Traductor, Traditore: (Un)translating Born This Way’s Duplicitous Message

By Samantha Cohen

It’s taken a long time for me to respond to “Born This Way.” It took a long time for me to watch the video, even. The first time I heard the song, I had to close its window before it ended. Oh Gaga, I thought. No.

Maybe it is silly, embarrassing even, to have such a prolonged emotional response to a pop song. To be actually saddened. But in the bio-deterministic world of mainstream media, Gaga had been an anti-essentialist beacon, beaming into the living rooms of, like, all U.S. families. In a world where female pop stars are packaged to be palatable, commoditized and literally defined by the gaze, Gaga’s art and fashion said fuck the gaze and fuck gazing into mirrors, even. Invent an identity. Invent another one. Become who you want to be and then become who you want to be and then become who you want to be again.

My love for Gaga had been based on her performative assertion of performance as identity and it broke suddenly and crushingly with three words: Born this way. I don’t get to love a lot of things in this world and so I hold on fiercely to the things I do. Lady Gaga was the only contemporary mainstream pop artist I was able to love and now what.

I still have complicated feelings, but I’m ready, I think, to work through them, here. It was Meghan Vicks’ article on Gaga as trickster that sparked a bit of hope toward the reignition of my Gaga love. What proceeds will be an argument that “Born This Way” marks Gaga’s self-outing as a trickster figure and that in “Born This Way,” she uses her trickster status to further the cause of gay rights. It will be, too, a personal attempt to redeem Gaga, an elaborate excuse-making for an artist I want badly to love.

***

So, trickster: Coyote, Raven, Prometheus, Loki, Eshu, Hermes, Mercurius. Et fucking al. All mythologies, all cultures, have a trickster figure, and at the site of any change in the social fabric, there s-he is. Trickster is shape-shifter, gender-transcender, a two-spirited seducer. Trickster embodies both sides of any binary opposition. Trickster is culture hero and amoral jokester. S-he is sacred and hilarious, ridiculous and godly, good and evil. Do I need to go on to convince you that Trickster is Gaga?

Okay but what I do need to convince you of, maybe, still, is that Gaga identifies herself as Trickster in the “Born This Way” video. So here: The video opens on a pink-triangle-contained Gaga with legs up where antlers might be, an animal (but still human) Gaga, a between-genders Gaga high-heeled and bearded.

This Gaga is revealed to have two heads and two faces, symbolizing Trickster’s dual nature. Gaga’s second face tells us a creation myth. A creation myth that breeds both good and evil. Wherever there’s a creation story, there Trickster is.

Plus, Trickster is able always to descend to the realm of the dead – to play around and shift things down there. At various points in the video, Gaga enters a sort of underground meat locker where a dead guy dwells. Gaga herself’s in death drag. We know it’s death drag because while the actual dead guy’s catatonic, Gaga’s dancing vigorously, chest-beating, even. She’s physically manipulating the dead guy, presumably for her own ends. Gaga’s down in the death realm for a shifting.

***

But so here’s the thing about Trickster: Trickster’s ends are always the ends of creation, of social change. Trickster is thief, outlaw, destroyer, and ultimately, creator. Trickster uses the Lorde-ian “master’s tools” to dismantle his superstructure, all while entertaining and enchanting, distracting and seducing the fuck out of him. Or H-I-M. Coyote, Loki, Anansi, and Prometheus, for example, all charmed their ways into stealing fire from the gods in order to bring the sun, moon, and stars to the people of their respective cultures.

Trickster uses the language of the dominant culture to get the job done.

“Born This Way” is essentialist, for sure – but Gaga knows that essentialism’s what gay-basher bullies are able to hear, what those in power to change the gay rights situation know how to respond to: There is no other way. You were born this way.

In his book Trickster Makes The World, Lewis Hyde argues that Tricksters are “joint-disturbers” (256) – that Trickster pinpoints the joints of any being, culture, or idea it plans to attack and, in a sense, lubes up these joints in order to move around the more solid pieces they connect, to slide them smoothly, smilingly, and reconnect them elsewhere. Trickster must fit easily into either side of the joint, must seduce both sides in order to slide them so smoothly. Gaga recognizes where the joint of the gay rights debate is, and she works that joint.

Gaga’s aware that U.S. gay rights hinge on proof (or at least belief) that homosexuality is biological. The rhetoric surrounding the U.S. gay rights debate has been, on the right side of the joint, that homosexuality is a sinful choice (God says), and, on the left side, that homosexuality is genetic, and therefore cannot be sinful, since it’s not a choice at all (Science says). “Born This Way” sides with the science of the left, functioning as an anthem self-assured enough to fill in any gaps the scientific studies might leave. Simultaneously, it challenges the right by bringing their God into its message and subtly questioning their faith in H-I-M: Gaga’s God makes no mistakes. Gaga’s God didn’t mess up in creating the gays.

***

Hyde claims that Trickster always serves as translator between two realms. The realms between which Gaga translates in “Born This Way” are actually not the realms of the right and the left; they are the realms of born-this-way gay rights activists and anti-essentialist self-performers. While pro-gay equality and anti-gay equality sides of the argument are essentially speaking the same language (no choice vs. choice), we (queers, academics) are literally speaking a different language than those who seek proof of genetic gayness. We require a translator. And Hyde reminds us of the Italian saying, “traductor, traditore,” or, translator = traitor (264).

Signifying Monkey defeats his Lion oppressor using verbal tricks and witty discourse the Lion is unable to understand. Though Monkey is speaking Lion language, Monkey twists this language. Monkey uses symbolism and the Lion can only understand what is literal. Br’er Rabbit, too, despite being rabbit-sized, uses wit, trickery, and the invention of a new symbolism in order to dismantle the enslaving social rhetoric.

It’s important that, just as Signifying Monkey speaks in Lion language, Gaga doesn’t use academic jargon or the language of queer subcultures. Her litany of identities doesn’t include butch, boi, bear, or even queer. She is speaking the language that the dominant culture understands to be theirs.

One thing Gaga’s use of the language of the dominant culture enables her to do is insert the word “transgender” into the mainstream lexicon. Transgendered life, is what she says. LGBT has sort of just become code for “gay,” while its other initials get lost. The word transgendered is still underlined in red by MS Word’s spell check where I’m typing this.

***

   

Gaga’s creation myth is pretty clearly for us, the anti-essentialist self-performing ones, the academics, the artists, the queers. Who else cares about origin stories or the “multiverse” or mucus-y glittery cell division but the same freaks who care about performance as identity? And one way to read Gaga’s creation myth is as a form of extended justification, an apology for the essentialism to come. The final line of Gaga’s creation myth: “It seems easy, you imagine, to gravitate easily and unwaveringly towards good. But…how can I protect something so perfect, without evil?” As she says this, Gaga holds a machine gun, rendering actual the metaphorical master’s tool.

And when Gaga descends from her heavenly Mother Monster throne and enters the world of the song, she’s wearing (comparatively) subtle makeup and a bikini with dainty chains. Her attire is decidedly normal, pop-video appropriate. At first glance, it’s something Britney might wear. But Gaga’s prosthetic cheekbones and strange magazine glossiness exaggerate her normalcy in a way that lets us know that Gaga hasn’t walked away from her monsters, but is adopting the uniform of the mainstream in order to work inside the system, for us.

***

But so by showing us that she identifies as Gay Rights Trickster, Gaga invites us to look beyond the platitudinous words of her almost-parodically reductive anthem, or to look deeper into them. But then what is she saying beyond the seeming-essentialism?

First, the vaginas through which Gaga’s new race are birthed are made not only of shiny pink membrane, but also of black patent and glitter and silver chains, dissolving the boundary between nature and artifice. And, then! Post creation-myth, in the first shot of the dance floor, the dancers are hunched and shadowed to be shaped like uteri and ovaries.

We might miss this had the video not primed us (at least) twice already with ovary/uterus shapes during the creation story, but since we’re primed, we totally see it. And what it suggests is that we can form ourselves into our own uterus-and-ovaries, into our own self-birthing centers. That we can curl in on ourselves and gestate, any time we need to, and be reborn.

The factory rows of Gaga heads, inchoate and waxy, suggest that there are multiple possible selves for all of us, that we simply have to call on one of our own partly-formed baby heads, to shake it awake and wash it off, in order to be new. I love this.

***

I’ve convinced myself now that Gaga has not had an essentialist conversion. But I still have tangled feelings about whether it is okay to put such a strong essentialist message out into so much of the world. I’m pretty sure most people who hear “Born This Way,” or even watch the video, will not see past the apparent biodeterminism. Isn’t it destructive to tell gay kids, or “orient-made” (I won’t go into this term’s issues here) kids that the have no choice in who they become, that they are victims of the circumstances of their births?

But then, shortly after Gaga’s Prime Rib of America speech, DADT was repealed. Months after the release of “Born This Way,” gay marriage was legalized in New York. On June 24 just after New York legalized gay marriage, Gaga tweeted “I can’t stop crying. We did it, kids.” Maybe this is not self-puffery but just…somewhat accurate. We could ask whether these huge systematic changes are worth the propagating of an essentialist message, but I think a better question is, is there another way to create change? Or do we need this trickstery use of (which is also a propagation of) the dominant language, even if that language is harmful?

I don’t find “Born This Way” inspiring or beautiful. What I wish the whole world would watch instead is the scene in Paris is Burning where two joyful-looking transwomen frolic on the beach singing, “I am what I am / I am my own creation!” But what does this accomplish, social change-wise? 65 million people have watched the “Born This Way” video on YouTube alone. Paris is Burning, I think, is relegated mostly to the academy, or to queer living rooms only.

Angela Carter wrote that “a free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.” Gaga extends this monster-ness to all of the disenfranchised, the bullied, and the pushed-out who are dancing in 5-inch heels and hair dye (or in bowties and suspenders, or in A-shirts and Dickies). And maybe part of the monster quality is that we monsters can’t speak in our own language if we want to be taken seriously by the dominant culture, if we want to create big systemic change. Monsters have to skew, to craft, to seduce. Gaga, as self-appointed Monster Representative to the dominant culture, must be Trickster. We can go on speaking our language in our queer living rooms. We can create spaces for monster discourse and monster love. But if we want equal rights, we need a Trickster representative.

Before “Born This Way” begins Gaga tells us to “Put (our) paws up.” Not our hands. Our hands are for holding our lovers, for cutting friends’ hair and watering plants. Our hands are too pure for this kind of work. No, for Trickster work, we need our paws – our Monkey paws, our monster paws.

Author Bio:

Samantha Cohen 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's teaching a class called Semiotics of Fashion in the Critical Studies program at CalArts this fall.

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Grammar Trouble and Lady Gaga’s Lyrical “I”

By Eddie McCaffray

Beauty is in the “I” of the beholder

Ever since Lady Gaga sang, “He’s got me like nobody […] she’s got me like nobody” in “Poker Face,” she has been playing with fluid grammatical identities. Accordingly, this essay will consider Lady Gaga’s lyrical use of the first-person singular pronoun, and, more broadly, the role of the narrator in her songs. As have many songwriters before her, including some she cites as influences, Lady Gaga often writes songs that function as the narrative or manifesto of some fictionalized narrating personality. Bruce Springsteen, one such influence, is well-known for writing character songs, wherein the speaker is specified enough to have a particular financial and/or romantic situation, personal past, or philosophical outlook; this character is then acted out by Springsteen’s song. Thus, though these narrators are only occasionally named, they do have distinct sensibilities as artistic creations separate from both the song and singer herself. Such a narrator may be fairly specific, such as in “Paparazzi,” or less so, as in “Government Hooker.” But in both songs, the “I” of the lyrics is not really intended to be understood as Lady Gaga herself, but as another persona Gaga sings through.

However, Lady Gaga plays with this trope beyond simply employing it – she steals rather than borrows. In several of her songs, the “I”, the narrator, is not simply one character, created to sing a particular song, but instead is inhabited by dual or multiple fictionalized speakers sharing that always-singular “I”. For example, as discussed previously by myself and others, “Judas” presents a narrative wherein it is difficult to tell just who is speaking to whom, or about whom. And, to heighten the anxiety caused by this narrative uncertainty, Gaga’s songs often threaten power relations in the same move. Not knowing if Jesus is betraying Judas or if Judas is betraying Jesus is worrisome not only because it makes identity uncertain (who’s who?), but also because those two identities traditionally have an established and meaningful relationship – one which includes and encourages certain assumptions about power, legitimacy, and morality; this very relationship is destabilized and made uncertain as well. The same is clearly true of the stalker/superstar relationship in “Paparazzi,” and of the client/hooker one in “Government Hooker.”

I suspect, and will argue, that this uncertainty – both in its basic perspectival-narrative aspect, and in its (gender, power) “trouble” aspect – is directly linked to Gaga’s performative project. Beauty, or power, achieved through performance, are in the “I” of the beholder, in its quality as the subject. And it is just by blurring, through art-ificial performative identity, the line between beholder and beholden (subject and object) that power, beauty, and identity are made available or attainable for an individual who had previously been objectified into passivity and exploitation.

Is “individual” really the right word for a constantly-unfolding, transient-yet-destined, process that will always be constituted by the limits of subject and object?

Is there a grammar of the new race of Mother Monster?

Three-in-one “I”?

We will start with the most explicit, to my mind, example of this perspectival-narrative uncertainty: the “Judas” song and video. As I discussed in an earlier piece for GS, “Judas” presents lyrical and narrative uncertainty about whether Jesus, Judas, or some woman (Mary Magdalene?) is singing. Consider the verse:

When he calls 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.

In the first of these four lines, Gaga sings from the perspective of either an apostle or Mary Magdalene, called to or summoned by Jesus. Here, the narrator could even be Judas himself; this lyric could reference Judas in the middle of coming to give Jesus the betraying kiss, responding to Jesus’s salutation as written in the Gospel of Luke: “Judas, are you betraying the son of man with a kiss?” (Luke 22:47-48) Similarly, the next line suggests (relatively unambiguously) Mary Magdalene, who washed Jesus’ feet and dried them with her hair. The pledge of forgiveness could be Jesus speaking of Peter, who was prophesized to and did in fact deny his relationship to Jesus three times on the night of the crucifixion (as is suggested by the fourth line). It could also, perhaps, indicate Jesus’ forgiveness of the Judas kiss. These uncertainties are compounded by the chorus of the song – which suggests Jesus still loving Judas, despite his betrayal, in addition to a pining ex-lover – as well as those that appear in the other lyrics.

Thus the narrator in “Judas” must switch many times, often in the space of single line, and usually not between two possible identities but between two clusters of possible identities: from “Judas-or-Mary” in the first line to “Mary” in the second to “Jilted-Lover-or-Jesus” in the third and fourth. And the likely addressees (the likely objects) change as well! Does the singer transform from one to the other to the other to the other in order to become whatever is necessary for holding the listener’s attention? To maintain the authoritative, power-position before the verb? Has performance trumped identity – first by being the identity of the performer and then by fulfilling its role all too well? What does such a narrative voice suggest about Gaga’s whole project of fame? That the performer and audience are one? An endless chain of performers performing for performers?

Let us expand and explain this idea by studying the “Paparazzi” song and video. As Ayah Rifai suggests in her November 2010 essay for Gaga Stigmata, the pop superstar of “Paparazzi” in fact seeks the love of fans, is desperate to receive what they are desperate to give. When the stalker and stalkee, paparazza and popstar, are so closely adapted to one other, who holds the power? Who is disciplining whom? Whose discourse constitutes which object? The superstar and the paparazza need each other, and the stalker is the inversion of the superstar – not the best performer but the best fan. The desperate search to express oneself is in fact a desperate search for the attention of others. The most intimate possession, the self, interacts symbiotically – not exploitatively – with the most foreign phenomenon, the power of the Other.

“Promise I'll be kind”

Perhaps this is best exemplified simply by the desperate, romantic vocal performance Gaga gives to “Paparazzi.” Though sung from the perspective of a paparazza, the song is invariably (of course) performed by the pop star. Its desperate professions of love and devotion cannot help but bleed beyond the lines of the fictive, narrating stalker persona; Gaga’s love of fame leads to her love of photographers, of stalkers, and that shows in her vocal and live performances. In these performances of the song, Gaga often dies – the pop star martyring herself for the sake of her death-obsessed “fans”? So desperate to give them what they so desperately need that she will die – and live again? In the extreme intimacy of such a symbiosis, is the distinction between performer and audience somewhat arbitrary?

Rifai writes, “In this interpretation, the paparazzi unwittingly function as disciplinarians who cleverly keep stars in line – and perhaps even transform them into seemingly ‘docile bodies’ – because they document them from the moment they step outdoors to the moment they return home.” While I do agree with this reading, it seems to me that equally present in Gaga’s project is the idea that the performer (the object, the stalkee) does have agency. We know all the clichés about record executives manufacturing the fame and success of performers, but doesn’t this overblown cynicism more or less miss the undeniable participation of the superstar? In the paparazzi-superstar symbiosis, being watched becomes as active, as needed, as watching. The active voice of “he watches” is usurped by the passive of “she is being watched.” In highlighting the power of the viewer’s view, the power of the viewed’s performance should not be forgotten: the ability to become what(ever) others want is still an ability, an action, an agency, and undoubtedly a creative and powerful one. 

Slime Dress; Fluid Body

This trouble of perspective – this “who is objectifying whom?” and the change in power-dynamics such grammatical uncertainty causes – is further illustrated by the inversion of the human relations carried out in these narrative shifts. Because Judas, Jesus, and Mary sequentially pass through the same “I,” it is impossible to establish the power-to-act of any one exclusively. Sometimes Judas precedes the verb and occupies the subject position, acting upon Jesus (“I’ll bring him down, bring him down down”), and other times their position is reversed (“forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain”). The absence of a single power-vector, of a monarchical subject, is revealed. In such a multi-polar world, the whizzing of activity overwhelms the nodal sobjects – “nodal” because they now occupy a relative, rather than privileged, position; and “sobject” being a neologism denoting what is left after the subject/object distinction has been deconstructed. Action/verb overshadows both subject and object: being conditioned not by doers and objects, but conditioning them. The thematic subjects of these songs become their grammatical verbs: sacrifice, betrayal, and love in “Judas”; longing, obsession, performance, observation in “Paparazzi”; fucking as well as simply being (anything, everything) in “Government Hooker”; and acting (without permission or condition) in “Scheiße.”

Thus the verbal theme of “Judas” communicates a feeling of anguished backsliding ever attendant on desperate aspirations – whether the speaker is someone remembering an addictive, abusive relationship they are not yet over or Jesus clinging to his wayward disciple, it is the action of reaching above while dragging behind that lingers above all uncertainty: “Jesus is my virtue, while Judas is the demon I cling to.” Similarly the fluid identities of “Paparazzi” lead to an endless loop in which longing longingly regards longing: the paparazzi obsessively pursue the star, who obsessively pursues fame, represented in the figure of the paparazza. The photographers struggle to take pictures of the star struggling to be photographed. These songs are not about narrators but about actions: anguished backsliding and longing. And these are, after all, two rather similar actions. The painful backsliding in “Judas” complements the insatiable longing of “Paparazzi.” Just as the narrator of “Judas” is torn between what she knows is good for her and what she knows is bad for her, the narrator of “Paparazzi” can never conclusively achieve that for which she longs. Fame exists only in being hounded by photographers and stalkers; the invasive torture that has killed Gaga in so many performances is what the superstar pursues. She responds to desire, to interest, both of which are endless (and endlessly variable) appetites – she is condemned, has condemned herself, to transform forever. The singer of “Judas” desires something (Jesus, virtue) that her nature (which clings to Judas) precludes. She is caught between the initiation and completion of an action, just as the singer of “Paparazzi” is denied satisfaction: her goal, longing, is the antithesis of satisfaction!  In the end, the symbiosis of performative identity dissolves the subject and the object into verbs, making a universe where completion, satisfaction, and rest are impossible because there is only timeless action.

This trope – the paradoxical, transformative nature of performative identity – appears in the song “Government Hooker” from her recent album Born This Way. The song highlights the alternation between power and exploitation inherent in performative identity. Gaga sings “I can be anything, I’ll be your everything/Just touch me baby, (‘cause I don’t want to be sad)” – with the last line sung in a metallic male voice utterly at odds with the female pop voice that delivers the first three lines. Beyond the question of who is speaking (of who is subject and who is object), these two voices comprise a single, coherent, interwoven narrative: one of desire mutating and multiplying to satisfy itself. The distinction between the client and hooker is secondary to their mutual performance, their speaking, their reality, which is one of cooperation: the hooker becomes whatever is necessary for the client. Thtthis simple lyric also suggests that the hooker has her own agenda – after all, she gives a command to the client when she says “just touch me,” she reveals her agency, and any prostitute does have an agenda. He or she is exploited; but at the same time a prostitute demands and receives of her client just as her client does of her (money). Perhaps this suggests that it is a trick of history, of situation, and not one of fundamental reality, that certain roles or professions are weak, amoral, and victimized.

“Put your hands on me”

Two commonly-appearing verses in the song further suggest the power of the hooker and, more fundamentally, the unity of hooker-client, the problematization of the subject/object distinction: “As long as I’m your hooker!” and “Yeah, you’re my hooker!” (conspicuously not sung in a mechanical and masculine voice, but in that of the feminine narrator). These suggest, first, that the hooker functions as such contingently and temporarily: “As long as I’m your hooker” implies the corollary that all the promises and offers of the song end when the “I” is no longer “your hooker” – which is thus at least theoretically possible. Again, it is important to distinguish between the reality of prostitution in society and the ontological relationship here metaphorized as prostitution: Gaga’s performativity in this area is more a critique of Cartesian dualism and the panoptic power of the gaze that it produces than it is a statement on the social reality of prostitution.

“As long as I’m your hooker”

With this in mind, it is clear that these two verses suggest the agency of the hooker regarding the client, even going so far as to reverse the relationship, thereby removing the distinction between the prostitute and her client. Following a display of Freudian versatility – “I could be girl (unless you want to be man) / I could be sex (Unless you want to hold hands) / I could be everything, I could be anything, I could be Mom (unless you want to be Dad)” – Gaga closes the song with a triumphant, feminine, hooker-voice in chorus with the mechanical, masculine, client-voice: “I wanna fuck Government Hooker (back up and turn around) / Stop shitin’ me Government Hooker (put your hands on the ground!) . . . (Get down!)” The song transforms by its end from a tale of object-exploitation at the hands of the subject (client exploits prostitute) to a mutual celebration of their power over one another, and an enaction of their unity. Both exercise and enjoy power and submission alternately, simultaneously, and complimentarily. As the identities of the two are “reduced” to actions or verbs, their symbiosis is revealed.

This metaphysical statement of empowerment expressed as grammatical trouble takes on a similar form in the song “Yoü and I,” a rocker ballad written by Lady Gaga about her (now ex-) boyfriend Lüc Carl. Much of the verses are sung by Gaga as Gaga: “It’s been a long time since I came around . . .” But in the lead-in to the chorus, and in the chorus itself, Gaga quickly blends speaking as herself, speaking as Lüc, and speaking as Lüc speaking as Gaga. When she sings, “He said, ‘sit back down where you belong, in the corner of my bar with your high heels on / sit back down on the couch where we made love the first time and you said to me: ‘something about this place. . .’’” the chorus to follow has transformed into her quotation of Lüc’s quotation of her. With this in play, does Gaga have a stronger claim than Lüc himself to the narrator, to be the character of the character song? The title certainly fails to establish just who is “you” and who is “I,” instead making the narrative identity totally ambiguous with the simple use of supposedly-reliable pronouns. Who can claim to be the “you” or the “I,” though both terms claim specificity? Both are in irresolvable play. The song professes the love of Gaga for Lüc by professing Lüc’s love for Gaga. This revealed reciprocity leads to union – not coincidentally metaphorized by a joyous love.

“You taste like whiskey when you kiss me, oh!”

This continued, extended play goes so far as to suggest that the actor may be a feature – perhaps a secondary one – of action. Subject is not the prerequisite or creator of action, but a feature of its (grammatical) voice. This makes sense in an aesthetics where action has become the character of a character-song. If we are what we do (what we perform?), Gaga is a superstar and a stalker and a paparazza; she is Jesus, Judas, and Mary; also hooker and client; politician and activist; Lüc and Gaga. I believe that such a metaphysics is at the heart of her fame project and her entire performance art project. As Rifai and Gaga herself have suggested, her work must be understood as a whole: music, videos, performances, interviews, every costume . . . And this work – her persona that encompasses such contradictions of power and exploitation – undermines discrimination at its most basic level, by accepting the other as the other, by ascribing agency to the object as the object. It does not seek that agency by demonstrating that the object is really a subject or demanding that it become one, not by unifying all people under a single theoretical concept of “human” that remains at bottom a straight white man, but by ascribing rights, ascribing agency and creativity to the object without demanding that the object becomes something different, without qualification or any justification besides the assumption that every thing should – does – have agency, and is equal despite manifold perceptible differences. In response to the flat assertion that a hooker, as a grammatical object, could never have agency, Gaga’s metaphysics offer a flat assertion that a hooker obviously is the origin as well as the target of power; thus not that the hooker is a subject, but that an object shares the claim of the subject to agency. The object has an equal right to “I”.

Finally, the song “Scheiße” functions as a commentary on this entire principle. The song, when read as addressed to shit, (“I’ll take you out tonight, do whatever you like / Scheiße Scheiße be mine, Scheiße be mine”), becomes a pining, hopeless love song, very similar in this way to “Judas” and “Paparazzi.” Gaga is pleading to be worthy of her shit – her messy (by)product, her action, and its outcome. As in “Government Hooker,” in “Scheiße” a desperate polymorphous perversity is employed to entice and earn her own activity: “I’ll . . . do whatever you like . . .” Performance, transformation, and creativity seek desperately to seduce themselves by means of themselves.

Scheiße be mine

But Gaga also wishes that her action didn’t require this qualification – that her verbs did not require a subject. This regret contrasts interestingly with the desire to be worthy: Gaga uses the same word (“shit” or “Scheiße”) to mean her creations (foremost of which is herself) that she worships, and the limitations and qualifications that limit her ability to create, to be. What she is grappling with here is the fundamental unfreedom of existence: if you create something, you become unfree to not have created it. In terms of performative identity, you can be anything, but once you are, you are no longer free to be something else. The desire or impetus to create means that one is never without condition – desire to create is a condition that creation always requires! Gaga might sing “I wish I could be strong without the Scheiße, yea,” but strength requires at least something to bear. The perfect freedom offered by performative identity is, considered from a different perspective, perfect unfreedom: you must enact yourself, you cannot enact another. The “shit” Gaga produces – herself – limits the potentiality that she wants to be to a mere actuality; achieving one possibility extinguishes all others.

Gaga’s mediation on this paradoxical, existential freedom-unfreedom is expressed as a feminist message: “Love is objectified by what men say is right / … blonde high-heeled feminists enlisting femmes for this, express your woman kind / fight for your rights.” Gaga recognizes that the grammatical privileging of subject over object operates as a blueprint for various forms of discrimination – in this case, sexism. Being a strong female means acting without qualification (“If you’re a strong female, you don’t need permission”) – of occupying the role of assumed efficacy that has so often been gendered masculine. So she makes the taking of this space (“When I’m on a mission, I rebuke my condition / If you’re a strong female, you don’t need permission”) the condition and goal of gender liberation. It could be the goal of any emancipatory or anti-discrimination movement, combating exploitation by combating objectification at its most fundamental level.

This feminist aspect is best exemplified in the line “I don’t speak German but I can if you like.” Here Gaga attaches overcoming herself (speaking German even though she can’t speak German) to the condition of a man’s desire. As long as the traditional grammar remains the basis of power and agency, she can only overcome herself, grow, be strong, accomplish, act, through either the fiat or the imitation of masculinity. Instead of the self-expression of performance being guided by Gaga herself – by her project of becoming worthy of her shit – that expression, that creation is guided by the desires of men: by the shit of others. It may not be possible, on a fundamental, ontological level to escape the conditions inherent in existence; but Gaga does see a way for womankind to escape the conditions imposed by patriarchy. A new grammar, a new verbal perspective, to express the power of the object as well as of the subject.

Thus I argue that the narrative play of Lady Gaga’s lyrics offers both a re-imaging of the character-song form and a key to understanding not only the meaning of her songs but the nature of her entire artistic project. The grammatical troubling of this voice expresses the theme of performative identity and the radical agency to which it leads. It is at once philosophical and emancipatory, artistic and political; it is itself a paradox, a unity achieved not despite contradiction, but by means of it.

Perhaps this is a meaning of the third eye Gaga wears on her chin as Mother Monster in the video for “Born This Way”: her two eyes have been inverted and deconstructed into one. Does this eye have sobjective vision – seeing and also seeing its own seeing? Does it unify power and submission in one perceptive act? Can it see what is without losing sight of what might be?

Author Bio:

Eddie McCaffray is a PhD student studying medieval history at Arizona State University.

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Gaga's Anaphase, Gaga's Sonogram: the Mirror, the Cell, the Vagina, the Image

By Roland Betancourt

The following piece is the fifth in our series on Lady Gaga's video for “Born This Way.” Click here for our previous analyses of the video.

Dyed my bangs black. Its my new monsterlook. Let the mitosis of the future begin. Off to meet Judas.

11:01 PM Feb 26th via Twitter for BlackBerry®

Lady Gaga’s “tweet” concerning her new bangs serves as a forerunner for the “Born This Way” film. Her statement follows a very simple formula: she has made a physical modification to her look, and that physical modification becomes the new look for her monsters. While it is her look, it structures a new “monsterlook” that will be surely mirrored by Little Monsters. The TwitPic itself is produced on her Blackberry in a mirror, as many of the (in)famous MySpace profile pictures of the early days of social networking. Gaga uses the cryptic phrase, “Let the mitosis of the future begin.” Upon viewing the “Born This Way” film, this statement retroactively becomes foreshadow and reference; but at that moment of ignorance before the video was released, this statement latches on to its utterance context for meaning. Therefore, one is led to understand a connection between her image and its reproduction. It is as if she is saying to her Little Monsters, this is my new look, go and replicate it yourselves.

After viewing “Born This Way,” one understands this statement anew, this time within the context of the video and its focus on birthing and reproduction. It is necessary to point out here the bane of every high school biology teacher who has had to teach students about the difference between mitosis and meiosis. While meiosis is the production of sexual reproduction cells, which contain half the chromosomes to produce an animal, mitosis is the exact duplication of a single cell. Mitosis is the type of reproduction that occurs for single-celled creatures – it is a form of non-sexual reproduction. Therefore, there seems to be an incongruity here. Did Gaga mistake perhaps this basic difference? No. Gaga has stated that “Born This Way” emerged as an Immaculate Conception. Was she referring to the birth of Christ? Staging herself as the Virgin Mary as I have argued here before, having been impregnated by God through the grace of the Holy Spirit? Of course not, for the Immaculate Conception refers not to the Incarnation of Christ, but to the conception of Mary herself as a vessel free of sin so as to be capable of bearing the Son of God.

What Gaga has done is create what the Ancient and Byzantine Greeks referred to as chōra, a container or dwelling place. This existed for the Byzantines as a conceptual trope for the Virgin Mary, primarily addressed in the Byzantine world as the Theotokos (the God-bearer). Chōra, rudimentarily, in Platonic philosophy, was the space in which anything could be said to exist. Therefore, it served as a useful ontological construct for the entity of the God-bearer, whose body was the “Container (Chōra) of the Uncontainable (i.e. the Son of God).” Gaga has often placed herself in this position of the Virgin Mary, either advocating her chastity to stress her creativity or wearing the McQueen Annunciation dress. What she has done now is given birth to a race that partakes in this being, a race of immaculate humans – free of prejudice – that may exist as open receptacles of ideas and images. Yet this mitosis, this reproduction of an open container, is both a violent experience and presents a dangerous receptacle.

The violence of mitosis is in fact the manner in which evil is described as being created in the “Manifesto of Mother Monster.” Just as in mitosis, where the microtubules latch onto the chromosomes and tear apart the cell from within during anaphase, Mother Monster is violently split into two.

But on that same day, as the Eternal Mother hovered in the multi-verse, another more terrifying birth took place: the birth of evil.

And, as she herself split into two, rotating in agony between two ultimate forces, the pendulum of choice began its dance.

The text, however, can be misleading. We rely on word and image during the video to develop an understanding of the nature of these births. As she slowly speaks the Manifesto, the scenery changes and we are led through what seems like an early modern image of Hell; the music crescendos, and we are presented with the image of evil a few seconds after she has told of its birth, but not yet described the split. Costume-wise this is a different Gaga: she is not the Mother Monster that we saw earlier. It is not until after we see this evil Gaga pull a machine gun from her vagina that we are told how evil was created: “And, as she herself split into two...” For a brief period, the nature of the offspring is uncertain: are there two opposing individuals, or one with a dual nature? This ambiguity is lost when reading the Manifesto as a text independent of the video, but it is nevertheless crucial; Gaga employs this conflicted process of self-generative unfolding to suggest a fundamental confusion of natures and persons. She twists in agony because there are two ultimate forces, which we are left to believe are good and evil. Thus implying that good and evil pre-exist the birth. 

It therefore follows that Gaga’s birth of evil is not the birth of the force of evil, just as Mother Monster is never described as Good, but rather it is the incarnation of evil in flesh. Good and evil become potentialities of the flesh, forms of being that dwell within the container of Gaga’s image, and upon that incarnation are echoed in matter: the costume change between good and evil Mother Monsters. The “she herself” makes clear that Mother Monster is good and evil, that she is one and the same. Like the cell that has undergone mitosis, she is the shared interval of difference between good and evil, the distance between them, that makes possible both their sameness and difference. Same DNA, but she was born this way. Like a mirror, they are the same image but one is the “right” (figuratively and literally), and the other is left (literally) or an inversion of the “right” (figuratively) image. Their difference presupposes a more primordial similarity.

Now, I would argue that since we do not know what any of the births really were (other than seeing the embryonic heads being pulled out of her womb), we cannot be certain of the otherness of the offspring – precisely since it is a mitosis. We simply know how they were born, we know they were born this way. We may pretend that those beings pulled from her womb are the new race within humanity, but this is not what the Manifesto says precisely. The Manifesto says:

...a birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place. But the birth was not finite. It was infinite. As the wombs numbered and the mitosis of the future began, it was perceived that this infamous moment in life is not temporal, it is eternal. And thus began the beginning of the new race, a race within the race of humanity...

It is the act of perception of the atemporality of birth that forms the new race; it is not any birth in itself that mothered the new race. Birth and creation exist exclusively in the act of perception. Thus, the mirror-epistemology that structures the video demonstrates the importance of perception in these births, because there is no birth outside the praxis of perception.

When giving birth to a race free of prejudice, the Mother Monster is always depicted as a mirror image. She is mirrored in childbearing, having at times one presence but two countenances:

Her vagina, her birth canal, is the fissure of this mirroring: it is the non-interval, the non-slash through which the image is constructed. This image already has two countenances, two persons, but one nature, one body. The images of butterflies – creatures idealized for their bilateral symmetry – are prevalent. There is not a Gaga separate from a mirror: both are one and the same. Her vagina is the very origin of the images, it bears witness to the folding and its replication. Like the mirror-constructed image of the TwitPic and its viral distribution on Twitter, this image of Gaga giving birth in “Born This Way” is constructed in and by the mirror. In contemporary society, there is no better reification of Lacanian psychoanalysis than the MySpace mirror image, whereby identity is literally realized by the mirror – an almost too-crude literalization of Lacan’s Mirror Stage.

However, if it is true that birth did not occur until the moment of perception, why did the embryonic heads already bear the marks of the new epistemic humanity? Preliminarily, let me answer that by pointing out that the birth had not happened, only the wombs had numbered. We do not see the new humanity until after the Manifesto, before they are merely embryonic heads: non-animate potentialities, who merely bear a resemblance to Mother Monster. Perhaps more convincingly, however, is that as the “Eternal” Mother, Gaga never ceases to be a mother, but she also never begins to be a Mother: she is properly eternally a mother without beginning or end.

It is precisely this notion of perpetual birth that is conceived in the video. She states that birth “is not temporal, it is eternal.” Birth does not occur at a definite time, but rather is eternally occurring; not enduring or occurring in time, but wholly outside of time. Thus, time is collapsed and narrative merely structures a hermeneutics, thereby enabling common mortals to comprehend the cosmological ontology she has created and properly so; cosmology and cosmogony lose all distinction and become one and the same. In other words, the creation of the universe is the understanding of the universe.

Therefore, good and evil have always and will always coexist. Evil is not some other that has emerged to corrupt humanity; rather it is inherent within it. The new race that is without prejudice is birthed through “perception,” through the perception of this atemporality. It is the perception of this splitting/birth, this dichotomy between good and evil, that allows for a race without prejudice to exist within humanity, for humanity is the synthesis of the two. Humanity is the commingling of good and evil. But what precisely is this evil?

Unlike the image of Gaga giving birth to a race without prejudice, the image of Evil is not mirrored: even when giving birth to the machine gun, Gaga has one countenance and one person – despite the clear bilateral symmetry of the image. Only the image of Zombie Boy is mirrored, but he is not Mother Monster (although his mirrored and singular images deserve more attention, beyond the scope of this paper). Moreover, the image of evil is a sonogram:

The image of evil is not a direct image, it is an image that is seen darkly through the flesh, but is not the flesh, it is not externally manifested. It is not a direct contact, but rather an image formed through the reverberation of sound. Quite simply, a sonogram is not an optical image, but rather an info-graphic – it charts the echoes of physical bodies in order to produce an image from that data. This image’s format has a clear association with birth and expectancy. It therefore suggests that the birth of evil is an indwelling of an image that lurks within, as a potentiality in each human who is to be a container for infinite birth. Evil is the singular, oblique image of the self, the image that denies its own fluidity. It is not-viralized, it is not mirrored, it is instead kept within and not exposed. Evil is being insincere in the external representation of one’s own image of the self. It is an image that is corrupt:

Her image is not properly produced, perhaps due to interference from that concealment, seen darkly through the flesh. Like the murky sonogram, the image here represents the incongruous sound waves, it demonstrates itself as an icon of sound. Of supreme importance is that it is not virtuously pixilated as the Blackberry-taken, TwitPic-distributed image of social networking. Instead, it bears the formal traces of an alien corruption, one that we are not accustomed to seeing.

Therefore, the thesis of “Born This Way” becomes quite clear here. The perpetual birth of the self exists as the perpetual duplication and distribution of one’s sincerest image. “Born This Way” inaugurates an important shift in Gaga’s work, particularly towards the focus on the ontology and phenomenology of the contemporary image in circulation, in its physical incarnation as Vicks and Durbin have pointed out. It also represents the inexcusability of closeting – one’s true image should not have to be excavated through a sonogram: found in the stalls of airport bathrooms, or under the masquerade of a bully (i.e. the foot-tapping Larry Craig, or homophobic Dave Karofsky on Glee).

The question that remains to be asked and which I have brought up previously in my response to the “Born This Way” Grammy performance regards the important shift that this entire visual and rhetorical logic evidences in contemporary identity politics from that of the 1980s and 1990s. The militant insistence on “just being yourself” is coupled with the virality of the contemporary image and its cloning logic. Gaga is not at all advocating an inherent, insular construct of the self, but rather allowing one to continuously partake in whatever virality he or she chooses. The Monsters will reproduce her bangs and form themselves in her image. The “Manifesto of Mother Monster” was produced and recited by Mother Monster, but is a Manifesto of/for her fans. She is both her image and her representation, as the “Born This Way” film clearly articulates.

Her Little Monsters have the same DNA, but they were born this way. I-dentity is relegated to the shifter, as it always has been. It is the “I” that is the most powerful construct of identity, so personal that only you yourself can utter it if you wish for it to signify you. Even I am incapable of expressing to you this sentiment unless you put yourself in the place of my I. Here the deictic, relative pronoun, this constitutes the identity that exceeds the virality of your DNA. It is the preference of nurture over nature. Since birth is an anachronic renaissance, the “I” that once provided us with the insincere myth in language of a stable, fixed, and continuous identity for our self has been displaced to the relative pronoun, that whose deictic function craves an antecedent for any possible signification – and if there is no antecedent available, it must be taken adverbially to mean “in this manner.” The I is a shifter as much as the this, but we suspend disbelief to delude ourselves that we know what we means. By forcing identity onto a more dependant shifter, Gaga has forcefully pushed us beyond any lazy shorthand for defining our I-dentity and placed all weight onto our articulation of the perpetual this that constructs our performance of everyday life.

Author bio:

Roland Betancourt  is a PhD student at Yale University in the History of Art department focusing on Byzantine art and image theory, with an outside concentration in contemporary art and popular culture. In 2009, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a double major in art history and anthropology. 

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