Oh Jo, Make Me a Cyborg

By Samantha Cohen

The following is the fifth piece in our series on Lady Gaga’s “Yoü and I.” For previous analyses, click here.

This year for my August 16 birthday, Gaga released a fantastical-violent video-world containing my favorite things: cyborgs, “nature,” mythical creatures, dolls, Jo Calderone. Also on my birthday, a friend sent me excerpts of Martin Buber’s essay I and Thou. The umlaut on “Yoü and I”’s “u” makes me almost think that Gaga intends for me to connect her video with the German essay, and I’m going to. Also, I’m going to argue that Gaga creates a world in which real love involves violence and objectification; a world in which cyborg love is the best kind.

So okay, Buber says that an individual person has no spirit – spirit exists only in the connection between two people. And the lovers in “Yoü and I” do animate each other, make spirit together, etc., but also something else is happening here. Buber laments this something else. “All response,” he says, of a You to an I, “binds the You into the It-world” (1). The beloved, in other words, never escapes becoming an object.

But in “Yoü and I,” as opposed to in I and Thou, objectification and spirit-making are part of the same process of becoming.

The world of the “Yoü and I” video challenges the idea of the natural: who can say that the fields are natural while they’re traversed by a cyborg? Who can say that anything’s natural in a world that contains mermaids and phoenixes? In becoming an object in “Yoü and I,” the beloved takes her place in the world; she takes on a set of constraints within which to create, to act in a world of other constructions.

“Yoü and I,” obviously, is about relationships. We see a lot of them. I’m going to go relationship-by-relationship below, discussing the spirit-making/objectification in each.

CYBORG GAGA

The video opens on an already-object Gaga – Cyborg Gaga. Cyborg Gaga has obviously already gone through a relating process that has both turned her into an object and given her the spirit that enabled her to disappear (in order to make art?) for two years.

Cyborg Gaga sets up early the pain and the necessity of becoming an object. The lanyard straps of her high heels are cutting her, making grotesquely bruised and bleeding ankles, yet she’s returning to Nebraska for a man who wants her “in a corner of (his) bar with (these) high heels on.” She’s returned to re-undergo the bloody process of objectification. Cyborg Gaga craves to be an object, and thus to be re-animated.

The lyrics also reveal Cyborg Gaga’s desire to be an object in that she’s returning specifically in order to be her lover’s “baby doll.” In the world of this video, we see that baby dolls are not innocent. The baby doll in the video’s intro is displayed by a ghoulish ice cream truck driver, and Cyborg Gaga’s reactions are both to nuzzle the doll to her face, as well as to wince and cower from it. I read these opposite reactions as illustrative of Gaga’s desire to both be and possess a love object, as well as her fear of the painful process of transformation.

JO CALDERONE AND NATURE GAGA

So I want to argue that Jo Calderone is not a hetero man but a queer butch or else a drag king. Mostly my rubric for this is the same know-it-when-you-see-it approach that my high school English teacher claimed applied to both good writing and pornography, but also, I’ll turn to Judith Halberstam. Halberstam makes a distinction between “Butch Realness” and “Femme Pretenders” (classifications I might change to simply “butches” and “drag kings,” as I think drag needs some degree of camp in order to qualify, and also that it’s problematic to use some kind of “natural” butch- or femme-ness to make distinctions between “real” drag and “pretend” drag, but I’ll use Halberstam’s terms). Halberstam says that we can recognize “Femme Pretenders” by “heavy eyebrows…deliberately overdone” (check), and by poses that are “deliberately, loudly theatrical and even parodic” (check, check). Jo’s beer bottle throwing, snarl, shoulder action, and anachronistic greaser style mark him, I think, as queer. Along with the spelling of his name, the typically female Jo rather than the male Joe.

The queerness of Jo and Nature Gaga’s relationship is important in this video because it demonstrates that objectification is part of all love relationships, not only heterosexual/heterosexist ones – that feminism will not lead us to a world without human-objects, nor should we want it to, for reasons I’ll get to soon. Objectification between Nature Gaga and Jo comes, though, through consensual BDSM, which is not fully enacted here, but is clearly suggested, I think,

We see Gaga’s consent in this relationship when she slaps Jo’s hand away playfully, showing her agreement to enter into a relationship of slapping/grabbing, as well as asserting her agency not to be slapped or grabbed. The violence in this relationship is ironic and playful, while also doing the necessary objectifying work.

Jo, too, is aware of his own object status. He poses and postures, greases his hair and rolls up his sleeves for Nature Gaga. (And for us. Mm.)

So here’s why, according to Donna Haraway, we shouldn’t want not to be objects: Haraway describes the cyborg condition as a shift from “white capitalist patriarchy” to “informatics of domination” within “a post-gender world” (3). Her A Cyborg Manifesto critiques the feminism of the 70s that would have goddess-women frolicking in a field, howling at the moon. The earthy nature goddesses in “Yoü and I” may be free, but ultimately they’re prancing in circles in boring nightgowns, incapable of real action in the object/cyborg-world. By opting out of objecthood, they’re opting out of personhood. They barely interact with each other, making them spiritless, Buberianly speaking. They do not sing.

Through objectification and playful domination, it seems, Jo Calderone has rescued Nature Gaga from her fate of field-prancing and brought her into the It-world, which is where she is able both to have a love relationship, and to make music. We see, near the almost-BDSM moment, Nature Gaga running fierce and determined toward the camera, away from the coven of goddesses. Also just after that moment, Gaga is playing the piano with more animation (spirit) than before, and her body movements take on a robotic (cyborgian) quality.

VIRGIN BRIDE GAGA AND HER HUNK

Let’s contrast the kind of objectification and domination between Jo and Nature Gaga with those practices between the video’s traditionally patriarchal couple: Virgin Bride Gaga and her Betrothed.

The wide-eyed and worshipful Virgin Bride Gaga is being treated as an object, but she isn’t aware of her status as such. Virgin Bride’s Betrothed unwraps her possessively, engulfingly, but Virgin Bride Gaga hasn’t consented, as Nature Gaga has, to the terms of her objectification – she’s too innocent to be capable of consent. Though the bride’s Hunk enacts the least amount of physical violence on his love object of any of the video’s lovers, he is somehow the creepiest. There is no question of future violence toward Virgin Gaga, and not seeing it only makes it more menacing. This video has already established a world in which no one is innocent. Virgin Bride demonstrates that innocence is not a thing to strive for, as innocence only means surrendering to objectification without really consenting.

Besides being childlike, Virgin Bride is ghosty and ethereal. She’s see-through. And I see her see-through wedding as a critique of the flimsy love narrative propagated by popular media – a critique of the idea of love as cute and non-violent and transcendent. The sweet, transcendent love between a virgin bride and a strapping hunk does not exist in the actual world of this video: in this video-world, in order to transcend, you have to become a ghost.

RELATIONSHIPS IN THE BARN

For me, the world of the barn is a world of metaphor, an unconscious world. Here, there are more incarnations of Gaga than I can confidently count (it’s unclear who is the same self and who is Other) and time passes nonlinearly, as in dreams. (Is the black-haired Gaga in a water chamber, for example, pre-mermaid Yuyi, or a failed attempt at mermaid making, or something else all together?) Is the male lover person creating or caring for these hybrid Gagas? The barn represents visually and non-logically what is happening in all the video’s relationships: object-creation, unspeakable violence, tenderness, love, myth-infusing, hybridity.

CLOSING THOUGHTS & CYBORG GAGA, AGAIN

Buber says, “Only silence toward the you…leaves the You free. Where Buber seems to present this leaving-the-beloved-in-silence as a non-option (or a tragic option?), in the world of “Yoü and I” the leaving, optimistically, is an option. We see the Is in this video leave their Yous free via silence here: Jo postures and puffs and looks at the sky, leaving Nature Gaga free to experiment with her music. When her lover leaves, Mermaid Yuyi flips her tail excitedly and has little moments of exultation in her new objecthood. And Cyborg Gaga has left for two years, she says, imaginably to be in a free and silent state, but is now returning for more objectifying love. Solo freedom, it seems, is the other side of object-love, but the free in this video are relation-made objects already. In this world, Spirit-imbuing objectification-love can happen, and then silent freedom, in cycles that range from a song bar to two years.

At the end of the video, we see Cyborg Gaga’s face, and it is the first face in the video that we trust, that isn’t menacing or empty in some way, and we realize that this is because we, the viewer-lovers, have created Cyborg Gaga. She is our object. By watching, we are guilty of this process of objectification-love, but also we are responsible for making Gaga possible – for entering into the relationship that makes the spirit by which she creates.

Works Cited:

1) Buber, Martin, and Ronald Gregor. Smith. I and Thou. New York, NY: Scribner, 2000. Print.

2) Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. London [u.a.: Duke Univ., 2006. Print.

3) Haraway, Donna Jeanne. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. 2009. Print.

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HER AND ME

By Devin O’Neill & Mrs. O’Neill

The following piece is the second analysis in our series on Lady Gaga’s video for “Yoü and I”. For the first piece, click here; for the second, here.

We’ll begin colloquially, since the video takes place in the country.

Having little bits of metal implanted in your face and arm fucking hurts. In fact, the entire video hurts. Even the shot of her high heels looks painful, though nothing’s involved but dirt, grass and shoes. Maybe that’s saying something about high heels. Maybe that’s saying something about a lot of things.

Women are cyborgs. People in relationships are cyborgs.

Donna Haraway basically seemed to think that anything that could be parsed as two interlocking systems could be deemed cybernetic, because the distinction between the “natural” and the “artificial” didn’t mean much to her. But we see the violation of the body’s boundaries in this video and in general, in terms of cybernetics, as painful. Robocop did not look comfortable, and neither does Gaga. What does that mean about falling in love?

These implants aren’t the only painful situations in the video. There are allusions to restraint and suffocation – a mermaid outside of the water might have trouble breathing. Those prominent gills have nothing to draw in. She’s being taken care of, but a huge proportion of the scenes in the video look very uncomfortable.

There are two notable exceptions: her wedding scene and her scene with Jo Calderone.

These are worth looking at, firstly to discover if they actually are exceptions.

I can’t think about Jo without thinking about Carl Jung. The Anima and Animus, psychic shadow-personalities created from the repressed femininity in males and the repressed masculinity in females, that act at gateways, guides to the deep areas of the subconscious. The essentialist ideas implicit here cause problems, and I wouldn’t be so on board with them except for the problematic nature of Jo himself.

He’s male, and this makes him somehow different from all of Gaga’s other creations. He received an enormous amount of attention for this. Why?

Let me put this another way: Jo throws into stark relief the fact that all of Gaga’s other images and personas, while infinitely mutable, have all been decidedly female. She isn’t as amorphous as we thought. There’s something about men.

But here, at last, she gives us a man. And she has a very special relationship with this man.

Both Jung and Aliester Crowley would argue that an individual’s marriage to herself is one of the most self-actualized accomplishments in human psychic life. And that’s what Gaga’s giving us here. The force inside you that makes you fall in love, that makes the whole world seem aglow and full of butterflies? That comes from you, and gets projected onto the love-object. You can have access to that feeling whenever you want.

Is Gaga in love with Jo Calderone?

One would sculpt a male identity based on a male ideal. A possible answer is “yes”.

So we have her and Jo loving and doving in the cornfield. But we also have a very literal wedding taking place, with a gorgeous model, this acknowledgement of the other.

This other, though, is performing surgeries and violations of pornographic proportions on the pain-nerved body of our ingénue. The aggressive imagery stands in stark contrast to the upbeat rock and roll of the track. Why all the violence?

We have, here, the narrative of human love as process. Because Gaga understands something important about love, something blindingly obvious but something that often gets left out of the media’s portrayals and our own perceptions.

Love is pain.

Her example-narrative points us not to a single moment of love, the happy moment, the moment of butterflies, but to the entirety of romantic engagement as a process viewed in four-dimensional space. Five dimensional, even, because of all the layering of metaphor. Consummation is thrust in our face at the same moment as agony, and it’s all soundtracked by a rousing stomper of an uplifting track that closes Gaga’s religious statement of an album. She says, watch me get surgery performed, watch me experience pain and suffocation, and watch me do it triumphantly. Watch me get married, too. Watch me do it all at the same time.

Love and mating are engagements in which both systems involved must open to the interaction. Parts mesh, gears grind, and things get snapped off. Love is violence and collision; I’m sure Ballard would agree. Love is the creation of the cyborg, the amalgamation; it’s the ultimate surgery on our subjectivity. This is the surgery that’s being performed in the video, and whether the interaction is between Gaga and the other or Gaga and herself is ultimately immaterial – when say that we must come to love ourselves, the violence of a bifurcation has already taken place.

The oxygen mask offered to the mermaid. The splitting of the self. The longing, and the eternal gap, and the tiny, glorious moments of consummation we get. These processes are the reward for living and loving. The processes themselves. The entire picture, and the slow disassembly, throughout our lives, of the chrysalis of ourselves, the imprisoning neurosis of our own individuality. Learn to love, and learn to die. Be ready.

Grant Morrison has declared, in lectures and in writing, the end of the individual in favor of a kind of willful schizophrenia, the development of multiple personalities to avoid the ego’s calcification and lack of options toward being. What a charming idea: two of those multiple personalities could get married.

You can marry yourself.

But you can also marry somebody else. The meshing is never easy, and you do it at peril of the disruption of your current system of self. But this pain, this surgery, is celebrated by Gaga. This song is triumphant and liberating and the video should be viewed the same way; we should marvel at this gorgeous violation of becoming, we should glory in the dirty obscenities of love as thoroughly as we celebrate its beauty. The video forces us to confront both sides of the coin at once. It’s a tesseract diagram of how to love, and we should not just examine it. We should go beyond that, and examine our own lives, loves, and pains in the same way. In five-dimensional hyperspace, the way they actually exist. They’re beautiful that way.

Photographs and video from Devin and Mrs. O'Neill's honeymoon album.

Author Bios:

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

Mrs. O'Neill is a psycho.

Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.

Click here to “like” Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.

Ga Ga Glossolalia

By Devin O’Neill

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

My problem with critical theory in a nutshell is that attempts at rationally deconstructing art are inevitably hamstrung by the fact that if what the artist meant to say could be expressed in denotative and linear language, the art wouldn’t have had to be made in the first place.

Damien Hirst’s diamond-covered skull is not saying anything explicit. It’s not saying “capitalism is death” or conversely “money is everything.” It can be analyzed after the fact, but that’s what criticism is: autopsy. That’s all. It has very little to do with the creative impulse, which is at least potentially irrational, a disruptive fact that the structured, source-citing arguments of critical discourse seem to skirt by simply not talking about it. I could attempt to write antirational criticism, but then it would just get called art and it would be published somewhere else. The skull is a meaning-bomb, not a meaning. This bit of an interview should clearly elucidate the gap between the critical and artistic processes. Granted, it’s only one approach, but the point is that it can’t be discounted as an alternative way of envisioning creative discourse:

There have been some strong reactions in the LGBT community to Gaga’s presumption at recording an “anthem.” Criticism of the anthem’s message, of course, must presuppose an understanding of what the anthem is saying. There are messages blazoned in big block letters across the song (the genetic essentialism of the “born this way” idea; the direct mentioning of queer subpopulations in the lyrics), and they’re taken at face value. These are the messages, by and large, being reacted to by the “Gaga doesn’t speak for me” demographic. To say with such emphasis that she doesn’t is to presume that on some level she’s trying to (and it’s to presume that she isn’t “you”; the disinclusion of Gaga as a member of the LGBT community in popular rhetoric continually confuses me. She’s hard, in my mind, to see as traditionally, heteronormatively straight. She’s at least genderqueer).

Reacting to a song and performance like “Born This Way” with straightforward, politicized analysis somehow seems a more cogent and aware method of systematized thinking than to react to a Captain Beefheart song the same way would be (this would be seen as reductive). But Gaga deceives (lies): because her lyrics are simple sculptures, with visible edges and directions, people give up on further interpretive depth. Is this their laziness, her design, an accident of the work’s construction, or some combination of the three? Whose failure or success is it that people don’t look closely at the ragged edges of these simple shapes?

This tension is brought to a head by the “Born This Way” video, and the possible trajectories and rhetorical touchstones embedded in these images bend the entire conversation about interpretive depth over and fuck it in the ass. We are experiencing pop mysticism here, and mysticism is generally (duh)ssociated with the transcendence of binaries. In addition, the texture and language of STYLE is a gateway to the infinite, explosive to analysis: since analysis involves a breaking-up of something into its component parts for a review of its functionality (from the Greek analusis), how small do we break up the globally and laterally affective images in this video? Do we meditate on the material of the threads in her birthing outfit? Opine on the pink color of her hair? Count the number of times her cunt-gun fires a bullet? Here we descend into the fractal apophenia of artistic psychosis, and not even William Blake can save us. In a stylistic exercise, which Gaga excels at, the infinite is in every thing.

But paradoxically, many of my colleagues have voiced frustration with regards to the reductiveness of the song and video: they don’t want to be a Gaga “clone,” they don’t want to be “born this way” – they want to transcend their biology. This discussion of transcendence of the biological is grounded in the static nature of the biological – an illusion. They themselves reinforce the binary by rebelling against its “nonexistence,” and in the process, blind themselves to the fractally textured potentiality for interpretation latent in the song and video. She tries to tell them – the birth is infinite. They don’t hear her, and they don’t hear Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto either. Gaga’s embrace of technology and augmentation of the body is a transhumanistic exercise. Her music could not exist without machinery, and she herself is to be modified and remixed: here she’s remixed her very self into two (un)equal and (non)opposite versions. The idea that she could be preaching biological immutability in the lyrics to this song is an assertion ignorant of her entire body of work and creative methodology.

Being free of prejudice in the larger sense is a necessarily mystical act, since it implies a shedding of the constraints of biosubjectivity: regardless of our liberation ideology, we are limited brains with limited perceptual and praxical equiptment. We achieve this goal of freedom from any prejudice only in death (if then). She is positioning god-symbols; lines of progression and worship, not attainable goals or objects. The infinite is integral to her practice and the infinite is not handled well by politicizing critics, whose positions require counterpositions structured in AT LEAST binary arrangements. Is this video an argument for binaries or against them? Shut up. It isn’t an argument at all. Argument implies limitedness, and she’s babbling the glossolalia of the forever, both verbally and visually.

The capital H-I-M in the song functions as a lighting rod for this mystical experience, just as all god-metaphors do. Further objections have been raised about the religious, and therefore presumably conservative, undertones of the song. Again, this perspective willfully blinds itself to her words, her images, basically all the rest of her art. That this is seen as a valid critical response is baffling to me. Contradiction and complication are Gaga’s constant companions, at the left and right hand of the mother. These are the weapons with which she continually deflects reduction, and in so doing, keeps us (and the media) interested.

Therefore, the only proper way to engage with Gaga’s work is to worship her like a deity. By this, I mean: regard her as an infinite entity proffering a trajectory toward transcendence. This act does not have to be mindless (not to discount mindlessness), it can be a purposeful and creative exploration of the potential of religiosity. This may be the source of some of the conflict between the little monsters and their critics: they see us as fanatics, and we are proud and ironic about our fanaticism. Or are we? Their bafflement only fuels us, just as bafflement must fuel the Phelps family or the denizens of 4chan.org. As Grace Slick said: you gotta find somebody to love. Or, at least, it’s a lot of fun. She is our Mother in this way, in her new video: a simulated, stimulated entity that offers us boundless connectivity and license for intimate joy and, at the same time, boundless freedom and the concurrent violence and pain of division and isolation. The binary symbols in the video are symptoms of the fact that in our current, un-ascended form, these trajectories are seen as antithetical, unable to be unified. But in the video, they are unified in Gaga. She does not need our linear reasoning to enable herself to exist as both.

So: who is anyone to assert that the linear, logical pursuit of an ideology of liberation in this context is a more valid critical method than doing a bunch of MDMA and just dancing to the song? I ask this as a serious question.

Author Bio:

Devin O’Neill is a writer, performance artist, PR practitioner, and compulsive liar (what’s the difference?) based in Long Beach, CA. He enjoys things he shouldn’t, on purpose, and tries to get other people to enjoy them too. Some of his projects can be found at http://www.popocalypse.com/ and at http://devinoneill.blogspot.com/.

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What's Paglia Got to Do With It?

By Jack Halberstam

Oh no! It was just as a new semester began, as the football season kicked off and right when Jersey Shore moved to Miami…right when Justin Bieber was adjusting his diaper for the VMA’s and the Jackass crew had figured out new ways to showcase male moronism in 3D…indeed just as Gaga chopped up her filet mignon to wear the next night at the VMAs, just then, someone let Camille Paglia out of her box.

Once a decade, Paglia, an acid tongued Susan Sontag wannabe, rents space in some national newspaper to tell us that we are all wrong about everything. Usually we are all wrong about a cultural icon we all love…or else we are all wrong about an entire movement of theory and philosophy, or we are simply wrong about our historical moment, the meaning of sex, the politics of gender, Madonna, Italians, John Donne, lesbians, drag queens, the economy, universities, cultural revolt…and now, we find out, **newsflash** we were all wrong about Lady Gaga. Yup, we were wrong. We all thought that Lady Gaga was actually doing something interesting, cultivating new combos of avant-garde innovation and popular recycling. We thought she sounded good, looked even better and straddled the divide between Warhol and whimsy while flashing her notoriously ambiguous meat purse. Many of us found her musically interesting, culturally thrilling and inordinately fabulous. We liked her in leather, in chains, in a wheelchair, in bed, in a sandwich, in a pussy wagon, on the phone, in jail, under meat, we liked her but then we found out that, well, we were wrong.

Lady Gaga, I learned from Camille Paglia, is just a copycat who latches onto a generation of glazed eyed internet clones and exploits its incapacity to think without an Iphone app at hand or to know anything without a twitter feed. She is a rich girl playing at being marginal, “a diva of déjà vu,” less sexy than a drag queen, less talented than Elton John, less charming than Lily Allen (is that possible??), and a “rootless” pretender who manipulates her fans, the “little monsters,” into pathetic displays of fanatical admiration. Gaga, for Paglia, represents the end of culture, the end of civilization, the end of truth, values and meaning, the end of sex, and the triumph of a kind of Baudrillardian age of the simulacra (only she wouldn’t cite Baudrillard because he is French and therefore…wrong).

In a kind of counter-Haraway move (think Haraway of “Cyborg Manifesto” rather than Haraway of “Companion Species Manifesto”), Paglia argues that we have lost touch with what is real, true and good in our mania for media manipulation, video games and cell phones. If Haraway recognized an interpenetration of humanity and technology in the digital age that was exciting and wondrous (even as it was also exploitative and dangerous), Paglia, sees, predictably, a manufactured public realm populated by media puppets and their passive and stupid fans. If Lady Gaga’s supporters have recognized in her a newish formula of femininity, phones and desire, Camille Paglia sees only same-old same-old or, in her words “the exhausted end of the sexual revolution.”

Like a bad drag queen imitation of Allan Bloom, the prophet who preached the end of culture just two decades ago in The Closing of the American Mind, Paglia worries that “the younger generation” is missing out on all the really important cultural texts that made up her own education. The Iphone generation take pleasure in cheap imitations when they could be thrilled by “real” culture, i.e. canonical English literature; they are literate in texting but hopeless at real expression and they are not even original in their forms of rebellion. Paglia has always seen it all before and she never tires of sending her readers back to school circa 1950 to bone up on their John Donne, Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson. Like a manic T.S. Eliot guarding the “great tradition” and prowling around its archive with claws out, Paglia reminds one of the schoolmarm host of the British quiz show The Weakest Link. Ann Robinson became famous for dispatching her victims on the show with the immortal words: “you are the weakest link, good bye.” And it is this tradition of learning (rote memorization of the tried and true authors memorialized by new criticism) that Paglia returns to time and time again. Why the popular media returns to Paglia time and time again is another question! But probably the answer has something to do with a kind of media masochism, a desire to be spanked for not paying attention or for succumbing to banal mind candy. But at any rate, when Paglia does come out of her box, we get to watch a completely unselfconscious right-wing libertarian blurt out high-minded nonsense while thumbing her nose at all the other academic drones who believe in crazy shit like “the construction of gender,” the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction and the mediated nature of reality.

Paglia knows better. She knows that women are women, feminists are stupid, communication networks have replaced real intimacies and Madonna was ripped off. What she doesn’t seem to know is that all cultural production consists of wild combinations of the new and the old, the borrowed and the bold, the real and the fabricated. She also doesn’t seem to know that every generation must have its icons and the tired cycle of oedipal denunciations within which older people sneer at younger people’s tastes never does change anything. She also does not seem to know that Madonna was the queen of rip offs and that her cultural borrowings were almost never acknowledged and often fell within a long tradition of white absorptions of Black cultural innovations.

Many people have noted that Lady Gaga lives in the long shadow of Madonna but noting this is not the same as totally collapsing two performers from very different historical and cultural milieux. Weird then that Paglia condemns Lady Gaga for her “poker face” when she adored Madonna’s performance in 1990 in “Justify My Love” because it confirmed that “we are nothing but masks.” Strange that Paglia charges Gaga with “obsessively trafficking in twisted sexual scenarios” while casting Madonna’s Christian upbringing as inspiring because “without taboos, there can be no transgression.” Bizarre that Paglia is so taken with Bowie’s androgyny and Warhol’s relation to the marketplace but can find not a single shred of glamour or talent in Lady Gaga’s gender-blending and articulate performances.

Ultimately, what Paglia thinks about Gaga is about as interesting as what Sarah Palin thinks about feminism or what Glenn Beck thinks of Eminem. More important is the issue of what narratives about the popular, the avant-garde, innovation and cultural appropriation make it into the mainstream media. And somehow, Paglia always seems to find an open page ready to receive her rants, her crazed generalizations (“most of Gaga’s worshippers seem to have had little or no contact with such powerful performers as Tina Turner or Janis Joplin”), her nutty projections about a generation, a culture, a movement. While Paglia is stuck in 1990, still spinning her narratives about atrophied affect, cultural decline and sexual inertia, we have actually entered new debates, developed new vocabularies and in creative interactions with new media, we have all of us become little monsters, chasing our own gaga urges and moving steadily further and further from the modernist splits between high and low, good and evil, sex and death.


Author Bio:  Judith "Jack" Halberstam is Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at USC. Halberstam teaches courses in queer studies, gender theory, art, literature and film.

Halberstam is the author of Female Masculinity, The Drag King Book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters and a new book from NYU Press titled In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives.