Memory, Monsters, and Lady Gaga

Celebrity Studies, 2012

Popular Music & Society, 2013

Like her chart-breaking musical success, Lady Gaga’s relationship with fans, built by her messages of self-acceptance and by her intense engagement with fans through social media, is unprecedented. Through one-on-one interviews with an international sample of 45 self-described Little Monsters, we explored this unusual fan-celebrity relationship and found that Lady Gaga’s re-articulation of the negative connotations of “monster” enabled fans to use her as a mirror to reflect upon and embrace their differences from mainstream culture. We argue that social media amplify fan identification and raise questions about the changing nature of fan-celebrity relationships in a digital environment.

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.

Re-told Feminine Memoirs: Our Collective Past and Present, 2013

Laini Burton, ‘Abject Appeal and the Monstrous Feminine in Lady Gaga’s self-fashioned persona “Mother Monster”’, in Re-told Feminine Memoirs: Our Collective Past and Present, Inter-Disciplinary Press, Oxfordshire, England, 2013. ISBN: 978-1-84888-192-1.

2011

Monsters and the Monstrous Journal (Inter-Disciplinary.Net)

The concept of beauty is of particular and somewhat trivial importance in contemporary society. Although notions of beauty have continually changed throughout history, there continually appears to be a benchmark on which to shape expectations and behaviours with regards to one’s appearance. Various artists—performance or otherwise—utilise this benchmark in order to undermine and challenge notions of beauty in an age where celebrity culture tends to define trends of beauty and behaviour. French performance artist Orlan, and singer-song writer Lady Gaga both challenge notions of beauty not merely by rejecting current conventions, but by incorporating the theme of the ‘monster’ or the ‘monstrous’ within their and physical experiments. They do not simply offer up the idea of the monster as an alternative to common conventions of beauty, but instead replace those standards with the monster; the monstrous conversely becomes an aimage or figure with which to understand their own perspective of beauty. In this manner their respective performance and musical art becomes a novel method with which to undermine traditional theories of beauty by providing a monstrous figure to define their unique brand of beauty. Both women achieve this most acutely in their use of body modification and surgical work, most notably Orlan through her filmed surgical procedures to alter her body. Although both women have been criticised for their liaising of the monster with notions of beauty, for their stark and confronting depictions of themselves, they nevertheless prove fundamental in removing strict and conventional theories on which ideas of beauty are built. Of particular importance is their role in celebrity culture, a realm that relies on standard and trite conceptions of beauty. By incorporating the theme and figure of the ‘monster,’ Orlan and Lady Gaga help to subvert mundane concepts of beauty in celebrity culture, by challenging the way in which beauty is culturally constructed.

Celebrity Studies

Lady Gaga's star image has been read by scholars as a 'hypermodern gospel of liberation' (Corona, 2010) and 'a symbol for a new kind of feminism' (Halberstam, 2012). Her reputation for progressiveness has been reinforced by LGBT rights, body acceptance and anti-bullying campaigns and a star persona which deliberately play with the tropes of avant gardism, artifice, self-invention, monstrosity and non-normative femininity. This would appear to suggest that Gaga sits apart from to wider understandings of gendered celebrity culture, which identify celebrity as a site for policing 'acceptable' femininity (Holmes and Negra, 2011), a

2016

This article employs schematic framing as an analytic tool to examine the popular culture figure of Lady Gaga as a genre. It is known that genre analysis is a powerful tool for popular cultural studies. However, the typical genre approach which relies on identification of the stable linguistic (and semiotic) features a genre entails in respect of form, substance, functions, and relations is only applicable when a text is perceived as a sole composition of semiotic units such as syntax, textual and rhetoric structures, and lexical devices. It is hardly useful in this respect in examining social texts such as popular culture movements that have the propensity to become prototypes or genres, for other successive social texts. As such, through analyzing the Lady Gaga genre as schematic frames and mediated publicness, I argue in the article that macro-analytic tools such as schematic framing are more useful than the semiotic unit analyses in unpacking the volatility of similar social texts, as well as their social ramifications in times of rapid digitization and convergence.

This paper will explore the type of spiritual expression of adolescents and young people in and through current popular music culture. In particular, the paper will propose the music and industry constructed by and around the popular singer and songwriter Lady Gaga as a test case. Her incessant use of religious language and religious symbolism has equally attracted praise but also criticism. This paper will acknowledge that Lady Gaga is not simply an icon of this hypermodernity but she is a complex phenomenon which brings together various elements as well as actors. It will explore if and to what extent the main spiritual elements are traceable in this phenomenon.