Googoo for Gaga: Feminism and Fame in the Hyperreal

Given the 'orgy of signifi cation'-as Jean Baudrillard might put itthat characterizes 'Paparazzi' and 'Telephone,' analysts have little choice but to choose a particular point of entry into these videos and organize their approach to them around a specifi c set of questions. 4 Our questions grow out of an interest in the culturally driven themes at work in the videos and our hypothesis that these themes are crystallized in the coming together of sound, word, and image in the dance sequences of 'Paparazzi' and 'Telephone.' In fact, director Jonas Åkerlund fi lmed these sequences while paying close attention to the timing and editing of musical, lyrical and visual gestures. Similarly, B. Åkerlund and the production team attended to the minute details of the costuming, stylistic staging and presentation of materials. 5 Under Åkerlund's creative direction, music, image and movement are woven into a highly compelling and powerful communicative form.

2017

Lady Gaga and Popular Music: Performing Gender, Fashion, and Culture (Routledge Studies in Popular Music), 2013

If Lady Gaga, as we are told ever so bluntly by the hyper-butch, body-building guards in “Telephone” (2010, Dir. Jonas Åkerlund), does not “have a dick,” Jo Calderone certainly does. Taking her critique of the fetishization of the female body into the public sphere, Gaga donned a meat dress in protest of the expectations of female stars by the popular media at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2010; this year, she simply refused to be female altogether. In this chapter, I examine the trans/affect of Lady Gaga’s carefully scripted display of the Jo Calderone persona in both his interview and fashion spread in Vogue Hommes Japan. Gaga’s monstrous aesthetics are political because they fit within the category of the sublime. The sublime identifies those aesthetic practices in excess of the viewer’s cognitive capacity for reason; it remains obscure to our conceptual powers. Trans embodiment can be seen as an expression of the sublime, as it reveals the multiplicity and instability at the heart of gender. As T. Ben Singer argues, transgender embodiments evoke the sublime because they “confront us with a vision of potentially infinite specific possibilities for being human” (616). In this way, trans/affect names the complex of affective responses evoked by transgender embodiment.

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. During the ascension and commodification of Web 2.0, online music videos became host to a new kind of glitch: the digital stutter of insufficient buffering in Adobe Flash Player and other streaming media software. Some female performers recognized the potential of this electronic disruption to interrupt the male gaze and the traditional objectification of the female body. Working inside the genre of corporate music video and the logic of the glitch, performers like Madonna and Lady Gaga make visible their ambivalent relationships to patriarchal, heterocentric video culture through simulated freezes and drop outs in the streaming image. These “errors” open up intervals of frustration—and potential critical reflection—in the playback and, by extension, in the temporal structures of fantasy. In so doing, they remind the viewer that although she may perceive female music video stars as objects of fantasy, as fantasies they are not always under her control.

The Journal of Popular Culture, 2011

Celebrity Studies 6(2), pp.231-246

Lady Gaga’s celebrity DNA revolves around the notion of monstrosity, an extensively and multifariously researched concept in post-modern cultural studies. This study draws on biographical and archival visual data relating to the Gaga phenomenon with a focus on the relatively underexplored live-show, with view to elucidating what is really monstrous about Lady Gaga. The argumentation that is put forward by drawing largely on Deleuze & Guattari’s notion of monstrosity, as well as on their approach to the study of sign-systems that was deployed in Thousand Plateaus, is supportive of the position that monstrosity as sign seeks to appropriate the horizon of unlimited semiosis as radical alterity and openness to signifying possibilities. In this context it is argued that Gaga is a simulacrum of herself (supreme signifier) and at the same time a (dis)simulacrum or dissimulative (feigned) simulacrum. Gaga is monstrous for her community insofar as she demands of her fans to project their semiosic horizon onto her as simulacrum of infinite semiosis, albeit a simulacrum that, in (the) reality (principle), may only be evinced dissimulatively in a feigned manner as (dis)simulacrum. Pursuant to an extensive analysis of the linguistically unarticulated, yet multimodally considerably more insightful imagery from seminal live shows during 2011-2012, Gaga’s presumed monstrosity is ultimately rendered as more akin to hyperdifferentiation.

This proposal aims to highlight problems surrounding the ethics-aesthetics relationship projected by female pop singers in their music videos and the formulation of new models of femininity. However, it is possible these models never existed and this is a reformulation of female roles and stereotypes invented by patriarchy. Spanish

Lady Gaga and Popular Music: Performing Gender, Fashion, and Culture, 2014

The cultural history of the telephone is one that has run in parallel with that of recorded technology in popular music. Both histories are invoked by the corpus of “telephone songs”, songs whose lyrics focus chiefly on the mediation of a romantic relationship by telecommunication technology. Lady Gaga’s “Telephone”, originally a solo project designed for Britney Spears but later a collaboration with Beyoncé, exploits the standard conventions of the telephone song genre. Common tropes are explored, but also sometimes subverted through playful manipulation of the expectations for women in relation to technology, sexuality, race and gender.

2008