel, Beijing, Shanghai and Tokyo. His subjects are stars, friends, famous drag queens, and icons of a fantastical world.

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A Religion Against Itself: Lady Gaga, God, and Love

2011-09-14T04:00:00.000-07:00

By Peter Kline

I’d like to offer a theological read of Lady Gaga’s project. But let me begin with a little about me and why I’m interested in our current queen of pop.

I’m what you’d call a “religious person.” I attend church on Sundays, I have a seminary degree, I preach and lead worship regularly at my local church as well as at the local jail, and I’m currently studying for a Ph.D. in theology. And yet, I don’t particularly like religion. In fact, I’m often rather disturbed by it – as one is often disturbed by one’s own family, I suppose. I recognize that all religious speech and action – including my own – is always only a hair’s breadth away from ideology and propaganda (and usually it just is ideology and propaganda). In our current cultural and historical moment in the West it cannot help but be this way. Once religious language and institutions lose their taken-for-granted authority – which they have in modernity – all attempts simply to carry on with either the language or the institutions necessarily take on an air of insecurity and desperation about them. (This is not to say that pre-modern religion was any less ideological, only that in modernity we have become self-conscious about the ideological nature of religion).

I say this as someone still committed to Christianity. By “Christianity” I don’t necessarily mean “the Christian religion,” although my commitment to Christianity has and will, I think, be played out amidst all the trappings of “the Christian religion.” Christianity, for me, is reducible to one claim, and my belief in the truth of this one claim is what keeps me wading through all the muck and nonsense of the Christian religion – including, again, the muck and nonsense that I myself produce along the way. The claim is this: that poor peasant from Nazareth named Jesus, executed for blasphemy, is somehow the Mystery at the heart of all things.

And so I’m constantly asking: is there any sense in which religious terms like “God,” “Jesus,” and “worship” can be categories of truthful and liberating (rather than ideological) speech and action? Which is to say, can they be rescued from “religion,” from the quest to secure ourselves against our finitude by pretending that “God” or “transcendence” or “eternity” or “the holy” is within our grasp as some identifiable bit of the world – whether it be a nation, institution, person, text, idea, or ambition?

It is for these reasons that I find myself deeply fascinated and compelled by Lady Gaga’s project – precisely as a religious person, as a theologian. The terms I just mentioned, (“God,” “Jesus,” “worship”), are terms not infrequently employed by Gaga herself. It is the way she inhabits and enacts these categories that compels me. We are often told that there is nothing really new in what Gaga is doing, especially with regard to religious themes and symbols. She is just another disgruntled post-Catholic who employs the images and tropes of religion for shock value. The standard (and by now tired) line is: she’s just doing what Madonna did.

But this is to fail to understand and appreciate Gaga’s project and the role of religion within it. She can’t be categorized or written off as a disgruntled post-Catholic who finds that the only way to deal with her religious upbringing is to profane it. This is a fundamental misreading of her art. There’s something much more subtle going on, a positive and appreciative appropriation of religious identity, but with a twist. Gaga’s performance of religious themes and identity is utterly sincere and serious. She’s not just after shock value. I’m convinced of this. The twist, though, is that this sincerity and seriousness is not entirely sincere or serious about itself.

This is the paradox and irony at the heart of Gaga’s entire project: a kind of earnest flippancy. I remember vividly one of her sermonettes at the particular Monster Ball I attended in Nashville. With a fiery conviction that would outdo any southern preacher, she proclaimed to us: “Jesus loves every fucking one of you!” And I have no doubt that she was aware of the signs being picketed about outside the arena before the show, urging “homosexuals” and other “sinners” to “repent.” Gaga assumed the role of counter-preacher, and she wasn’t kidding around. But her sermonette didn’t lead into some moralizing or tear-jerking song. It led into a raucous performance of “Boys, Boys, Boys,” as if to say, the only proper theological response to bigotry and hatred is to dance in its face to the tune of a (seemingly) vapid pop song.

It is this holding of one’s convictions firmly but of oneself lightly that is Gaga at her best. It is a posture that embraces finitude, contingency, and freedom. The problem with “convictions” and “ideas” – even and especially good and right ones, like, “Jesus loves every fucking one of you!” – is that they quickly imbue the holder of the conviction with a felt eternity and transcendence of contingency. We wield our convictions and ideas to shield us from the actuality of life, from the threats of having actually to live with and for others in all their singularity and finitude. (If I’m aware of the plight of the poor, convicted about the injustice of their lot just enough to vote for the politician who has the best ideas about how to help them, that is enough). Gaga seems to intuit something of this, which is why she holds all of her ideas and convictions (and there are a number of them) ironically and absurdly, being always ready to drop the chatter and simply sing and dance with and for her fans.

This is why the performative core of Gaga’s art is constantly undoing its own conceptual pretensions, even and especially with regard to its religious dimensions – in a way that parallels, and here is my central claim, the way in which the performative core of Christianity undoes its own religious pretensions. What is the performative core of Christianity? It’s that mutilated blasphemer dying on a Roman device of torture and execution. What is the performative core of Gaga’s art? It’s that bloodied pop-star hanging dead before the murderous gaze of the MTV audience at the 2009 VMAs. This, I submit, is the central religious image in her entire oeuvre – a figure we’d like to make capital off of (whether religious or cultural), but who instead confronts us with our own violence, and in doing so calls us to freedom.

Jesus was put to death by the religious and political authorities of his day. Gaga was put to death by the cultural authorities of our day. Both died at the hands of those trained in the arts of death: the former at the hands of Roman soldiers; the latter at the hands of the paparazzi. Both walked straight into centers of cultural power to face their deaths: Jesus into Jerusalem, Gaga into Los Angeles. Both submitted to the violence of the powers freely and intentionally. Jesus: “He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed…” (Mark 8:31). Gaga: “I imagine that my pop career could be quite long and people will wonder for a very long time what my demise will look like, so why don't we show them?”

Notice just what this means for how we should understand Gaga’s art: it all takes place under the shadow of its already enacted demise. But this is a demise that she herself has enacted as art. Just here is the subversive or “salvific” move of her entire project. By enacting her own death, by submitting to the death-gaze of the pop-media world and turning it into her own art, she has taken the power of death out of their hands. She has exposed their violence, just thereby subverting it. Her death opens a space of freedom for her art and for her fans, creating space for all those “little monsters” who otherwise would be excluded and ignored by the very cultural powers that Gaga allows to crush her. By death she has overcome death.

This is exactly how the New Testament understands the death of Jesus – just replace “art” with “love,” and “little monsters” with “sinners.” “God shows God’s love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). “No one takes [my life] from me,” says Jesus, “but I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10: 18). “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). The apostle Paul taught that Jesus’ death “disarmed the rulers and authorities by putting them to open shame” (Colossians 2:15). Jesus’ death shames the very powers that enact his death, because by turning their violence into his own act of love, he turns their violence against itself. The power of violence is enfolded within his act of love and is thereby rendered impotent and mute. “I’ll just never forget when I spoke with MTV for the first time and I explained the whole performance with them, and I remember the second that I finished, it was crickets.” Gaga’s art makes mute the power that is MTV, and out of this silence emerges the freedom of her music, just as the silence of Holy Saturday gives way to the new song of Easter Sunday.

What I’m claiming is that Lady Gaga is a “parable” of the good news about Jesus I believe in. A parable is an extended metaphor, an indirect enactment or proclamation of some truth. Jesus himself told lots of parables about “the kingdom of God,” and part of what it means to believe that Jesus is not confined to the past, that somehow he continues to be present to us, is that he continues to enact parables among us – even and especially outside of “church,” outside of “religion.” Anywhere that genuine human freedom and liberation is happening, anywhere that the powers are being shamed, there Jesus is alive and at work.

This of course cannot be proven; it can only be believed. But as Gaga herself is wont to say, freedom is living halfway between fantasy and reality, believing in a liberation that cannot be seen or even thought, but that can only be lived, against all odds. Her art, she says again and again, requires a massive faith; it is, she tells us in her recent VMA promo, a “huge lie,” meaning that it is true only in the actual doing of it. “I’m a free bitch” is a not a propositional statement meant to correspond to some state of affairs in the world as we know it. It is a cry of hope, an absurd leap into an impossible possibility. Reflecting on her HBO Special performance at Madison Square Garden, she says, “I look out into that crowd and I’m like, when the fuck did this happen? How did this happen? Who created this? Because I didn’t create this, I for sure didn’t. It’s God. It’s for sure Jesus. It ain’t me because I’m not ridiculous to think for a second that I’m that powerful.”

What exactly did Jesus do? Make her rich and successful? No, not that. Right before saying “It’s for sure Jesus,” Gaga says, “My faith in my creativity and artistry has nothing to do with making it, because we kinda had already made it, right? I mean, when we were playing for nothing downtown, it was still like we’d made it, we still felt like we were superstars.” What she is talking about here is a freedom for creativity and art independent of the powers, independent of the pop-machine. What is astonishing to her, what to her can only be received as a gift from God, is that she has been given to share this freedom for creativity with so many fans. “Little monsters…they are the truth. They are my reason for everything.” Her art has turned into a work of love, and that is a transfiguration no power in this world can produce. “It’s for sure Jesus.”

It is here where Gaga is most intensely religious, invoking Jesus as the driving force behind her art. And yet it is here where religion undoes itself, refusing to be a border or gate-keeper of “the holy,” and instead becoming a total abandonment to the freedom of love. “This is my chance to release / And be brave for you…Tonight I will return / The fame and riches earned / With you I’d watch them all be burned.” Gaga once described her album Born This Way as “bad kids going to church.” That album, we might say, is at its core a sermon about the prodigal generosity of God that is no respecter of religion. “It doesn’t matter if you love him / or capital H-I-M /….God makes no mistakes.” “God,” accordingly, is not some Big Other who demands our servile obedience, but simply and sheerly the Freedom to love every other. “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born [this way] of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:7-8). That dead pop-star hanging in front the 2009 VMA audience just might be, for those who have ears to hear, an absurd witness to such love.

Let me conclude by citing one of Gaga’s own prayers. This comes from one of the previews to her HBO Special she released a few weeks prior to the special’s airing. In it, she is getting ready for her Madison Square Garden debut, struggling to make sense of it all. After an intense moment of vulnerability about her abiding insecurity, she offers the following:

“Let’s say our own prayer. Dear Lord, thank you so much for the blessings of all of my friends and my family. And thank you for all of the amazing screaming fans that are here tonight. Dear Lord please give me strength to be a winner for all of them and not for myself. Dear Lord remind me to empower not myself, but to empower those around me, because that is my gift. My gift is not self-worship, but my gift is the worship of others. So please help me to be strong, and please help me to know my own strength. Please help me to be brave, Lord. Dear God, give me courage. Do not let me give into those feelings. Do not let me give into my own insecurities. Allow me to walk in your light. Allow me to live and breathe and sing and dance for all the dancers on that stage, for the band, for the music, and for you. Amen.”

In the holy moment following the prayer, she turns and says, “Now I got some shit to do.”

Bibliography

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1669406/lady-gaga-video-music-awards-performance.jhtml

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZScnfH7vxE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNUiDMUrBw4

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1653302/lady-gaga-release-first-born-this-way-single-february.jhtml

Lady Gaga, “The Queen,” Born This Way, Interscope, 2011.

Lady Gaga, “Born This Way,” Born This Way, Interscope, 2011.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXYpDC9qecs

Author Bio:

Peter Kline is a doctoral candidate in theological studies at Vanderbilt University. He ministers to prisoners in Nashville.

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HOUNDSTOOTH FAME IS TOO GREASY FOR GLITTER : GAGA AS THE GUTTERDRUG : FAME & THE ANAGIRLS LIMITED $$$ ENGAGEMENT! : A RETROSPECTIVE OF PRODUCTION-VALUE FASHION; OR, AN ANALOGY INVOLVING GLITTER, VOMIT, AND PAIN.

2011-09-12T04:00:00.000-07:00

By Carina Finn

the details scream over-privileged teen aristocracy, the jamaican-flag knits & houndstooth nails. everyone needs some low-culture kitsch in their closet; if you’re under 25 & “legit” you have to have it.

“POP MUSIC WILL NEVER BE LOWBROW”

pop music makes its own language & the language is made of refrains. the repetition of the hook which is a mask all monsters wear is a loop of constant passwords. if the passwords do not unlock value that is to say style or worth then the password is of little consequence and is repeated endlessly (see: rebecca black’s FRIDAY or The Black Eyed Peas’ I GOTTA FEELING).

In the original video version of FRIDAY, the illusion of style is chemically reproduced; the image is screenprinted in toxic ink, the inhabitants of the video are uncannily animated mannequins produced by the same kinds of machines that produce pop with a high production-value. because the economy of pop music is dictated by either cost or exclusivity, rebecca black’s video has a low production-value because its language is not exclusive and its materials are not costly.

In this hipster cover of FRIDAY, the password does not acquire its referent-value by means of repetition, but by its imitation of an exclusivity that acquires its value via a semantic disjunction. the components of the image projected in this video have randomly assigned values, and the viewer must work harder to establish objective correlative indicated by the combination of coke-bottle glasses, tie-dye, harmonica descants, college sweatshirts, tween-girl pop lyrics, etc.

Contrast these with THE FAME PART ONE, in which the password, or refrain, is not repeatedly endlessly – it is not even complete. A constant loop of pop creates a language that is minor and exclusive and therefore raises its value. The language can exist because it steals from itself, makes a hinge of its own parts.

EITHER A MINOR LANGUAGE CONNECTS TO MINOR ISSUES, THEREBY PRODUCING PARTICULAR RESULTS, OR IT REMAINS ISOLATED, VEGETATES, TURNS BACK ON ITSELF AND PRODUCES NOTHING

“I do not think that is an elitist attitude” [i]

THE POWER-VALUE OF GAGA is imitation, intimidation. the fashion is a repetition of the antithesis of such, such that the imitators become the gods themselves, the paradigm like a virus rather than a symptom. in this way, gaga’s power, which is desire (defined by the fact that her acolytes wear her style like masks), infects her public with military tactics. she demands that they comply they acquiesce it’s their desire to be loved by their object, so they make of their bodies, idols.

IDOLATRY IS AN ESCAPE FROM FORMAL REDUNDANCY

the repetition of a system : ESCAPES FROM POWER FORMATIONS. DESIRE IS NOT INFORMED, INFORMING; IT IS NOT INFORMATION OR CONTENT. in which case is the system by which the same is conveyed – form rather than information, the matrix which defines a quality of GAGA-NESS, into which a given agent might input the components allowed by their own economy and press it through the mesh. the result is a disposable fabric which can be mass-produced, becomes weaker with every wear, shifts the status of desirability of the wearer from a concentrated fabric with a high production-value to one which has been stretched to a level of transparency due to a scarcity of luxurious resources; or, DESIRE IS NOT SOMETHING THAT DEFORMS BUT THAT DISCONNECTS, CHANGES, MODIFIES, ORGANIZES OTHER FORMS, AND THEN ABANDONS THEM[ii] –

or, fashion is a collective constant present: In The Fashion System, Barthes says that Fashion Time is “festival time,” that “festivity is tyrannical, it conquers time” (Barthes, 250). Fashion Time is time and its afterlife, the moment of the outfit & its temporal death, an undeath that endlessly cycles through the collective consciousness as Fashion continues to infect itself with a constant rebirth. Fashion Time is of and outside of time but never in Time.[iii]

time in THE FAME is a fantasy of form. the action of being fashionable is urgent; there is an object of some value that must be acquired immediately. there is a sale – this implies rarity, as this particular value is only available for a limited amount of time. to turn value into an object is to commodify the insubstantial substance à STYLE.

the value of the individual song is cut so the value becomes the conglomerate, the collective. the soundtrack changes songs like outfits. every hook is on sale there is a small tear of entrance. the tear is a needle-hole, or a lesion, which allows the contamination of the body by the drug machine.

teenagers ripping apart sales GIVE ME MY DISCOSTICK just dance wearing sunglasses breaking glass with glittery scepters and taking taking taking and wearing black and finding the one thing they want which has value only because they want it; or,

TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGY is I WANT THAT machine.

“We must begin by enlarging the definition of drugs” (Felix Guattari, MACHINIC JUNKIES).

we must acknowledge FASHION-AS-DRUG. we must look to the origin of the term HEROIN-CHIC, in which the body that seeks to imitate purity of form for the sake of fashion must suffer by entering into the physical language of fashion, which requires a salve, a rupture of “reality,” an injection :

everything that contributes to provide a sensation of belonging to something, of being somewhere, along with the sensation of forgetting oneself, are ‘drugs’[iv]

what is the value of the sick life, or the life of the sickness, the natural development of disease?

the fashion junkie, the heroin-chic, the organless body, the anoretic, the reverent. these things have value they are LIMITEDTIMEONLY! this is because they are going to die, soon. their extremity, their excessive withholding of “nutrition” in favor of “luxury”, is fatal. the fact that it is fatal is part of its appeal. a drug can kill you; that’s why it’s fun. we want to be saved, we want absolution, we want to die.

“this ‘medicine,’ this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison, already introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence”[v]

the teenagers take to the streets they are starving. they take bites of things with value they spit it out they taste like poison. the ultimate fame is adoring degradation.

the rush of glitter-vomit is a drug. it feels good to be watched, adored, sacrificed. the point is to adore oneself to the point of destruction. the point is an absolute quality of vanity. to love the imitation so much so it’s ”true”. to lose oneself in the materials of oneself, to be constantly breaking, combusting, on purpose. to keep making ruptures, to keep reinventing, to keep up with the economy one must constantly be emptying. becoming-nothing is style; fashion is waste. the wasteless are the totally wasted, they break.

THE RESIDUAL CRYSTALS THAT CONSTITUTE MACHINIC DOPE CAN PENETRATE THE ENTIRE PLANET, REANIMATE AND RELAUNCH IT[vi]

in order to be reborn one must die. there has to be an ultimate excess; the body must first be emptied, then filled, then emptied and filled again, must be pressed & pressed many times through the mesh of reality to become unreal, to transcend the organic, to achieve fame – to not need. to exist in a constant revolution-state of teen which has value because it is always-rare; or, the becoming-body is always limited-edition.

inside of the temporality of fame time is malleable, shifts, condensed and stretches, is defined by a quantity of light; or, glitter. the light burns holes in the fabric, makes lesions, or sites of affliction, harbors for drugs. the need of the constant-present is continuous destruction, never-ending consumption of the materials of construction. there has to be a loop. there has to be a digesting, a regression. one gets a bit obsessed with the process of crafting the body such that value is a goal rather than an assignation, an alienated, all-encompassing sign with no signification other than fame.

in this case, fame forms an absolute-zero, attainable only when the subject has transcended substance, become a specter of reflection, smashed glitter, vain annihilation.

[i] Felix Guattari, Soft Subversions: I AM AN IDEA THIEF p. 21

[ii] Some of the above CAPITALISED text is from Guattari, Soft Subversions: The Adolescent Revolution, p. 156

[iii] The italicized text is from my talk, THE COLLECTIVE FASHION CONSCIOUSNESS, presented at the IU Collections and Collaborations Conference in Spring 2010 . The full text is linked here: http://ladyblogblah.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/the-collective-consciousness-look-at-my-outfit-we%E2%80%99re-at-war/

[iv] Guattari, Machinic Junkies, p. 158

[v] Derrida, “Dissemination,” p.1845

[vi] Guattari, Soft Subversions: Machinic Junkies p. 161

Author Bio:

Carina Finn is an MFA student at the University of Notre Dame. Her chapbook, I HEART MARLON BRANDO, was recently released by Wheelchair Party, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in SUPERMACHINE, TYPO, boo!, Alice Blue, CutBank, Seven Corners, and elsewhere. She has won two Academy of American Poets prizes and been nominated for a Pushcart. Her plays have been performed at Notre Dame and The Bowery Poetry Club.

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Bled Threads: Drew Bird

2011-09-10T20:20:00.000-07:00

GS: How long have you been designing clothes for yourself and others?

DB: I think it all started when I was 10. I used to dress up my girlfriends in 50s cocktail dresses. We would all go to the park and pretend we were fairies. Around that time I was the first one to order a hairpiece out of a magazine and wear it to school. Of course I tired of wearing hair when I started designing hats.

GS: Tell us about one of your favorite projects/shows that you've worked on.

DB: I think my favorite is the one I am working on right now – a fashion reality show with a conscious attitude, which re-establishes a sense of self-esteem in people who have been forgotten. Fashion is a self-expression. I think the magazines forget to promote this. We each take what we know of ourselves and express it or hide it somehow through what we wear. My other favorite project is getting my web store up and running.

GS: Describe your getting-dressed process.

DB: It starts with my mood I suppose, which is generally very positive. I do not face a moment without conscious thought of how I want to inspire the world. I would never step out of the house without preparing myself for the incredible encounters I face every day. Currently I live in Tepoztlan, a small town in Mexico where the people are influenced by the Mayan culture. Many of the teens in the town ask me for advice on every subject from their personal self-expression to how I maintain my level of happiness.

GS: Who are your fashion heroes/influences?

DB: Love the couture of Alexander McQueen, the boldness of Cher, the playfulness of Victorian circus personas, and the idea of futuristic flight attendants.

GS: Do you have a fashion philosophy you can bestow upon us?

DB: Look in the mirror and make sure you like what you see. Be your own truth not someone else’s. If you are faking it other people will let you know.

GS: How do you think your fabulousness affects your experience of being/interacting in the world?

DB: Well.... it is rare when someone will say no to my face. At the airport they never ask me to take off my hat. I think of my hats as hair and so they see them that way as well. Besides, I travel so much they know me by name.

GS: How does it feel to be objectified?

DB: I never think of it because I am too busy just being. If someone is staring I rarely notice, and if I do, I love to say hi, and find out what is on their mind.

Bio:

Drew Bird’s first exposure to the theatre was through her grandmother who would pack her up and take her to see her parents perform in high school musicals. Later, Drew studied theatre at the University of Wisconsin, where she formed her first theatre group, performing at small theaters throughout Wisconsin.

In NYC, Drew started to film her own shorts, including Pillar Saints and The Janitor. She applied to The American Film institute, got in, and relocated to Los Angeles. She now lives in Tepoztlan , Mexico. Her goal currently is to direct her first feature. You can enter Drew’s Hatmosphere at http://www.drewbird.com/.

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WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER DONATING TO GAGA STIGMATA

2011-09-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

"I will never waste your damned time or your money."

-Lady Gaga

Gaga Stigmata is entering a time when, in the midst of juggling multiple jobs to pay the rent, writing our dissertations, making performance art and poems, falling in love, and living life, we will be writing and organizing the Gaga Stigmata book. We will be doing this for no pay, in addition to running the journal for no pay, all the while continuing to provide you with immediate, in-depth analyses of Gaga's latest videos and performances, such as our recent series on Gaga's "You&I" video, and her forthcoming VMA performance. Remember our exciting roundtable discussion about the meat dress last year?

Did I mention we are falling in love with Gaga all over again as we work on this book?

We've also been expanding the site, bringing exciting new writers and artists for our Haus of Stigmata team, and Samantha Cohen as our fantastic and tireless new Creative Editor. None of our writers are paid at this time, and Meghan and I have worked countless hours on the site for free since its inception. Our journal will be featured in Yale's The American Scholar Magazine this fall, and recently Meghan and I were interviewed for Spex, a German pop culture magazine. We offered you the full-text of the interview, translated, here on Gaga Stigmata. I worked on our co-written answers to the Spex interview from my English 100 classroom in Pasadena, while my students took an in-class exam, as that was literally the only time I had free that week to do it.

As we continue to work hard to be a part of the cultural evolution for art, criticism, and pop culture that both Gaga Stigmata and Gaga herself stand for, would you please consider donating to the site that moves at the speed of pop? It takes a lot of time and energy to move at this speed - we need your help to be able to continue the revolution.

Thank you,

Kate Durbin
Founding Editor, Gaga Stigmata

Jo Calderone Performs at the 2011 VMAs! Let's make a discussion, Stigmata readers!

2011-08-28T20:39:00.000-07:00

We're still gathering our thoughts on Jo Calderone's performance (and, Lady Gaga's performed absence) from tonight's VMAs. While we're crafting our thoughts into mature essays, we're hoping you'll share with us your reactions and preliminary ideas regarding tonight's performance. Let's make another amazing discussion, Stigmata readers!

Topics to consider:

Jo Calderone accepts award for Best Female Video; highlights the idea that Lady Gaga is not there to accept the award.
Jo Calderone, speaking about Lady Gaga: "She left me!"
Jo Calderone, speaking about Lady Gaga: "I want her to be real!"
Jo Calderone, speaking about himself: "How am I supposed to shine?"
Jo Calderone, speaking about himself: "I gotta get in there."
Jo Calderone, wearing Brooks Brothers
This performance, in relationship to the Jo Calderone narrative so far (see Cheryl Helm's first piece on Jo Calderone, as well as Roland Betancourt's work)
Judith Butler, performativity
Politics and aesthetics of drag
Jo Calderone and Drug Addiction

xoxo

Meghan Vicks

Co-Editor, Gaga Stigmata