The Pasteboard Mask: Our Lady Leviathan

By Laurence Ross

This is the fifth piece in our series on the video for “The Edge of Glory.” Click here for the first piece, here for the second, here for the third, & here for the fourth..

Your tail will then split in two and shrink into what human beings call pretty legs. But it will hurt.

– the Sea Witch

“Well, I would kill for fashion.”

– Lady Gaga

“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks … Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough … Talk to me not of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

– Ahab

There are two music videos for Lady Gaga’s newest single, “The Edge of Glory”: the one that exists and the one that does not. This is not exactly a lamentation for a reality that could have been. More so, this is a Borgesian analysis, a deconstruction of the imagined work, an essay at assaying the untaken path in the garden of forking paths.

The First (Second) Version, Which Exists:

If the aesthetic of “The Edge of Glory” is more reminiscent of MGM studios than of New York, it is for good reason – the video was not shot in New York. Moreover, there seems to be little attempt at making this set feel like New York. In what reality is there a street in New York (much less one with a burning building) that goes unpopulated for more than five minutes? Even as Gene Kelly sings and dances in the (artificial) street in the (artificial) rain, there are passersby, and Gaga, in taking a spin around the lamppost, is undoubtedly echoing this performance.

Perhaps that MGM context is the context in which this video should reside, the context in which we should approach our appreciations, lamentations, and critiques. Gaga, as always, is delivering a performance. She is on a set, a set whose artifice is purposely showing its seams at every edge. Gaga emphasizes this artifice, this edge, from the very first shot of the video: her hand emerges from behind the edge of the street-corner building, an edge we cannot see beyond. The second shot? Gaga’s hand running along the edge of an open window frame, an open window that leads into a room in which we can see nothing.

The antiquated and stark aesthetic of this music video – especially when compared to the super-saturated confections Gaga has been feeding her little monsters – seems to have caused a wide-spread reaction of being served a stalk of broccoli for dessert. But a music video made with the aesthetics of another time, (let’s say for example, since everyone is saying it anyway, the 80s), means something much different when the video is produced in 2011 rather than, well, the 80s. The video is, perhaps, less so an homage, and more so a new thought. The video wears the mask of antiquity, putting forward the question, what (if anything) is behind the mask? After all, we are looking at a stage set, the mask of a building, a building that is simply a façade, a shadow, an imitation of the real life thing.

The Second (First) Version, Which Does Not Exist:

Of that which does not exist, we have shadows, we have ghosts, we have specters. We have been the spectators of a handful of live performances of “The Edge of Glory” that complicate the existent video, creating a labyrinth of imagery. On “Le Grand Journal” (15 June, 2011), Gaga is literally spun around toward the crowd, revealing Lady Gaga-as-mermaid. She is half human/half fish. She is, from one aspect, a monstrous mutation. From another aspect, she is beautiful, born that way. And from yet another aspect, she is both, simultaneously. Your fish tail, which we find so beautiful, looks hideous to people on earth. Lady Gaga-as-mermaid is a paradox. And if Gaga is consistently anything at all, she is a paradox. Here is her stage, her performance with all the layered, mirrored complexities we expect Gaga to be continually birthing.

Lady Gaga-as-mermaid is out of water; she is out of her natural habitat. The mermaid is attracted to the surface world as Gaga, in “The Edge of Glory,” is attracted to the Other world, the world on the other side of that edge, whatever that world might be (be it death or simply the other side of the window, the turn around the street corner). Lady Gaga-as-mermaid needs a mask to breathe in this Other world, yet seems unwilling to actually use it. She seems committed to a type of death, a voluntary drowning in air, as she momentarily stares at and sings to the device that could give her life, give her breath, before discarding it. Or, conversely, the mask is a necessary device that facilitates her surgery. The mask is an anesthetic mask, one that will allow her to cross the line from water to land, from tail to legs, from one side of the water to the other, one that will allow her to cross the edge that is the water’s surface. And Gaga sings with eyes half-mast, already in a state of sedation. There are the doctors/angels dressed in white and aquatically moving at the foot of the operating table, offering masks up to Gaga – offerings of life and/or death, offering the paradox that one must die in order to live.

This performance contains many of the elements that exist in the nonexistent video, a video (not) directed by Joseph Kahn. Mermaids, dancing doctors, the menacing tray of surgical instruments, the metallic operating table. The aquamarine wig – a color that simultaneously conjures images of the ocean and of hospital scrubs. We watch (or would watch) this spectacle as the captivated audience seated in the amphitheater of a surgical concert/Sea World show with the captive creature (the captive Gaga) as its centerpiece. We watch this performance from our seats, spectators hungry for spectacle, our bags of candy in hand, and we are tickled pink or blue or maybe both.

The Duality/Singularity of Gaga:

The existent version of the “The Edge of Glory” video is not without its complexities. The outfit/costume Lady Gaga wears throughout the entire video is a piece by Versace. Versace’s logo, the (disembodied) head of Medusa, adorns the outfit/costume. The Medusas are layered: one Medusa strung on a necklace and hanging free as an ornament, the other tightly affixed to Gaga’s throat on a choker. And the old woman clamped eight big oysters onto the princess’s tail to show her high rank. “Ow! That really hurts,” said the little mermaid. “Yes, beauty has its price,” the grandmother replied. Versace’s logo is often encircled in a wreath and represented as a coin. And as with any coin, there are two sides, one edge, and the viewer can only view one side at a time. To see the one side is to give up the other.

The box Gaga has painted on her cheek as a beauty mark signifies a container, a confinement, though this box is not filled in. The box is an open box, an open window of sorts, a third eye (as we have seen before in the “Born This Way” video). The box is simultaneously a symbol of constriction (a prison, a coffin, a vagina) and of freedom (an open space, a gateway to the soul, a vagina).

Medusa herself embodies a feminine paradox. She is a powerful, allegedly beautiful figure; though, if she is imbued with the desire to be with a man (as Gaga’s lyrics to the song are imbued), that desire would be unquenchable in her current, monstrous form. Any man that gazed upon her would turn to stone. Her one consolation was sitting in her little garden, with her arms wrapped around the beautiful marble statue. Medusa’s power is simultaneously a curse, her hair producing loneliness and amplifying longing. Medusa’s hair constitutes her (dual) identity. “I am my hair, I am my hair,” sings Gaga. “I’m the spirit of my hair, it’s all the glory that I bare.” And if Gaga is her hair and Gaga’s hair is conceived as all her glory, then that glory (identity) must be two-toned, two-toned as the half-black-half-white hair she bares throughout the existent video.

And though there is only one set in the existent version of “The Edge of Glory,” there are actually two Gagas: the Gaga on the fire escape and the Gaga on the street. The Gaga on the fire escape seems reluctant to escape the burning room she emerges from – and in fact, does not, first climbing up the ladder of the fire escape rather than down, and then re-entering the burning room at the video’s close. Meanwhile, the Gaga on the street is supposedly removed from the danger of the flames behind her. Both Gagas are backlit by red light (“fame hooker, prostitute wench,” “it isn’t hell if everybody knows my name tonight”), though the Gaga of the fire escape seems content to dance with the (artificial) building while the Gaga of the street kisses the very (artificial) street she walks on. Both Gagas seem to be egging the viewer on, beckoning the viewer to follow (and indeed, the viewer/camera does follow).

Then there are the lyrics of the song itself, which present two conflicting sides/stories to reconcile. Or perhaps not to reconcile, but to co-exist. There is the story of the song’s origin (the death of Lady Gaga’s grandfather) that Gaga delivered during her Google interview. And then there is the narrative that is most explicit in her performance on American Idol (25 May, 2011): a story of two lovers, which, if the lyrics are interpreted from a certain perspective, transforms the song into a type of murder ballad. Gaga sings, “Another shot before we kiss the other side / I’m on the edge of something final we call life tonight.” The shot being either (or both) the shots of tequila that Gaga and her father drank in the wake of her grandfather’s death, or the shots of a double-suicide (the needled syringes of a couple of Darvon cocktails, or Gaga and her lover falling together from the edge of the crag). Both videos, the existent and the non-existent, seem to trace the narrative of the lover and the idea of wanting to follow someone into death, of giving up one’s life in its current form to be with another, and of (a type of) suicide. Death is present, by revolver or le petite mort – take your pick. Or pick both. But whichever you pick, death in this way, from a Christian perspective, is noted as a sin (“I’ll be dancing in the flames tonight”).

Think of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel, a poem in which a woman in heaven presses herself against the very edge of the rampart, the golden bars, in longing for her lover who is still stuck on Earth. She is unsatisfied with a heaven where her lover is absent; she wants, “Only to live as once on earth / With Love – only to be, / As then awhile, forever now, / Together, I and he” (lines 128-132). This is a type of love Rossetti recognized as pride, (granted, pride in one’s love, but pride nonetheless), and pride is the sin of Lucifer, the sin that is the origin of hell. Love and sin, for Rossetti and for Gaga, become fused into one desire, one action. Gaga then muses, “It isn’t hell if everybody knows my name tonight,” implying another form of prideful love: self-love. You might call it vanity. But is loving one’s self such a terrible thing? In “Born This Way,” Gaga sings, “There’s nothing wrong with loving who you are,” and we are left with yet another paradox: love as sin.

Guillotining Gaga:

There is one other performance of “The Edge of Glory” to consider: the guillotine-lined stage of Germany’s Next Top Model (9 June, 2011). The entire performance begins with a Gaga in shadow, a ghost-Gaga (“Scheiße”), then transitions into a dualistic-Gaga, Gaga at the piano (“Born This Way”) looking at herself in the mirror (the boudoir, the vanity), and then she walks through the three guillotines of sex, money, and vanity (“The Edge of Glory”). Beneath the guillotine in which she is finally beheaded (the one labeled vanity), she lays back in a facsimile of a hair salon’s shampoo chair, as if she is getting her hair cut/washed/altered/styled (a creative act, an act of life in spite of death, “that I’ll die living just as free as my hair”) instead of suffering an execution, a beheading, a death in the same vein as Medusa. The little mermaid was also beheaded, not in Hans Christian Anderson’s fiction but in our own reality. The statue of the little mermaid that resides in Copenhagen has had its head sawn off twice, a statue that is already a reproduction of the original, a copy, an artifice that can be continually replicated and recast. And of course, through Gaga’s execution, Gaga does not die, but instead survives. The little mermaid drank the bitter, fiery potion, and it felt to her as if a double-edged sword was passing through her delicate body. She fainted and fell down as if dead. Gaga executes yet another birth. There again are two heads: the old head and the new head, the real head and the false head. “Beauty is a lie!” Gaga screams, baring the severed, false head for all to see. There is, once again, Gaga after Gaga, Gaga bearing Gaga, Gaga both employing and exposing artifice as the means of her identity/hair/art/fame/act/reality.

Similarly, at the end of the existent music video, the final shot is of Gaga’s head in reverse, hanging upside down, loose and swaying, before she rights herself again and crosses over the threshold of the window frame.

“I’m on the edge of something final we call life tonight,” she sings. But what is on the other side of the edge? Now you mustn’t think for a moment that there is nothing but bare, white sand down there. Oh, no! The most wondrous trees and plants grow at the bottom of the sea, with stalks and leaves so supple that they stir with life at the slightest ripple in the water. Gaga still stands after the fall of the guillotine, still baring her hair, and bearing another Gaga in the process. Perhaps the other side of life is not death, but life. Perhaps the two sides of a coin are the same. Perhaps there are double-headed coins (Versace). Perhaps the tail is an illusion. Perhaps the mermaid, in this reality, does not exist.

Note: The italicized portions of the text are lines taken from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.

Bibliography:

Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Little Mermaid.” The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen. Ed. Maria Tatar. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2008. Print.

Bain, Becky. “‘American Idol’ Finale: We Judge The Performances.” Idolator. 26 May 2011. Web. 19 June 2011.

Bain, Becky. “Lady Gaga Almost Loses Her Head On ‘Germany’s Next Top Model.’” Idolator. 9 June 2011. Web. 19 June 2011.

Bain, Becky. “Lady Gaga Is A Little Mermaid On ‘Le Grand Jounal.’” Idolator. 15 June 2011. Web. 19 June 2011.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 2007. Print.

Born This Way. Dir. Nick Knight and Lady Gaga. Perf. Lady Gaga. 2011. Film.

Daw, Robbie. “Review Revue: Critics React To Lady Gaga’s ‘Edge of Glory” Video.” Idolator. 17 June 2011. Web. 19 June 2011.

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

Lady Gaga. “Hair.” Born This Way. Interscope Records, 2011. CD.

Lady Gaga. “Judas.” Born This Way. Interscope Records, 2011. CD.

Lady Gaga. “The Edge of Glory.” Born This Way. Interscope Records, 2011. CD.

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

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. “The Blessed Damozel.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Vol. E. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2006. 1446. Print.

The Edge of Glory. Dir. Lady Gaga. Perf. Lady Gaga. 2011. Film.

The Edge of Glory. (Not) Dir. Joseph Kahn and Lady Gaga. (Not) Perf. Lady Gaga. (Not) 2011. (Non-existent) Film.

Wieselman, Jarett. “What went wrong with Gaga’s ‘Edge of Glory’ video?” New York Post. 17 June 2011. Web. 19 June 2011.

Writer 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, Bluestem, and elsewhere. He has recently completed a novel, Also, I’m Dying, in which characters deliver performances of crisis, education, anarchy, vanity, husband, wife, child, and alcoholism, among other things.

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Betrayal/Forgiveness

By Eddie McCaffray

The following piece is the second in our series on “Judas.” For the first piece, click here.

This essay examines four dualities surrounding “Judas” the song and Judas the video: (1) Gaga’s equation of forgiveness and betrayal in a recent interview, (2) the wordplay of “Biblical sense” and (3) of “conjugal sense” in the bridge verse of the song, and finally (4) that of Judas/Jesus themselves. What I suspect is interesting about each of these dualities is that, in the process of doubling or mirroring that takes place between the opposing poles, the emphasis is on the collapse of the duality into one (ambiguous?) unity. Though doubles may often operate as diametrically-opposed principles-in-conflict, or provide a better understanding of two concepts/characters through contrast, the doubles in Gaga’s “Judas” more often deal in reduction to a single principle or character, and the ensuing ambiguity of opposites becoming one and the same.

First, what of Gaga’s statement that betrayal and forgiveness “go hand in hand.” In the context of “Judas,” how are these two concepts, these two actions, similar, connected, even the same? How might this be understood? Betrayal can be thought of as abandoning or turning against a principle or person. For example, Judas betrayed Jesus in both senses; he abandoned, even attacked, Jesus by giving Jesus to his enemies. At the same time, he contravened and threw down the principle of Jesus’ teachings, to which as a disciple he had dedicated himself. He betrayed both Jesus and himself. Forgiveness, on the other hand, is purposeful, loving acceptance. A person can forgive another person or something more nebulous like fate or society. People even forgive themselves, either for something they’ve done to another or for some personal failing damaging or relevant only to themselves. In a more radical sense, forgiveness means to overlook or ignore something, as when God forgives the sins of men.

So what does it mean to say these two concepts “go hand in hand,” as Gaga does? What connection can they have? Over the course of her short career, Lady Gaga has espoused a message of self-acceptance and self-creation (or transformation) – isn’t this as much a paradox or contradiction as equating betrayal and forgiveness? These two uncertainties have the same answer: the self is fundamentally a continuing transformation; if it accepted what it was, forgave itself at some point, and thus abandoned that transformative nature, then it would have also betrayed itself. The self is not born that way, the way it was at some specific point, but born this way in an always-moving, always-changing present.

Lady Gaga, especially with the release of singles from and information about the upcoming Born This Way album, suggests that the true self is a kind of creative, transformative principle. It is artistic expression, rather than an artistic expression, and thus acceptance and embodiment of that true nature requires both change and artifice. The true self is art-ificial, something consciously made anew constantly.

In recently released HBO behind-the-scenes footage of the Monster Ball, Lady Gaga, in tears, says that she still sometimes feels like “a loser,” even when up on stage performing before thousands of screaming adorers. The Lady Gaga persona is not a comfortable expression of Stefani Germonatta’s true nature, it is not Stefani Germonatta’s essential self; rather, it is an act of will, carried out despite fear and weakness, a process of self-formation that is identical to the overcoming of fears and insecurities that are, of course, essential to her self in some way – the persona, her self, is a self-overcoming. In this sense, then, the transformative, performative aspect is united with the idea of an essence. Essence is self-overcoming. Continual transformation, despite and even for the sake of fear and danger, is what the self ideally is. Given this, forgiveness as an acceptance of what already exists in the self is also a betrayal, because it abandons the principle of that self as transformative.

Thus, when asked about “body modification” (her bone-horns) in a recent Bazaar interview, Gaga answered, “Well, first of all, they’re not prosthetics. They’re my bones . . . they’ve always been inside me, but I have been waiting for the right time to reveal to the universe who I truly am.” This quote simultaneously captures the extent to which artifice becomes natural in Gaga’s aesthetics or ethics of self (the prosthetics are real and are hers because she chooses them as such), and the way that essence is not a completed existence, but a living principle according to which the self is manifested, according to which it is continuously transformed into what it is. If Gaga had accepted her bone-horn-less self, forgiven that lack, she would have betrayed her self by abandoning its principle of change. Consider also her statement regarding Rico “Zombie Boy” Genest in the same interview: “In the video, we use Rico, who is tattooed head to toe. He was born that way. Although he wasn’t born with tattoos, it was his ultimate destiny to become to man he is today.” And his destiny to become the man he will be tomorrow.

This equation – forgiveness as a betrayal of oneself – takes on new meanings when refracted through the lenses of the other dualisms in the “Judas” song and video. I now move to the bridge verse of the song, which precedes immediately the central interlude of the music video: “In the most Biblical sense/I am beyond repentance/fame hooker prostitute wench vomits her mind/but in the conjugal sense/I just speak in future tense/Judas kiss me if offenced or wear ear condom next time.” In this verse, both “Biblical” and “conjugal” are each presented as having a singular “sense” – but both adjectives have fully-functioning double meanings. “Biblical” refers either to, of course, the Bible and Christian religion/theology in general, or to “knowing” someone “Biblically” – having sex with them. Likewise, “conjugal” may refer to both sex or marriage, and verb conjugation (“I just speak in future tense”). How do these senses relate to forgiveness, betrayal, and the self as an essential, transformative principle?

The two meanings of “Biblical sense” are brought out by the following lines: the reference to “repentance” indicates that Gaga is far beyond the betrayal of (asking for) forgiveness. Her revolutionary project – of self-fashioning, of artistic expression, of LGBT rights advocacy – is pure in its bravery, strength, and ferocity. In three senses, Lady Gaga is beyond repentance, is not afflicted by the doubt or hesitation with which acceptance of an imperfect world or self is to some extent synonymous. First, she does not risk caving to a fear that might prevent her continual self-overcoming. Second, her desire for fame is trumped by and cannot compromise her artistic drives. Third, she feels no desire to forgive an intolerant society its vices and thus temper her advocacy. But at the same time, the opposite of each of these propositions is true: she is only a “fame hooker,” prostituting herself for exactly what she claims to be beyond. The reflexive vomiting of her “mind,” her creativity, and even, perhaps, her advocacy, is all only a desperate ploy for acceptance.

“Conjugal sense” functions in the same Janus-faced fashion. Does the marriage suggested by “conjugal” indicate Gaga’s commitment to her revolutionary projects, or does it suggest her submission, her clinging to, fame and acceptance? Is she married to principle or to convenience? Is she a slatternly Eve (subservient wife and ancient damnation of Fallen Man), or is she the dedicated and pure nun betrothed to Jesus? Is her project all “future tense,” a continuously-evoked false promise? Or does it mean that she is truly committed to the future towards which she claims to work, the future of the “new race, free of prejudice”? Gaga is endlessly torn between two opposite poles (as suggested in the Manifesto of Mother Monster); Jesus, her virtue, calls her to self-overcoming, art, and the advocacy of social justice. At the same time, Judas, the demon she clings to, pulls her back to a betrayal of those principles – to an acceptance (forgiveness) of the world as it is now.

I believe that these paradoxes and ambiguities come to fruition in the final duality, that which is obviously the fundamental allegory of the song and video: Jesus and Judas. The intimate and fraught relationship of these two figures has suggested itself to many readers. Judas, in one sense the ultimate villain, is required for the success of the ultimate hero, Jesus. And who needs Jesus, who claimed to come for the sake of sinners, more than the ultimate sinner? Jesus requires Judas in order to be betrayed; Judas requires Jesus in order to be forgiven – both fundamentally need what the other represents. They make one another possible, not despite their diametrical opposition, but because of it. Would it be too extreme a stretch to regard them, like forgiveness and betrayal, like the unrepentant fame-hooker and the nun-whore, as two sides of the same coin?

This ambiguous unity of supposedly-opposed principles and identities is at the core of Gaga’s “Judas”: the collapse of distinctions is omnipresent in both song and video. The lyrics make it impossible to ever be sure who is singing to whom; indeed it is impossible to argue that there is a continual narrator or addressee at all. Take the first verse: “When he comes to me, I am ready/I’ll wash his feet with my hair if he needs/Forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain/Even after three times, he betrays me.” These lines include the possibilities of Jesus speaking about Judas (and about Peter), of Magdalene speaking about Jesus, and of the Gaga-character speaking about the Judas-character. They even suggest Jesus as a liar (or jealous lover), if the “he” of the foot-washing is the masculine owner of the lying tongue. What of the piercing, possibly furious, undoubtedly jealous gaze of Jesus in the video – who, it must be noted, lacks a name on his motorcycle jacket (another possible indicator that identity is ambiguous)? 

Does “king with no crown” refer unproblematically to Jesus, or does his crown of thorns, made not only explicit but positively gaudy in the video, disqualify him? Could Judas be the king with no crown? And given this uncertainty, is the Gaga of the lyrics “I’ll bring him down, bring him down-down” a weapon directed against Jesus or, as the video shows, a weapon directed by Jesus against Judas? Are the clung-to Judas and virtuous Jesus of the lyrics the same characters as those who bear their signifiers in the video? What does all this ambiguity suggest about that for which Gaga is struggling, and what is impeding, endangering, or opposing her struggle?

Nietzsche suggested, in a long-lost line from his posthumous-patchwork The Will to Power, the idea of “duality as too weak a unity.” I wonder if a similar thought is far from Gaga’s mind regarding the Judas project: she is clearly desperate to accomplish something, and at the same time desperately afraid of the forces (internal as much as external) that threaten that accomplishing. But in a song and video that set up an opposition so often treated as the ultimate black-and-white – Jesus and Judas – and then profoundly blurs the distinctions and identities involved, might she not be suggesting that, regarding her project and its impediments, her perception of duality is a weakness or a misunderstanding? Are her demons and her virtues, her weaknesses and her strengths, her fears and her hopes, really one and the same?

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The Femme Outré & Other Real Fakers: Going Gaga for Artifice and Femininity in the 21st Century

by Becca Klaver

Gaga, what can I say but that I recognized you the moment I saw you. You were a star, a sign of everything I knew about women and artifice, taken to the most illogical, asymmetrical extreme. Over and over they call your outfits outré, from the French to push beyond bounds, and everywhere you go you push beyond, casting mirror-ball light onto the limits we thought we were too post-post-post- to still believe in. You put the shock back in pop, and this has everything to do with gender.

I went to Catholic school, too – replete with uniforms and uniform worldviews. When I was in eighth grade, a runaway to public school, my new best friend took me on as a makeover project. Raiding her closet and thrift stores down by the university, we tried out Raver, Hippie, Glam, and Grunge. It was fun, but nothing stuck. What I really wanted from my newfound fashion freedom, it turned out, was to be able to mix and match all of these prepackaged looks, and to apply touches that belonged to none of them. I spent high school combining and recombining, indulging a thirst for texture, color, armor. At the end of senior year, the feathers, velour, faux fur, animal prints, long gloves, and rhinestones helped me secure “Most Original Style” alongside “Most Likely To Win on Jeopardy.” In college, I acquired a vocabulary for what I was doing – performing, and specifically performing the straight-girl-as-femme – through a gender studies minor, a particularly fantastic writing class called “Scandal, Femme Fatales, and the Information Age,” and my residence in Los Angeles, whose artifice I thought a very suspect thing.

So you see, I recognize you, Gaga. People like us – artists, poets, singers, dancers, fashionistas – need, or once needed, to perform, bedeck, exhibit our identities as others, little monsters, queers, aliens, artists. It happens in every town. And in every town, now, people know who you are. And so they know who we are: you made us all famous. Do all your fans say, I feel like I know her? Some celebrities cultivate an aura of remoteness. But in spite of your gleaming armature, in spite of your exacting poise while performing, you seem like one of us. Vulnerable in interviews, contradicting yourself from one to the next, staging your identity every day even as you struggle to articulate it. And you do try, seeming gosh darn earnest at every turn, patting your heart as your eyes fill up with tears, straining your brow, shyly avoiding eye contact, even slumping your shoulders, hands clasping instead of clawing, uninterested in posturing during conversation. I’m real, you want to say, not artificial, and then you move over to the stage and become unreal, or realer, or the thing called Gaga.

They all say you had to say goodbye to Stefani, or that you do daily. I’m not sure I believe it. Before I do, I would like to know what that moment looks like. Is it when you put on the first mask, or the last? The heels or the eyelashes? Is it the moment you start singing? Or does Stefani vanish from the second-story window at the sight of the first cameraman of the day, lunging from the shrubs? I don’t want anyone to separate who I am with my makeup on from who I am without it. I’m the same person.

You went so far down the gender spectrum, you circled back around on the other side. As Anne Sexton writes, A woman like that is not a woman, quite. / I have been her kind. A woman who is too much woman, too unsettlingly woman, must be something else – must be in drag or a freak but not just woman. When they asked Google if you were a hermaphrodite, when the kids playing foursquare whispered loudly that you had a penis and then squealed and shoved each other, that was a schoolyard way of saying that you had taken woman so far beyond bounds that they didn’t recognize it anymore. Besides, who would wear so many outlandish outfits unless she were hiding something? Isn’t hyperbolic style just a big cover-up? Well, yes: gender is often the very thing we hide or exaggerate when we hide or exaggerate ourselves. Your pixellated crotch on the “Telephone” video proves you’re in on the joke.

The guy from the New York Times asked, “How important is artifice to you?”, and you replied, “Artifice? As in artificial?” He clarified: “No, as in a construct, a stratagem.” Then you said, “I don’t know, that word implies artificial to me. I don’t see myself in terms of artifice. I see myself as a real person who chooses to live my life in an open way – artistically. I am a walking piece of art every day, with my dreams and my ambitions forward at all times in an effort to inspire my fans to lead their life in that way.”

I’ll admit that I was surprised by – and amused by the irony of – the fact that you weren’t familiar with the word artifice, but the artist isn’t, and shouldn’t have to be, the critic. I do have a problem with all of these definitions, though, each of which define artifice as a negative concept. Artificial. A construct. A stratagem. Like the related word artful, which can mean crafty as well as skillful, artifice as a concept rides the line between trickery and creativity, between casting a spell and making a work of art. When the artwork is the body (“I am a walking piece of art”) – and not only the body, but its décor, and its gestures, and its mise-en-scène (that is, and the entire image-matrix in which a persona is bound up) – the audience becomes especially convinced that there is a difference between Artifice (Bad) and Art (Good).

I am not so convinced. When artifice is seen as the opposite of authenticity, naturalness, reality, and openness we forget (or maybe, never knew) the fact that artifice and femininity have had an uneasy relationship for most of modernity. Giggles, skirts . . . blanched deference, hesitation . . . the trappings of femininity have been “optional” in theory for a long time, but not until the late twentieth century in some privileged countries on this planet did girls and women start to have a real choice about how girly, womanly, or feminine they wanted to appear. Indeed, in some cultures in 2010, the costumes of femininity are enforced by armed guards. And beyond that, modern western culture has long policed the idea that it is “natural” for women to behave in modest, flirty, or coy ways – that it is “natural” for women to be artful – as in, conniving and strategic. What you do, Gaga, that is so magnificent, is to realign these costumes and mannerisms of femininity with artifice instead of naturalness, thereby calling into focus – and celebrating and redeeming – the unnaturalness of it all.

Cultural theorists have been saying for at least two decades that gender is a performance, but not until you, Gaga, did they have their glittering, sequined exemplar. And you underscore the fact that femininity is not “natural,” but not “artificial” in a bad way, either – on the contrary, femininity can be performed quite artfully. It may take a Haus of designers to create you, but you are nothing if not dazzlingly crafted. You can “be yourself” and “be authentic” especially if you are an artist of selfhood: the performance is transparent; more than that, the performance is all there is. The adolescent fear of being perceived as “fake” and the “deep self” of psychoanalysis are traded in for the sheen of surface.

Those who find you inscrutable probably haven’t been paying very close attention to what’s happened to femininity as it moved into the twenty-first century. They might not know what a big problem and question it is for The Thinking Girl Now. We apply eye shadow, or we don’t. We wear pants, or we don’t. (“No pants.”) We giggle ecstatically, or we don’t. We smile and nod while someone speaks to us, or we don’t. We call ourselves girls well into our 20s and 30s, or we don’t. There are so many ways to perform girl and/or woman now; granted, most of the performers don’t recognize their behaviors as performances. But for those of us who do, who must, we now have something – someone – to point to in order to explain what has happened: the change that’s come upon us all, the detachable femininity that we recognize because we enact it on a smaller, more private scale. It is easy to point to you, because you are everywhere. And whether a widespread comprehension of gender as a performance has seeped into popular consciousness or not, we know, through you, that gender performance has hit the mainstream (with all the complications of commodification that this implies).

You shout it out from every page and screen: Once feminine costumes and behaviors became regularly detached from women (in theory, through gender, queer, and feminist studies; in practice, through drag and burlesque, through the hallway and the sidewalk), femininity may have looked the same, but its function changed. The fact that biological women can perform femininity, and the audience can sense that this is a performance, is the fundamental difference. And perhaps this crucial change also provides an explanation for all of the “Lady Gaga hermaphrodite” online searches. It’s simply hard to believe that a “real woman” would find a need to perform femininity – so, instead of making the conceptual leap toward accepting detachable (unzippable, unbuttonable, unvelcroable) femininity, people question your gender instead. As Ella Bedard points out, “[Gaga] cites iconic, often gendered identities without indicating the existence of a ‘neutral’ or ‘normal’ self that these performances can be said to mask.” So, people go looking for the empirical evidence of a “‘neutral’ or ‘normal’ self” – that is, for evidence of the young woman known as Stefani Germanotta – in the place they usually go for fact-checks, the Google search box.

When an artist like you comes along to declare, to the tune of incredibly catchy pop, that we’re all freaks, made of fake parts in authentic assemblages, the whole world sits up and listens. Or gets up and dances. And when a woman artist like you dresses every day like she’s on a runway or in a museum installation, “no pants” and all (or nothing), we are reminded not only of those cultural places in which femininity is on display, but of the basic fact that femininity, by virtue of being, historically, the gendered quality linked to display, is both an act and an art. Those of us who perform it consciously are real fakers. And we’ve got tickets to the ball.

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Author Bio:

Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collection LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010) and the chapbook Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape (greying ghost, 2009). A founding editor of the feminist poetry press Switchback Books, she is also editing, with Arielle Greenberg, an anthology of poems for teenage girls. Becca holds degrees from the University of Southern California and Columbia College Chicago, and is currently a PhD student in English at Rutgers University. Born and raised in Milwaukee, WI, she now lives in Brooklyn, NY, and blogs at the pomo expo.

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