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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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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Manifesting Love: "Born This Way" and Surrealist Art

By Willow Sharkey

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

Lady Gaga’s single “Born This Way” emerges into a world where questions of who may love whom are far from settled. Indeed, cultural anxieties regarding ambiguous gender identity, or any sort of otherness that falls outside clearly defined binaries, continue to so pervade the social body that the bullying of queer youth has become a sad emblem of recent history. “Born This Way,” then, is a deliberately queer anthem, ostensibly made to joyfully empower every “othered” being.

The word love repeatedly punctuates the lyrics of “Born This Way,” underscoring several different sites where love may operate. Gaga proclaims that it doesn’t matter if one loves an intimate partner or God, tells listeners to love themselves and their friends, says that she loves her life and this record, and that love requires faith. How love is incarnated is not of importance, rather the expression of love is paramount, integral to liberation; it also requires bravery, vigilance, and commitment.

 

Joan Miró, Love, (1925)

By highlighting an array of sites where love may be realized, “Born This Way” complicates the expression of love in mainstream pop music. It doesn’t celebrate typical boy-girl love and longing; rather, it aims to affirm self-love, and to so deal with the roots of social fissures and violence. The video pushes this complication further: the joyful anthem turns into a meditation on why affirmations of love are necessary. It posits that love exists and is created always in opposition to something else (evil). If Gaga is the mother monster who loves all the monsters she has birthed, she feels a mother’s love for her many creations – this new race whose very otherness is beauty. Yet she also feels protective of her fragile, newborn race. To be loving is also to be protective, and out of this instinct is born the impulse toward violence. The loving mother, advocating for and giving form to a species free of prejudice, harbors still the kernels of emotion that give life to violence. The opening sequence of narration positions goodness and evil as inextricably linked within the self, to be continually grappled with. While “Born This Way” redefines the outsider as beautiful, it does not absolve Gaga or her beautiful monsters of impulses that lead to violence. Instead, the video challenges all to continually make a difficult choice: the choice to love.

Salvador Dalí, The Accommodations of Desires, (1929)

Lady Gaga often directs her viewers’ understanding of her projects through cultural references and quotations; in turn, these cultural references complicate the meaning of her own work. For instance, Gaga evokes Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein in the video for “Telephone” to signify how the ephemeral pop commodity is both horrific and seductive, dumb and powerful, delicious and empty. This time, Gaga cites Salvador Dalí and other artists associated with Surrealism as influences on “Born This Way,” and so deliberately directs us to her thematic concerns. Appropriately, this points us to consider the complications to be found within notions of love and bodily desire, and how these complications may answer to a cultural moment ripe with fear and violence. The Surrealists sought to champion and embody the values of love and desire in their works, which they felt to be under attack. We may not share the intense threat of censorship and social inequality that functioned in the early twentieth century, but total equality remains out of reach, and so contemplations of love continue to be vital to art as humanist enterprise.

Max Ernst, Men Shall Know Nothing of This, (1923)

The Surrealists’ explorations of love and desire were intimately influenced by psychoanalysis. But Surrealists departed from Freud’s conception of desire, predicated as it was on a model of “illness” and “cure.” What Freud thought of as perversion in need of cure the Surrealists theorized as simply one potential element of human experience. Max Ernst’s painting Men Shall Know Nothing of This (seen above), often held as a masterpiece of the Surrealist movement, is said to have been inspired by Freud’s study of the delusions of Daniel Paul Schreber, whom Freud diagnosed as a paranoiac. Specifically, Freud identified Schreber’s fantasy of becoming a woman as a “castration complex.” In the painting, the central image of two pairs of legs refers to Schreber’s hermaphroditic desires. Ernst’s inscription on the back of the piece notes that in the rendering of the legs as symmetrical, “the two sexes balance one another.” 

Thus, Ernst made room for the desires of Schreber to be something other than madness. His “delusions,” could instead signify “balance.” Gaga’s mother monster imagery – on the one hand, a writhing evil body twisting in excruciating pain, and on the other hand, a perfected image of split-screen symmetry, which together comprise an intermingling of supposed oppositions – brings to mind Ernst’s project: a sensitive meditation upon finding the humanity in those that Freud’s psychoanalysis would deem the insane other, on finding the balance within imbalance, the love in pain, the human in what has been designated inhuman. All this is a project of love.

In an experimental literary piece written by Surrealists Marcelle Ferry and André Breton, the two writers pose and answer a series of questions that demonstrate and rejoice in absurdity:

M. What is solitude?

B. It is the queen sitting at the base of the throne...

M. What is debauchery?

B. It is the place in a meadow where the grass suddenly becomes thicker. It can be seen from a long way off.”

- From “The 1934 Dialogue”

Just as the surrealists used techniques of displacement and dream logic to unsettle the reader’s relationship to “the real” – a conception of the world increasingly troubled by the chaos of modernity – so Gaga’s video for “Born This Way” employs a fragmentary narrative to unhinge the viewer’s conceptions of how the video’s narrative is to unfold, thereby unleashing the viewer into an elaborate dream fantasia, working to expand conceptions of what constitutes a “normal” experience.

 

Exquisite Corpse, (1934)

In a work from the same year – the drawing Exquisite Corpse (above) – Valentine Hugo, Paul Éluard, André Breton, and Nusch Éluard playfully approached fears about the limitations and possibilities of the human body. Gaga’s precise, gestural dance with the tattooed model Zombie Boy seems to echo and dramatize the sentiment of this piece: fear and longing intermingle in human encounters, decay is inevitable, loving play is the ward against the downsides of the complex human experience. Both the drawing and Gaga’s mirroring of and intimations with Zombie Boy make the monster body, something our bodies will no doubt become as their decay is inevitable – less of a curiosity to be feared and more of a form endowed with charm, to be embraced. The corpse – indicator of the fearsome unknown, the abject, lifelessness, a dead object or “thing” – is made into an exquisite subject, holder of agency, movement, life, capable of loving and being loved.

Gaga’s first visual representation of “Born This Way” was her Grammy performance in February 2011, during which she emerged from an egg-like capsule on stage. Aesthetically, this image seems to have derived from Salvador Dalí’s often used motif of new lives hatching out of eggs, such as in his sculpture “Birth of the New Man,” or painting “Geopolitical Child Watches the Birth of the New Man.” The sculpture itself is marked with the phrase “the new man has to free himself from the past.”

Salvador Dali, Birth of the New Man, (1943)

The beginning of Gaga’s visual expression of “Born This Way” depicts her being birthed, freeing herself from the past. However, by frequently relying upon an excavation of the visuals of the past, Gaga also reinvents the past for new purposes. Moving from the Grammy performance to the video, Gaga shifts from being birthed to giving birth, from being freed to freeing – at once inextricably bound to past, and attempting to liberate herself and others from its strictures and mistakes. The process is a painful one: the choice to love in the face of hardship is difficult.

 

Francis Bacon, Self Portrait, (1973)

The final image of the “Born This Way” video is Gaga’s face, in her zombie make-up, situated within a pink triangle, blowing a big pink bubblegum bubble, which seems about to pop. The monstrous face is reminiscent of the work of another artist Gaga has cited as an influence for the video, the painter Francis Bacon, and his dark self-portraits, which, though often read as horrific, he claimed to “not find disturbing.” By referencing Bacon’s presentation of a modified face as an monstrous and anxious, yet still human representation of a body, Gaga once again cites a dynamic process, this one concerned with how pathologized or stigmatized objects may become subjects.

Moving from the agonizing beginnings of life to the inevitabilities of corporeal decay, Gaga consistently grounds “Born This Way” in a tension of bodily pain. But the several gestures she makes to intermingle the pleasures and healing qualities of love with the certainties of pain and opposition manage to make “Born This Way” an expression of the dialectical: the past exists in the present, intimacy is expressed publicly, absurdity resides in the everyday. Binaries are not reified, they co-exist. By evoking the complex imagery of Surrealism, Gaga creates anything but a simplistic take on the powers of love and desire – love is transformative, imaginative, and continually born, a dream always to be realized, expressed, and affirming of life and the varieties of experience. The “Manifesto of Mother Monster” manifests, or gives birth, to contemplating love again and again.

Author Bio:

Willow Sharkey is an Art History graduate student at California State University, Chico. She’s interested in performance/time based art, and all things pop culture. You can read more of her writings at www.willowsharkey.com.

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Anatomy of Fashion

by Meghan Vicks

When asked during the May 2010 SHOWstudio interview which of the outfits created with Nicola Formichetti was her favorite, Lady Gaga replied,

From that evening [the 2009 Video Music Awards], my favorite piece that we made, created, and designed all together was the performance outfit, the one that bled on its own. As a piece in itself, as an art piece, the garment would bleed on its own, even on a mannequin. It’s such a strong statement of fashion and art. The clothing is alive, it tells a story, it lives and breathes – the soul of the work. That piece was very special. That’s my most favorite we have created.

There is certainly a living, bloody vein that has threaded – or, pulsed – its way throughout Lady Gaga’s ever-evolving fashions. Many of her outfits literally refuse to stay still, from her living dress to her smoking cigarette glasses; and many embody the transience that is so indicative of a living (read: mortal) thing – recall her raw meat dress that evokes a sense of imminent decay, or outfits fashioned entirely from plaits of human hair. Her fashion rejects the notion that clothes are inert, lifeless material, mere coverings for the human body; rather, they become one with Gaga’s flesh. “She’s sleeping,” Gaga told an interviewer, referencing her now-iconic hair bow. Yes, fashion sleeps, bleeds, grows, moves, smokes, and lives in Gaga’s world.

And now, it dies too. And not as a metaphor, as we might refer to the death of last year’s fashion trends. With the release of “Anatomy of Change” (directed by fashion photographer Mariano Vivanco), which previewed the latest collection from Mugler’s menswear that was influenced by the creative vision of Nicola Formichetti, and set to music made and remixed expressly for Mugler by Lady Gaga, it seems that Gaga’s forthcoming album Born This Way and its accompanying performance will feature fashion that dies just as much as it lives. Aesthetics of the waking dead. Life, death, and rebirth – all at once. We’re still dealing with monsters. But now the clothes revel in, or reveal, their capacity for death.

The clothes and images featured in “Anatomy of Change” bring death to the forefront. Formichetti has said that his vision for the collection focused upon “darkness, Berlin, rebirth, and death” (source). Emblematic of this vision is the video’s centerpiece – model Rico “Zombie Boy” Genest, who has lately become famous for having tattooed his entire body to look like a skeleton. The film’s first shot of Rico presents him covered with a black, latexy skin, which he peals away to reveal his skull, his ribcage, his muscular structure – all that is normally covered always by the skin, and most times, by fashion.

The image of Rico reveals the human body literally laid bare, and this is the template upon which Mugler and Formicetti construct their fashions. Think Lear: “Is man no more than this?” But in Mugler/Formicetti’s vision, bare, “unaccommodated man” becomes one with fashion. After all, the skin is literally removed, but the fashion is not. As if to say: fashion has become more a part of human anatomy than human skin. Human skin is superfluous, but fashion is essential – become part of the essence of the human body. Anatomy of change. Formicetti has said of Rico, “he’s like a literal, visual interpretation of what is under the skin as well as a celebration of what’s covering it”; notice that there’s no focus on the skin itself. The barrier is overwhelmed by what it pretends to divide.

Other images in “Anatomy of Change” reiterate this fusion of human anatomy and fashion, wherein fashion takes the place of the skin (as Rico’s tattooed body suggests that he is skinless). Rico, revealed ribcage, and black leather jacket.

Rico’s skull masked by pearls.

Rico, bare-chested, wrapped in a black veil that is reminiscent of a shroud.

But underneath that shroud, Rico’s body – tattooed entirely with signifiers of death – is vibrantly, even defiantly alive. The body reborn from fashion, perhaps. Or maybe, the borders between fashion and the body are now so blurred that we can no longer tell where the body ends and fashion begins. As much as these fashions are about darkness and death, and as much as Rico’s body is marked as a corpse, they are also, as Formichetti’s vision dictates, highly animated. The veils are constantly in flow, in movement, over and above Rico’s body; the strings of pearls appear to asphyxiate Rico, only to jolt him to life. As the lines between body and fashion become indistinguishable, so do the borders between life and death. Which brings us back to the notion of the monster, who so very comfortably resides in these border zones where traditional dichotomies collapse. This liminal place where distinctions between body and fashion, life and death, break down, this zone where the monster resides, is the ultimate creative place – where one can be born this way out of death, out of fashion, out of life, out of the body.

 

This notion – that fashion is a living, breathing, and now dying part of the human body – has been proclaimed by Lady Gaga every day since the very beginning of her career. Isn’t this partly what she means when she tells us, again and again, that Lady Gaga is no different than Stefani? That the image is her truth? And now, fashion is skin.

It is also shit, but shit refigured in a positive way. Gaga’s music for the video, a remixed version of the track “Scheiße” from her forthcoming album Born This Way, begins with Gaga proclaiming “I don’t speak German but I can if you like.” The lyrics that follow have been fiercely debated on various Internet forums. Many who claim to be natively fluent in the German language say that Gaga isn’t singing in German at all, but in some nonsensical language that mimics German. Others have said that she sings, “Ich bin mir absolut klar, Ich trag den Namen Monster, Wir sind alle Familie,” which translates to “I am absolutely clear, I bear the name monster, We are all family.” For the former group, Gaga’s lyrically – and literally – singing “shit” – senseless, ambiguous gobbledy-goop; words that don’t mean anything, other than non-sense. And for the latter group, well, isn’t she singing about metaphorical “shit”? Because monsters are traditionally the freaks and outcasts of society – all this shit that official life withstands. She declares that we are a family of monsters; we are a bunch of shits – or the shits. The song and the video, then, become lyrical and visual love letters to shit: “Scheiße, Scheiße be mine! Scheiße be mine!”

Which brings me to some parallels and predictions:

Prior to the official release of “Bad Romance,” Lady Gaga debuted the song at Alexander McQueen’s runway show at the Paris Fashion Week in 2009. A month later, Gaga released the video for “Bad Romance,” which, not surprisingly, featured many pieces from McQueen’s latest collection. Heels that turned Gaga’s feet into hooves, that crystallized her body, shaped her into praying mantis – clothes that Gaga doesn’t wear, but that become Gaga. Implode the line between the body and the garment – this is Gaga’s fashion.

January 2011. Gaga previews “Scheiße,” a confirmed track from her new album, at the Mugler menswear show. Once again, Paris Fashion Week. You know what I think? Jo Calderone’s going to appear in the video for “Born This Way,” become flesh in those Mugler fashions that so dominantly featured death. He has only existed as an image till now; as Cheryl Helm has written, Jo Calderone is thus far “a construct, a static image on a glossy page; or like an empty suit still bagged up and hanging in Gaga’s wardrobe closet.” And as my friend Roland Betancourt has suggested in an article to be published in Gaga Stigmata’s upcoming book project, Jo Calderone was “born this way” – this referring to the process of taking images – in a photo shoot for Vogue Hommes Japan, styled by Nicola Formichetti.  

If my gut is right (or, maybe I should say, if my fashion is right), Jo Calderone will become animate – or, incarnate – in the most paradoxical of ways: in these Mugler fashions that take their creative inspiration from death. He will be the image that kills death by materializing in it. He will be immanently, essentially born this way out of fashion, photo shoots, and music videos.

And he will be just as much Lady Gaga, as Lady Gaga is Stefani Germanotta.