MtN’s Tour de Negative Femininities

By Samantha Cohen

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

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

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

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

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

Angelina's home-chopped bangs!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author Bio:

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

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Into the Groove of Lady Gaga’s “The Edge of Glory,” a Phenomenological Inquiry

By Danielle Pafunda

This is the first in a series of pieces that analyze the video for “Edge of Glory.” Each day for the next week, we’ll be posting an essay that explores a specific aspect of the video.

Live out your fantasy here with me

I know it’s gauche and boring to compare Lady Gaga to Madonna at this point in Gaga’s career, but relax. I won’t tell you Gaga’s work is like Madonna’s. I’m going to tell you Gaga updates and completes those pop projects Madonna began over two decades ago. She’s not conducting homage, ripping off, or riffing off. She’s finishing the job. “Born This Way” takes “Express Yourself” to its logical extreme, its extreme (un)natural conclusion, “Judas” cracks open the dark Kinder egg “Like a Prayer” left in our garden, and “The Edge of Glory,” our current concern, gives fans what “Into the Groove” ultimately squirms away from.

The video for “Get Into the Groove” uses footage from the 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan wherein Madonna plays a troubled party girl and Rosanna Arquette plays the repressed, temporarily amnesiac (read: zero interiority) suburban housewife. While the film and video invite fans to imagine themselves as Arquette, trying on the elusive star’s magical jacket, brushing against sex and danger they’d never experience as themselves, the project refuses to dissolve its fourth wall, to allow the fan to become the fantasy. It keeps a squeamish distance, insisting instead that the fan remain a lower Other, a voyeuristic nonentity.

Only when I'm dancing can I feel this free

At night I lock the doors, where no one else can see.

Here’s what Lady Gaga’s “The Edge of Glory” video hasn’t got: mutations, aliens, monsters, surgically enhanced cheekbones, twitching, Frankenstein body stutters, mucoid goo, doctors, headpieces, prison guards, fey lovers, poison, intergalactic birth machines, Dante-esque tectonic underground hellscapes, guns, machineguns, boobguns, clones, costume changes, motorized apostles, metallic crustaceans, pink hair, blow-up orcas for faking making-out, sexy men in cartoon wolf heads passed out on toilets, Beyonce, back-up dancers, a narrative.

Here’s what it has: a fire escape, a front stoop, a window, a high-octane smoke-machine, St. Elmo’s style saxophone hair tossing.[i]

So why even watch it? Gaga’s dance moves reference ballet, new wave, fly girl, Cher-strut, and Singing in the Rain. This is the kind of dancing one does by herself in front of the mirror when she, in Butler’s terms, “identifies not with an empirical person but with a fantasy…with the posture of some imagined relation whom one also imagines to be the recipient of love.” This is the dance you do by yourself with the imaginary body of your hopeless crush. This is the dance you do when no one’s home and you hold the doorframe and thrust your torso through it like into your lover’s arms. This is the kind of dance you do that feels big in your body, but would look small, ridiculous, would shame you if anyone caught it on film. You strip off articles of clothing, accessories, you shake out your hair which isn’t actually the long porno hair let down from the sultry librarian’s bun, but just your hair. You don’t want to open your bedroom window and leap right out so everyone can see the big thrill pounding through you because the thrill simply won’t manifest on your body, and, for another thing, Butler again, “the soul is precisely what the body lacks; hence that lack produces the body as its other and its means of expression…a figure of interior psychic space inscribed on the body as a social signification that perpetually renounces itself as such.” To lay bare your soul on your ugly body is to admit or accept that your soul is ugly, is plain, is small and disappointing. The edge of glory is in fact not an edge at all. You’re just a little person having a big feeling. The abyss you intuit is actually just a ten-foot drop. At worst, at best, you’ll get a goose egg on your forehead.

I’m tired of dancing here all by myself,

Tonight I wanna dance with someone else

But that doesn’t mean I have to go out. Better: open that interior window. Go deeper in, bring the Other with you. Take the body into the soul, take the fantasy inward. Through Gaga’s window, we see the brightly lit stage. We see the world in which her body is augmented by hyperbolic costumes and exquisite dancer-bodies, by buckets of blood and massive machines, her soul staged on her body, not revealed there. To go out the window is to go in. To leave the stage, enter the sentimental daydream of Gaga at home, face scrubbed of foreign objects (if not make-up), in her undies (if metal studded leather undies). Where the narrative would normally insist that the singer must break away from her fans to be alone with her man, like Tiffany tries and fails to do in the 1987 “I Think We’re Alone Now,” Gaga breaks away from the stage to be alone with us.

Gonna get to know you in a special way

This doesn't happen to me every day

Don't try to hide it love wears no disguise

I see the fire burning in your eyes

It’s not entirely accurate to say that “The Edge of Glory” has no narrative, but it does lack Gaga’s customary enhanced narrative. This video runs on the song’s narrative, stripped down. We’re alone tonight. The edge is metaphorical, the risk won’t kill us. It’s almost cheerful. I might mangle Butler to my own ends, observing that it’s not a fantasy Gaga has, nor a fantasy her fans have, nor do any of us live this fantasy. Instead, the fantasy exists between us. It conditions and constructs the specificity of the fan’s relation to Lady Gaga.

In poetry, the confessional works like this: it draws the reader close with its breathy promise of a secret. The reader, though wholly aware that she holds in her hands a book that anyone can purchase, enters the space of fantasy wherein the poet (often dead many years!) looks into her eyes and spills secrets for her alone. Somehow, it convinces. Phenomenologically speaking, who am I to say this intimacy isn’t real? Though the poem is widely available, perhaps the aura that buzzes between reader and poem is where the real fantasy work takes place. Perhaps the artificiality makes the stage door clearer, shows the reader right where to enter. Perhaps when the reader puts in, she fantasizes the poet just as the poet fantasized her, and these fantasies converge, actual coitus.

Live out your fantasy here with me

Just let the music set you free

Touch my body, and move in time

Now I know you're mine

For those of us who prefer building an identity through monster-vision, who watch Gaga videos for entertainment and blueprints, this video disappoints, but we’re not her entire audience. We’re probably not even the bulk of her audience. Lady Gaga’s fans asked for “The Edge of Glory” video, and she right quick made it for them – a modular fantasy. An open door symbiotic fantasy, one that doesn’t exclude, but includes the fan. It’s not fancy, and it’s not for each fan, but perhaps for those who are at sea in their affection for the star. She takes each one to this interior space. Staged, kitschy in its production value, referential in its urban sterility, one enters the video with her guard down. But when Gaga leaves the window frame, she walks toward her fans, not away from them. What brims in the aura between fan and video will largely depend on the fan’s ability and willingness to suspend disbelief, and that fan’s investment in the star herself. Here is an opportunity to see Lady Gaga scaled to fit, fit our screens, our imaginations. Maybe anyone could be Lady Gaga in this video, or join Lady Gaga in this video. One could move from fan to fantasy. Further, if an identity is constituted through a fantasy, then Gaga’s issuing a thank you. You fan, have constituted me. It’s just the two of us, here. I think about you when I dance alone.

---

[i] The actual saxophone playing will remind us of our pure-of-heart Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band days because it’s Clarence Clemons who’s the Bleeding Gums Murphy to Lisa Simpson or Léon to Mathilda in The Professional. He’s an unlikely guardian, but ultimately one who can better protect and guide our young heroine than any institutionally approved daddy. He won’t let her give up or get shot, but he also won’t lock her away to keep her safe or consider her virginal (vaginal) property. When they sit side by side on the front stoop we get a naive sense of well-being; a hint of Sesame Street, a hint of “Jenny from the Block” otherwise foreign to the Gaga oeuvre.

Author Bio:

Danielle Pafunda is author of Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (Noemi Press), My Zorba (Bloof Books), Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press), and the forthcoming tales of a mommy vampire Manhater (Dusie Press Books). With Alissa Nutting she’s at work on a collaborative short fiction collection about sad animals, dead pearls, and salty carnivals. She’s on the board of directors at VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and teaches gender & women’s studies and English at the University of Wyoming.

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Like Madonna

By Connie A. Lopez-Hood

          for Lady Gaga

She wears horns
She is hatched

She is (not) like Madonna
She is (not) like Beyonce
She is (not) like Christina
She is not like Brittany

She was hanging from a cross
She was dripping lots of blood
She was dripping, draping meat

She is Dada
She is daddy
She is (not) mommy
She is Gaga
She is gagging
She is super(ficial)

She is assemblage
She is (dis)assembled
She is abject
She is eject
She is reject(ed)

She is gendered
She engenders
She is androgyne
She is a(borted) fetus
She is probably chromosome

She is covered with costume
She is covered with custom
She is covered in carnal
She is (not) herself

She wore horns
She was hatched

She hangs (from) a cross
She is (not) like Madonna
She drips blood
She drapes meat
She is (not) (her)(self)

Author Bio:

Connie A. Lopez-Hood is currently working on her MFA in Poetry at Cal State University San Bernardino. She serves as a Poetry editor for Ghost Town literary magazine. Her work appeared in Our Stories Literary Journal as a runner-up for the Gordon Flash Fiction Contest and is forthcoming in Polari Journal's April issue. She is currently working on a chapbook collaboration entitled Operation: Lifted Flowers, with two other Inland Empire poets.

I Wanna Take A Ride On Your Disco Egg! - "Born This Way" Preliminary Thoughts & Discussion

By Roland Betancourt, Eddie McCaffray, and Meghan Vicks

Meghan Vicks: Let’s begin with our thoughts about the song “Born This Way.” How does the song’s form work with, or against, the song’s message? In what ways does the song follow in the tradition of “celebrate yourself” anthems past, and in what ways does it break from that tradition? How does the song compare to Lady Gaga’s music from The Fame and The Fame Monster, and what does it indicate about the direction of Gaga’s project? I’m sure we’ll come up with more points and questions to analyze regarding the song, but for now let’s start here.

Eddie McCaffray: What I noticed immediately about the song were the lyrics - they make a point of saying exactly what it is people are accepting about themselves and others. There’s a long tradition of anthemic love-yourself songs that, for better or for worse, don’t make any explicit reference to anything of which someone might be intolerant. That’s fine, but for me it comes off as an attempt to cash in on all the good press and good vibes of such a song without risking the alienation of any potential part of a fan base. But this song isn’t like that - it makes references to God’s acceptance, to a “different lover,” and turns the LGBT(A) roll-call into a real litany. In a similar manner, when Gaga says “black, white, or beige” she’s departing from the cliche (which is to sing something like “black, white, or blue”) and taking the issue of race seriously. There’s room for joy and power and celebration, but there isn’t room for levity. It’s stunning that she could fit “. . . gay, straight, or bi, lesbian, transgendered . . .” into an up-tempo club-banger, and it’s wonderful that she wrote a song about tolerance that intolerant people can’t sing.

Besides that, I think the pretty-simple nature of the song sort of goes along with the simplicity of the message. It has a pounding beat and some very fun synth stylings flowered around it, but musically as well as lyrically the song is about just one thing. I also like the implications of “there ain’t no other way”; there’s a somewhat-understated note of militancy in the song. The song isn’t afraid of making very clear just what it expects people to accept, and it isn’t afraid of saying that intolerance is not an option.

And, finally, the intro seems like she is extending a hand to the religious community. “It doesn’t matter if you love him or capital H-i-m,” as some have suggested, is a nod to Christians. The song isn’t about attacking anything besides intolerance, and if your religion can pass that very basic litmus test, then this is an anthem for you to celebrate your identity with as well - there are people out there who have their sights set on organized religion, people who aren’t treating it fairly just like some members of some organized religions aren’t treating others fairly. That’s not ok with this song either.

Meghan Vicks: Immediately upon the song’s release, Twitter exploded with people drawing comparisons between Madonna’s “Express Yourself”/“Vogue” and “Born This Way,” and many criticized Gaga for copying Madonna. While I don’t think that the song is an exact copy or blend of “Express Yourself” and “Vogue,” I do think that Gaga is purposely taking cues from Madonna (as she is always taking cues from those that came before her), and placing vocal and lyrical nods to her throughout “Born This Way.” That Gaga adopts and adapts what her predecessors have done is no secret; in a recent interview with Vogue she said,

It’s not a secret that I have been inspired by tons of people. David Bowie and Prince being the most paramount in terms of live performance. I could go on and on about all of the people I have been compared to - from Madonna to Grace Jones to Debbie Harry to Elton John to Marilyn Manson to Yoko Ono - but at a certain point you have to realize that what they are saying is that I am cut from the cloth of performer, that I am like all of those people in spirit. I was born this way.

She was born this way - from a genealogy of musicians, artists, and performers; significantly, she was cut - organically fashioned - from the cloth of the performer. “Born This Way” is no different; it’s also a product, or the offspring, of a long genealogy of anthemic, empowering songs that call on people to express themselves, love themselves, be themselves. So with “Born This Way,” Gaga’s rewriting Madonna’s message for a more radical agenda. As Gaga sings in the song’s opening lines, “My momma told me when I was young that we’re all superstars,” so Madonna sang nearly two decades earlier, “You’re a superstar, yes that’s what you are!” Madonna, of course, is a type of mother figure for all pop-starlets; when Gaga sings “we’re all superstars,” she’s singing as one of a generation who grew up listening to Madonna’s message from “Vogue” and “Express Yourself.” In a way, given the song’s message, it absolutely needed to sound a bit like Madonna’s; but, given the 21st century context, it needed to be more straightforward (as Eddie talks about above) and also way more radical.

Musically, the song combines disco with a solid rock beat, which I read as a merging of the gay culture with the mainstream. If we think about “Born This Way” as a gay anthem, then the musical composition of the song is pretty brilliant: Gaga has taken heavily from the arsenal of gay club music and created a rock song. Or, she’s turned a rock song into a disco ball fixture. It’s a very glittery rock song! Or tough-as-nails disco. In either case, musically “Born This Way” is a type of oxymoron that makes hetero-rock just as queer as disco, and homo-disco just as mainstream as rock. It’s an incredibly interesting musical vehicle in which to house the message of her song: that we’re all equally beautiful - black, white, beige, gay, straight, transgender … 

Roland Betancourt: Well, I think that in this song we are seeing a definite shift in the trajectory of Gaga’s work. I do not want to sound like there is some strict evolutionary model or a chronology that I wish to impose on Gaga, but there have been definite patterns in her work. I believe many of us can recall the early Gaga period, where she relied heavily on her collaborations with Space Cowboy. This was the period that was inaugurated by “Just Dance” and witnessed songs/videos such as “Poker Face” and “Love Game.” We then had a change with “Paparazzi” that has lasted much into the present, however, I would say that after the “Alejandro” music video things began to shift - mainly aesthetically and visually. “Born This Way” places this shift into the musical realm and ties in directly to the thematic issues that have been developing in her work about homosexuality and gay rights.

What is of first note is what Meghan is referring to as the Twitter-comparisons to Madonna, which I would also refer to as a more widespread outcry to the song. Looking at Gaga’s history though, we find “Just Dance” to have many similar parallels to “Born This Way.” In many ways, “Just Dance” serves as the jumping dance song that everyone wants to sing along and dance to, but not the song that you particularly see as revolutionary. Nevertheless, in “Born This Way” we encounter lyrics that are antithetical to the inconsiderate hedonism of “Just Dance.” I think the brilliant part of “Born This Way” is that she’s produced a song that we are already tired of hearing. The comparisons being made to Madonna, for example, may seem valid at first, but every time I have compared the songs they don’t really seem to be there. Sure there are some similarities that seem to be riffs on one another, as Meghan suggests above, but the song actually has less similarities than it would seem. Gaga has produced an uncanny song in the Freudian notion of the term, where it seems all too familiar yet also wholly foreign.


Eddie McCaffray: And what’s so great about the foreign-lodged-within-the-familiar is that it provokes rediscovery of the world - if not in Freud, in Heidegger and Shklovsky. To keep this concept in line with the aesthetic of “Born This Way,” only a continual process of self-(re)creation will keep one meaningful to oneself. Accepting the categories and patterns offered by the world in a simple rote mimesis - the primary risk of conformism - renders one a simple colony of that world. But Gaga’s play with and reappropriation of all manner of cultural symbols, combined with this message of radical (self-)acceptance, calls Little Monsters to keep themselves uncanny, to maintain the tight-rope walk of foreign and familiar within their own plastic souls. 

Meghan Vicks: How did the first performance of “Born This Way” affect and/or reflect the song’s message? 

Eddie McCaffray: Let’s take it at face value: she was born this way, on stage, in front of fans and in the middle of pop-culture pomp-and-circumstance, surrounded by elite dancers, in a crazy costume, singing a huge pop song, out of a giant plastic glowing egg/womb. As has been dealt with at length before, Gaga is created by fame, born in the spectacle that she does not assume but which she becomes - the spectacle isn’t something of which she is a prerequisite, it’s what makes her possible. She can only hide in plain view.

This is an idea that she discussed in her Sixty Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper just before the Grammys. Honesty is important to her personally and as a part of her relationship to the people who look up to her, enjoy her music, and so on. At the same time, who can live on camera all the time? As Cooper says, her costumes are “not only attention-getting, but attention-directing.” Gaga tells him that she “art-directs” every moment of her life in order to combine honesty, privacy, and constant total exposure. This is a central part of her project in general and the message of this song in particular: in the modern world, it is impossible to hide. We are all constantly skewered by a myriad of controlling gazes. Resistance is futile. Rather, self-expression - the active, conscious, joyful engagement with these gazes - is the escape from the downsides of such a life. In creating ourselves, especially in creating ourselves in the ambitious, powerful, faux-self-confident way that a rock star might, we create breathing room, cracks and crannies in our personas in which to live. This is beyond “fake it till you make it”; faking it is making it. As in her Grammy appearance, performance is present at the birth of Lady Gaga and all her Little Monsters. It is the egg, Lady Gaga the product.

Roland Betancourt: I have often been attracted to Gaga’s work in the manner that it reflects on the medium, which is a self-reflexivity that has been very important to contemporary art historians in the past 30 years - perhaps less so today. My article on Jo Calderone for the upcoming Gaga Stigmata book reflects on these issues. In particular, I have been fascinated by the place of the viral in Gaga’s work, but a notion of virality that exceeds its traditional discussion and looks more to the body of the artist. “Born This Way” ends with an interesting line, “Same DNA, but I was born this way.” This presents a complex issue. Same DNA as whom? Contemporary society sees DNA as a very essential building block and we constantly attempt to construct identities by virtue of it. Often we have stories in the news regarding the emergence of DNA evidence that absolves prisoners of crimes or identifies lost relatives. We like to constitute our fundamental identities on this biological code, and our daily identities on viral, binary-coded images - via Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. This co-mingling of essences suggest that Gaga shares a certain coded identity with someone, but differs in nurture - she was birthed in a different manner.

The fact that her performance included a birthing from an egg before an audience, as Eddie has just pointed out, plays with the very notion that I addressed when discussing Jo Calderone and which Meghan discussed in her “Anatomy of Change” essay. Gaga’s birth is a performative visual act - I mean that in both senses of the word “performative.” Yet at the same time she partakes an essence with someone, perhaps her fans, perhaps other misfits, other outcast monsters, or perhaps even humanity?

Her “organ” - perhaps one big visual pun! - was surrounded by faces on globes and haloed by glassy test-tube-like lancets. It reminds me of the instruments used to replace a cell nucleus in the cloning process - an image that for a period of time was prolific in the news following the cloning fears of the late 1990s.

There was a sense of some sort of laboratory-musical setting, a place where, through the dispersal of song, a viral reproduction could occur. Where others, through sound, could be infected or cloned as Lady Gaga - same DNA, different births. 

To play with the Madonna references (both the singer and the Virgin Mary), Gaga said in a recent interview for the upcoming Vogue, “I wrote [‘Born This Way’] in 10 fucking minutes … And it is a completely magical message song. And after I wrote it, the gates just opened, and the songs kept coming. It was like an immaculate conception.” Her use of the term “immaculate conception” is quite loaded. On the one hand it points to Madonna’s own work and supports the notions of a Mother-Daughter/Madonna-Gaga relationship that Meghan has set forth. On the other hand, it cites the miraculous conception of Jesus Christ through the grace of the Holy Spirit in the flesh of the Virgin through the performative speech act of the Annunciation by the Angel Gabriel. Recalling Gaga’s Alexander McQueen 2010 VMA dress, one sees an image of an annunciation on it.

Specifically, it is the image of the Angel Gabriel holding the Latin text of the Annunciation on a sheet of parchment that visually manifests the oral pronouncement of Gabriel that enacts the incarnation. The image being used is the Renaissance Annunciation by Stephan Lochner for the Altar of the Three Magi in Cologne.

But in Gaga’s dress, as far as I can tell, the Virgin is absent. The direct object of the annunciation is missing, placing Gaga in the role of the receptacle for the body of Christ. It is her flesh from which shall be molded the salvation of humanity, and most importantly, this process occurs through sound, through proclamation. It was later that night, while wearing the meat dress, that Gaga sang a portion of “Born This Way” for the first time and thanked God and the gays. When asked who she thanked more, God or the gays, she replied, “I thank them both equally, because they made one another.” Certainly, what we find here is this notion of co-creation and co-constitution that Gaga has defined as so crucial to the fame. Nevertheless, as a good Catholic school girl, Gaga surely knows the opening of the Gospel of John that posits the relationship between God and the Logos (the Utterance/Word/Verb: aka Christ) as co-existing and co-eternal with God. Therefore, she posits the gays as a communal force, one that is bound by a suffering on behalf of mankind, as if bearing the brunt of their sins and treacheries. Is this not the type of idea that the song advocates? A notion of community, unity, and power that comes through the fire of abuse? “Don’t be a drag - just be a queen.”

All these trends, notions of DNA, and Immaculate Conception, however, focus on the central notion of conception and birth, the idea of self-production and performance, which is seen as the crucial and fundamental postulate of 1990s self-esteem/identity-politics rhetoric. The idea of “being yourself” and, as some may want to compare, “Expressing Yourself.” Nevertheless, I would argue that Gaga’s focus goes directly to the issue of the performance itself. Just as the Virgin served as a model for Christian artists in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance because she presented the body from which the image of God was formed, the material substance, so Gaga plays a similar ontological role. It is in the closing lines of the song, regarding DNA, that the stripped dancers unite and dance entwined and form the “monster paw” that Gaga proclaims at the beginning of the song.

The idea of self-creation is seen here within a rhetoric of the self and community that is radically different from the “individual” of the 1990s, which was structured on this unique, quasi-isolated “I.” Many of us were fed the myth that you could exist as a quasi-island of self-defined identity. In Gaga, however, the message seems to be the same, but the rhetoric presents the notion of a dividual - a person that exists within a community, linked through networks and self-images. What this song and the Grammy performance re-iterate within Gaga’s corpus is that the identity politics of the past have been radically shifted, and that the self is constituted within a network of images, just as Gaga defines herself within the networked images of pop-culture. What we wish to attack in Gaga through comparison merely stresses the radical shift in how the eye/I is constituted via one another in contemporary society. 

Eddie McCaffray: Right! Maybe you could argue that the kind of identity Lady Gaga invokes is a kind that is inextricably tied to the hyper-media post-pop world in which we live. She’s a twisted reflection, an unsanctioned amalgamation, a satirical-partisan-celebrant; she doesn’t articulate a unique inner code, but bends the world back on itself in a distortion that remains essentially her own because of the act of its creation. Not expression but refraction.

Meghan Vicks: You guys are absolutely brilliant, but I need to talk about Gaga’s shoes and shoulders (this is so fucking typical: the men talk about science and religion, the women talk about clothes!). Did you see her shoes!? I haven’t yet been able to find a picture that shows a closeup, but her shoes were amazing. They were nude, and they looked like they were an organic part of her body - as if her legs had flippin’ sprouted stilettos! And her ankle bones protruded just as her shoulder bones did. It looked like she had reshaped, or regrown, her body in such a way that she now rocks shoulder pads that actually are her shoulders. As I wrote about earlier, the line between fashion and the body has blurred to such an extent that the distinctions between the two no longer exist: her shoulders have become her shoulder pads, and her feet have become her heels.

As Eddie talks about above, she’s corporeally born this [visual, performative] way: in fashion, on the stage, through a performance. The shoulder pads, in particular, are incredibly important in the scope of Gaga’s oeuvre. When she designed the blue outfit that she wore for “Poker Face,” she explained, “I knew I wanted it to be futuristic, so I thought shoulder pads cause that’s my thing. But I wanted it to be a new shoulder pad.” Hyperbolic shoulder pads have been a staple of Gaga’s work, so much so that they’ve evolved to become a part of Gaga’s body. They also, as Gaga indicates, signify something futuristic; in the case of the “Born This Way” performance, Gaga is reborn among a new race of humans (see the horns protruding from the cheekbones, the forehead, and the shoulders) who are are organically made from flesh and fashion, and reality and spectacle.

But for a song and a message that is so futuristic, the performance and the costuming feels very primordial and organic - not as space-age or typically futuristic as Gaga singing “Poker Face” with her video glasses, for instance, or as Gaga’s fire-shooting bra. And the performance is not nearly as hyper-consciously aware of its own performativity as much of Gaga’s earlier work is. So it is futuristic in a paradoxical way that calls to mind origins, beginnings, and birth.

We’re still dealing with monsters, though. Absolutely beautiful from one angle, and grotesque from another. As Roland and I were discussing on the phone earlier today, the bone structure that Gaga is playing with is aesthetically gorgeous from the frontal perspective, and monstrous from the profile. Look at Gaga’s face in these posters for Born This Way that have been plastered all over NYC:

 

From the front, Gaga has the desired bone structure of a model: incredibly high cheek bones, cat-eyes, arched brows, very thin. But from the side, the aesthetically beautiful becomes grotesque:

But the grotesque is always figured positively in Gaga’s aesthetic that embraces freaks, monsters, and queers. So again, as “Born This Way” is both disco and rock (sparkly rock, hard-core disco), so the costuming is beautifully monstrous. She’s turned the monster into a model, and vice versa.

Other points to consider and analyze:

• The gospel-esque outro of “Born This Way”
• “Born This Way” choreography
• Gaga’s hair during the performance
• Gaga, the Mother Monster, who hatches from an egg
• Gaga’s entrance on the Red Carpet in an egg, incubating
• Other topics of the Sixty Minutes interview: quotes, clothes, coffee-slurping, fake diamond
• Toccata and Fugue in D Minor quote during the performance (Gaga’s organ solo)
• Gaga's shout-out to Whitney Houston as inspiration for Born This Way
• Gaga's hat!

Dear Readers!

Please add your thoughts, analyses, and questions to the comments below. Let’s make (another) discussion, little monsters!