國立交通大學
外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班
碩士論文
“Express Your Women Kind”:
Lady Gaga and the Reconstruction of the Female Body
and Subjectivity
「女性宣言」:
女神卡卡與女性身體及主體性之重建
研 究 生：范慈紋
指導教授：馮品佳 博士
中華民國一○二年七月
「女性宣言」:
女神卡卡與女性身體及主體性之重建
“Express Your Women Kind”:
Lady Gaga and the Reconstruction of the Female Body and Subjectivity
研究生：范慈紋 Student: Tzu-wen Fan
指導教授：馮品佳 博士 Advisor: Dr. Ping-chia Feng
國立交通大學
外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班 碩士論文
A Thesis
Submitted to the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures Graduate Institute of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics
College of Humanity and Social Science National Chiao Tung University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Master of Art in
Graduate Institute of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics
July 2013
Hsinchu, Taiwan, Republic of China
「女性宣言」: 女神卡卡與女性身體及主體性之重建 研究生：范慈紋 指導教授：馮品佳 博士 國立交通大學外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班 摘要 本論文以陰性書寫的觀點來探討女神卡卡對於女性身體的重建與再現。旨在於了解 女神卡卡如何在其音樂展演中展現女性身體的流動性與多重性，並藉由女神卡卡的例子， 進而證明陰性書寫的可實性；另一方面，探討此女性身體流動、多重的展現解構父權主 義下的二元對立，並挑戰性、性別、種族與階級的限制。 本論文共分為四章。第一章為緒論，包括陰性書寫理論，以及略述女神卡卡的背景 與另外兩位具爭議性女性，瑪丹娜與梅蕙絲的關係。第二章為女神卡卡歌詞的文本式分 析，並討論其歌詞中陰性書寫的實踐。第三章著重於女神卡卡的女性身體表現，從音樂 錄影帶、服裝，以及現場表演來作分析。第四章是結論，總結全文重點，點出為何女神 卡卡，相較於瑪丹娜與梅蕙絲，更能代表陰性書寫的實踐，兼論女神卡卡身為一位具有 自我意識的女性主義者與社會運動者對社會的貢獻。 關鍵詞：陰性書寫、女神卡卡、女性身體、性別、表演
“Express Your Women Kind”:
Lady Gaga and the Reconstruction of the Female Body and Subjectivity
Postgraduate: Tzu-wen Fan Advisor: Dr. Ping-chia Feng
Graduate Institute of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics National Chiao Tung University
ABSTRACT
This thesis applies the concept of écriture féminine to explore Lady Gaga’s
representation and reconstruction of the female body. I argue that Lady Gaga uses her body to exemplify the fluidity and plurality of the female body. Although écriture féminine, espoused by French feminists, is questioned and disapproved for being idealist and
essentialist, I believe, with the example of Lady Gaga, the concept of écriture féminine will prove to be feasible. In addition, Lady Gaga’s demonstration of the fluidity and plurality of the female body deconstructs any kind of binary oppositions and pushes the boundaries not only about gender, sexuality, but also about race and class.
This thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter theorizes the idea of
écriture féminine and provides the introduction of the three transgressive female figures, Mae
West, Madonna, and Lady Gaga. The second chapter offers a textual analysis of Lady Gaga’s song lyrics. I elaborate on the relation between Lady Gaga’s sexuality and speech to the practice of écriture féminine. The third centers on the representations of the female body in Lady Gaga’s music videos, her costumes in terms of the grotesque with regard to the female body, and her performances. I analyze the narratives in her music videos and examine the ways in which she employs the female body as a vehicle to circumvent the masculinist discourse and empower others. Lastly, the concluding chapter offers a comparison and contrast among Mae West, Madonna and Lady Gaga to explain why Lady Gaga employs the strategy of écriture féminine and look into the role of Lady Gaga as a social activist.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This thesis would not have been possible without the support of many people. First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Ping-Chia Feng, whose expertise, help, and patience added greatly to my graduate experience. My gratitude also goes to my committee members, Dr. Ying-Hsiung Chou and Dr. Yi-Ming Huang, for offering their insightful suggestions and comments. I would also like to thank my friends who care about me, whether they are near or far. Last but not least, I am indebted to my family for enduring my procrastination, and encouraging and believing in me. I could not have come this far without them.
Table of Contents Chinese Abstract ... i English Abstract ... ii Acknowledgments... iii Table of Contents ... iv Chapter 1 Introduction ... 1
Theorizing L’écriture Féminine ... 3
The Advent of Monster(s) ... 18
An Overview of the Thesis ... 21
Chapter 2 Writing the Female Body: From a Pop Star to Mother Monster ... 24
Practicing É criture Féminine in Lady Gaga’s Song Lyrics ... 24
Chapter 3 The Monstrous and the Grotesque: Lady Gaga’s Representation of the Female Body ... 48
Lady Gaga’s Body in Music Videos ... 48
The Female Body as the Grotesque Body ... 58
Lady Gaga and Performing Subversions ... 66
Chapter 4 Conclusion ... 73
“Express Your Women Kind”1
:
Lady Gaga and the Reconstruction of the Female Body and Subjectivity
Chapter 1 Introduction
For centuries, the female body has been usually reduced to be male possession, and constructed based on the dichotomy in which women’s body, as opposite to that of men’s, are associated with passivity, dependence and subordination. As male possession, the female body, apart from being a site for procreation, has been required to conform to patriarchal expectations and fulfill male desire; moreover, women and their bodies have been controlled by patriarchal power, partly because men fear that women’s rebellion would lead to the dwindling of masculine power. Margaret Atwood’s short prose, “Female Body,” presents a concrete example. In “Female Body,” Atwood elaborates how women live their lives under dominance and constraints, and their bodies are “used” to fulfill the domestic duty of
housewives and mothers. The speaker states, “[t]he Female Body has many uses. It’s been used as a door-knocker, a bottle-opener, as a clock with a ticking belly, as something to hold up lampshades, as a nutcracker, just squeeze the brass legs together and out comes your nut” (491-92). Furthermore, at the end of this short prose, the speaker exclaims, “Catch it. Put it in a pumpkin, in a high tower, in a compound, in a chamber, in a house, in a room. Quick, stick a leash on it, a lock, a chain, some pain, settle it down, so it can never get away from you again” (493). Through the allusions to fairy tales, Atwood demonstrates that patriarchal men not only try to impose a fantasy of their ideal woman on society, i.e. a weak, mild, and submissive princess, but they also relentlessly and brutally try to dominate women and keep them from escaping patriarchy.
Judged from this example, it is evident that stereotypical images of women built by
patriarchy are not only predominant in the fields of religion and literature, but also are solidified in the mass media;2 if some women refuse to comply with patriarchy and try to overthrow the stereotype of a feminine angel in the house through exposing themselves as well as their bodies in public, harsh criticism and denunciation always come along. In the 1930s, when Mae West, an actress and a playwright on broadcast radio and in cinema, played with the boundaries of sex, and advocated feminine pleasure and copulation, American society had such a negative reaction that West had been criticized as a notorious vamp that threatened to contaminate people’s souls.
Likewise, the controversies caused by Madonna in the 1970s were no less fierce than those by Mae West, as Madonna disrupted the stereotypical image of a blonde and used her body to challenge the patriarchal expectations of women and transcend the social order. Almost thirty years after Madonna, another controversial figure, Lady Gaga, strikes the world with a more progressive and aggressive female image than Mae West and Madonna. The controversies surrounding Lady Gaga are quite unprecedented; in a way, it can be said that she keeps on provoking the patriarchal wrath.
Lady Gaga, a pop icon of the twentieth-first century, has been a contentiously popular figure ever since she launched her career in 2005. As her music is relatively catchy and consequently widely popular and loved, Lady Gaga is greatly admired and adored by her fans because she encourages them to embrace their sexuality and love themselves for who they are, which gains her the reputation of gay friendliness. Yet, Lady Gaga has been seriously
criticized by people who believe that she has blasphemed Catholicism and consider her overt exposure of her body to be obscene and vulgar, not to mention her exaggerative and weird outfits are quite offensive. While most people pay attention to her oddity and her image as a pop idol, I contend that they fail to perceive the latent meaning of Lady Gaga’s music,
2
See Gayle Tuchman’s “Introduction: The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media,” in Tuchman, Gayle, A.K. Daniels, and J. Benet ed. Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media (New York: Oxford UP, 1978) 3-45.
costumes, her body, and performances, even though they recognize her outspokenness for the benefits of those who are non-heterosexual.
Seen in this light, in my thesis I want to analyze Lady Gaga’s song lyrics, music videos, performances, and costumes as an embodiment of écriture féminine. On the one hand, I argue that Lady Gaga uses her body to exemplify the fluidity and plurality of the female body. On the other hand, I believe that although écriture féminine, espoused by French feminists, is questioned and disapproved for being idealist and essentialist, with the example of Lady Gaga, the concept of écriture féminine will prove to be feasible. In addition, Lady Gaga’s demonstration of the fluidity and multiplicity of the female body deconstructs any kind of binary oppositions and pushes the boundaries not only about gender, sexuality, but also about race and class. By demonstrating female subjectivity, she challenges and upsets patriarchy and its normative regulations regarding how a proper woman should act. Moreover, she shows how powerful a female body can be.
In this thesis, I will first theorize the ideas of écriture féminine via French feminists’ reading of the female body. Then I will briefly explore Lady Gaga’s background along with that of Mae West, Madonna, for the three of them share some similarities. What follows will be analyses of Lady Gaga’s lyrics, videos, costumes, and performances to discuss her sexual politics as well as her impact on society. Some people posit that Lady Gaga’s music and performances cannot be taken seriously; for them, she is nothing but a manipulator of the consumer market. However, as I wish to demystify the stereotype that associates female performances in pop culture with shallowness, I argue that when Lady Gaga writes or
performs her songs, she is also constructing her identity. Hence, I will examine the relation between identity and performance in order to support my argument.
Theorizing L’écriture Féminine
(Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” 245) In the early 1970s, even though the women’s movement in France had been active for decades, French feminists reckoned the phallogocentric thoughts imbued the society and women’s experiences have not been properly valued. Hence, French feminists propose the idea of écriture féminine, which attacks the dichotomy and phallocentric language in the Symbolic Order, and suggests recourse to a revolutionary language that embraces feminine voice and desire, as well as a text in rapport to the body. Through écriture féminine, French feminists aspire to find another possibility of reconstructing language system and building a feminine economy. Among them, the most outspoken promoters of écriture féminine are Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva.
In 1975, Hélène Cixous first presented the concept of écriture féminine in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” a short essay in which she encourages women to write and not to be afraid to speak up for their bodies and desires. Cixous’s argument is controversial for she flatly rejects and criticizes the norms in Western culture, and the psychoanalytic theories by Freud Sigmund and Jacques Lacan. Ever since antiquity, the Western way of thinking has been founded on dualism which is hierarchal and favors phallocentrism. According to Cixous, dualism may appear to be neutral, which accounts for its being taken for granted, but in effect it implies a closed language system in which women are often regarded as inferior and
passive. She criticizes the concept that only when women are submitted to and affiliated with men will their lives have any kind of meaning. Hence, Cixous opts for another language system that bonds the female body and experience with writing so that no gender will be suppressed by the other.
Cixous also denounces psychoanalytic theories, particularly those by Sigmund Freud and Jacque Lacan; for Cixous, their theories fall into the trap of dualism and revolve around the phallus to explain the formations of human beings in the sign system. For instance, Freud incurs some feminists’ discontent for his 1912 and 1924 theory that “anatomy is
destiny.”3
While some feminists accuse Freud of embracing biological determinism, other feminists, like Toil Moi, defend him by claiming that this statement cannot be comprehended literally and its significant should be meticulously examined as it is a derivative of
Napoleon’s statement (“Is Anatomy Destiny?” 75-76).4
Despite of Moi’s defense, Cixous concludes that Freud “came to support the formidable thesis of a ‘natural,’ anatomical determination of sexual difference-opposition” (“Sorties” 81). Moreover, Freud’s theories rest upon the sight of the phallus to delineate human sexuality and behaviors, from which Lacan extrapolates the phallus as “the transcendental signifier” (Cixous, “Sorties” 82). Since psychoanalysis revolves around the phallus, a symbolic organ which woman lack, Freud’s question to ask what women want suggests that they want nothing, which in turn leads Lacan to contend that women “cannot speak of her pleasure” (45). Hence, in this Symbolic Order, a woman will lose her own voice, her sexuality, her autonomy, and her body, and become the embodiment of male fantasy.
To counteract this masculine libidinal economy and phallocentric language system, Cixous exhorts women to resort to écriture féminine as well as to speak and write the body, in which case a feminine rhetorical discourse and economy will be fostered. Here we need to clarify that Cixous’s use of the word “feminine” does not contain anatomical denotation, nor is it caught in the dichotomy between culture and nature. To put it differently, écriture
3
This sentence first appeared in Freud’s 1912 piece, “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,” in which he discusses love and psychical impotence. According to Freud, love, in normal condition, can be fulfilled by the fusion of the affectionate and the sensual, which respectively refer to anaclisis toward family members and sexual desire (180). However, this complete satisfaction in love can scarcely be reached because of the prohibition of incest. What’s important is that this theory mainly applies to men as Freud declares that “[a]natomy is destiny” to suggest the genital differences result in different psychological
developments (189). Freud mentioned this idea again in another 1924 piece, “The Dissolution of the Oedipal Complex,” as he explained the child’s sexual development in relation to the Oedipal complex. Likewise, this explanation applied to boys only, since girls do not have a penis.
4
In Whose Freud, Toril Moi points out that Freud’s statement is in fact an allusion to Napoleon, who states that “politics is destiny” when he conversed with Goethe in 1808 (75). Being the greatest man in 19th
-century Europe, Napoleon did not believe in destiny; he reckoned that he was the one who were in charge of his own life, his own destiny, not the Christian God. Hence, Napoleon’s statement is fundamentally ironic, and Freud might apply this irony to suggest it is not anatomy that determines human sexuality and psychic, but “human
civilization, the fact that every known human society socializes its children, that makes such psychic conflict inevitable” (Moi, 78). Moi’s argument here explicitly indicates that Freud is not a biological determinist and feminists who accuse him of that fail to grasp the subtle meaning of Freud’s words.
féminine does not suggest that the writer is a woman; a woman may write with
phallogocentric language without noticing it, whereas a man may recognize the limits of masculine writing and represents femininity in writing. Cixous, for instance, indicates that the writings of Jean Genet and James Joyce are in fact examples of écriture féminine. As Cixous advocates écriture féminine in her famous article, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” the significance of the mythological figure, Medusa, and the connection between her and écriture féminine need to be examined. In Greek mythology, in which patriarchy pervades, the Medusa, whose hair comprises of serpents, is described as a monster who can turn people into stone if their eyes meet hers. Freud thusly sees the Medusa as a symbol of castration and the serpents as the phallus. However, Cixous reverses Freud’s assumption about the Medusa and turns this mythical figure into someone who can invigorate women. Cixous states, “You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing” (“The Laugh of the Medusa” 255). Contrary to the patriarchal assumption of the female body as the dark continent, the Medusa and her laughter serve as a metaphor for women to praise their sexuality and the female body. Accordingly, the serpents on Medusa’s head symbolize the plurality and multiplicity of female sexuality and body, through which women can enter feminine rhetorical structure. For Cixous’s écriture féminine, one of the important characteristics is that writing is bisexual, and Cixous points out two kinds of bisexuality: one is the traditional concept of bisexuality, and the other is what she called, “the other bisexuality” (“The Laugh of the Medusa” 254). Since writing in patriarchy is normally aligned with the worship of the phallus and rests on dichotomy, Cixous criticizes the former as “‘neuter’ because, as such, it would aim at warding off castration” and differentiation is effaced (“Sorties” 84). This bisexuality of patriarchy seemingly includes both sexes but in fact eliminates femininity. On the contrary, “the other bisexuality” in écriture féminine embraces differentiation and identify with different subjects. To be more specific, the other bisexuality includes both
sexes, which are manifested differently on individuals, but none of the difference is excluded. In this case, Cixous favors “the other bisexuality on which every subject not enclosed in the false theater of phallocentric representationalism has bounded his/her erotic universe” (“The Laugh of the Medusa” 254). She also contends that this “other bisexuality” is tightly associated with femininity, because woman does not endeavor to suppress bisexuality as man does. In other words, bisexuality occurs more in women’s writing than in men’s writing. Women’s plurality is henceforth manifested.
To explore women and their potentials, Cixous asserts the necessity for women to write about themselves and genuinely re-discover their female body so that they can acclaim their desires and sexuality. Only through writing about themselves will women be able to form a genuine feminine libidinal economy and formulate the feminine rhetoric. On the one hand, to write herself is to speak; while in the symbolic, filled with phallocentric discourse, women are coerced into silence and dumbness, feminine writing enables them to resume the power to speak about their thoughts, desires, and the demand to be heard. Women can express
themselves and the feminine rhetoric will be fulfilled. This concept of écriture féminine entails women’s self-identification and self-fashioning through writing. On the other hand, when writing themselves, women constantly “return to the body” (“The Laugh of the Medusa” 250). Women will not be afraid to reclaim their bodies and praise the female jouissance, which is not merely restricted to sexual orgasm, but also refers to maternity. More significantly, when women reclaim the female body and are thus able to voice their desire, the expression of their lived experience will be represented for “she signifies it with her body (“The Laugh of the Medusa” 251). In other words, when women start to write about
themselves, they also begin to reconstruct their female subjectivity.
As Cixous aspires to subvert patriarchy by way of écriture féminine, she resorts to motherhood and emphasizes the importance of the relationship between mother and daughter. “Mother” here is not just limited to the maternal role or her biological function; instead,
“mother” is regarded as a metaphor in écriture féminine. In a way, it can be associated with motherland, mother language, and even mother nature, since Cixous likes to link the mother figure with the sea, suggesting that the female body, like the sea, nurtures this planet with the symbolic power of the endless flow. Now women can reconnect with the mother via writing about the body with her milk, and the female body is made to be pure and prolific. As a result, the feminine libidinal economy will be constructed. In such a feminine libidinal economy, women will form strong sisterhood since in their writing, they will write in the first person and the second person; in other words, the subjects they use will be “I,” “we,” or “you.” This usage of these subjects not only suggests that the other5
would not be excluded any more, but is also the very opposite to patriarchal language that employs imperative tone. Affirming the other, écriture féminine is therefore heterogeneous.
Luce Irigaray, as does Cixous, figures that those “prestigious” philosophers since ancient Greek have excluded and suppressed the feminine, and criticizes Freud’s and Lacan’s analyses of the female subject through the phallus. Reviewing the history of philosophy, Irigaray, as a female philosopher, points out that male philosophers have been centering on “the same” against which anything different would be reduced. She states, “But wherever I turn, whether to philosophy, science, or religion, I find that this underlying and increasingly insistent question remains silent” (“Sexual Difference” 45). To reduce the different to the same or “the logic of sameness,” as Pam Morris argues, suggests an androcentric society and other gender specificities submit to him as “one and the same” (Literature and Feminism 114). Hence, the logic of the same embedded in phallogocentricism and logocentricism contributes to the effacement of sexual difference.
Objecting to the situation that woman’s position is subordinate to man in the Symbolic
5
The other here is different from Lacan’s concept of “the little other.” In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” the other refers more to the different, “the other woman,” as the opposite of the self, the same.
Order, Irigaray applies Jacque Derrida’s notion of différance,6
and puts emphasis on sexual difference to provide new possibilities in feminine economy which does not exclude the masculine or the feminine so that both men and women are able to define their subjectivity not in accordance to the anatomical differences. Nevertheless, sexual difference will not be possible within the Symbolic system; hence, Irigaray argues for the necessity to launch a “revolution in thought and ethics” (“Sexual Difference” 166). To make the revolution take place requires a new language. Hence, Irigaray sets the proposition of “parler femme,” which aims to disrupt and undermine the phallogocentric parameters.
Irigaray’s parler femme, as the word “parler” means to speak or converse in French, hopes to provide a new discourse other than the familiar masculine one. Parler femme, for her, is “not a matter of producing a discourse of which woman would be the object, or the subject (This Sex Which Is Not One 135); rather, she posits “the necessity of ‘reopening’ the figures of philosophical discourse—idea, substance, subject, transcendental subjectivity, absolute knowledge—in order to pry out of them what they have borrowed that is feminine, from the feminine, to make them ‘render’ and give back what they owe the feminine” (This
Sex Which Is Not One 74). In other words, woman is assigned the role of predicate in
language,7 always being auxiliary to the male subject (Whitford 45-46). Margaret Whitford therefore maintains that what Irigary’s parler femme attempts to do is to place woman in the position to “speak as a subject of éunciation,” instead of énoncé,8
which means “the content of the statement” (39&42). Speaking as a subject, woman will finally be able to assert her
6
Jacque Derrida indicates that the system of binary oppositions has been the base for Western philosophical thinking, stating that “in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. Thus, overthrowing this phallic, dichotomical thought, Derrida coins the term “difference,” and aims to “foreground his motion of difference (a word he coins to produce a fusion of différer—deferral or delay—with the idea of difference) to suggest the unfixed, unstable nature of meaning” (Morris, Literature and Feminism 117).
7
For more explanation about woman as predicate, see Teresa de Lauretis’s Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Smiotics,
Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. 8
The difference between enunciation and énoncé is of great importance in Lacan’s theory of the subject. Lacan avers that when speaking, the subject is actually split into enunciation and énoncé. He gives the fullest explanation about enunciation and énoncé in two articles, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” and “Analysis and Truth or the Closure of the Unconscious.”
social and cultural positions in the language system.
Irigaray further supports parler femme via envisaging the double syntax, through which a woman regains her self-affection. Double syntax, as Margaret Whitford explains in her introduction to the second part of the book The Irigaray Reader, refers to “a possible articulation between conscious and unconscious, male and female” and is one of the crucial characteristics of Irigaray’s sexual difference (77). Irigaray opposes to the masculine syntax as the one and only in the patriarchal discourse, and criticizes the ways in which men erase feminine syntax and imposes the masculine one on society because of the need to achieve masculine self-affection and self-expression. It is important to note that Irigaray does not attempt to promote another new theory about women, but instead she aims to renovate “the economy of the logos” (This Sex Which Is Not One 78). Therefore, as “double” suggests masculine and feminine, being in the economy characterized by double syntax allows woman to express self-love and love for the other to reach feminine self-affection without any
reference to the phallus; for a woman, unlike a man, has “two lips” (emphasis added), and hence can “touch herself ‘within herself,’ in advance of any recourse to instruments” (133). That is, a woman manifests autonomous female sexuality, and appreciates sexual difference through double syntax. In this sense, a woman can speak up for her desire, acclaims her sexuality, and achieves autoeroticism, without conforming to the patriarchal fantasy.
As sex and language are closely intertwined, the “two lips” in Irigaray’s works are of great importance. The two lips can refer to both human lips and labium. In the
eponymous article “This Sex Which Is Not One,” she assertively elaborates on the two lips and women’s sexuality:
A woman “touches herself” constantly without anyone being able to forbid her to do so, for her sex is composed of two lips which embrace continually. Thus, within herself she is already two—but not divisible into ones—who stimulate each other. (100)
In a way, “to touch herself” echos the self-affection in the double syntax, stressing a woman’s autonomous pleasure or jouissance. A woman, unlike a man, does not need any mediation as her two lips touch themselves already, in which case the penetration of the penis and the phallogocentric words can only be intrusive. Also, the image of the two lips symbolizes the plurality of the female body, sexuality, and hence language. It is pivotal to bear in mind that when Irigaray speaks of two lips, she actually refers to more than two, which points to a woman’s multiple sexuality. Also, this plurality of female sexuality demonstrates the symbolic ubiquity of feminine pleasure; the pleasure not only comes from the vagina, but also from the breasts, the vulva, the lips, etc. Strictly speaking, a woman “experiences pleasure almost everywhere” (103).
Fluidity is another crucial characteristic of the female body that Irigaray praises. Renouncing the sameness/oneness of the phallus, she affirms the fluidity inside a woman, and anticipates her to explore the overflowing potentials of the female body. This emphasis on the fluidity of the female body significantly reflects Irigaray’s effort to restore the close bond with the mother in the pre-Oedipal phase. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it, Irigaray’s emphasis on the fluidity of the female body purposely represents the “polymorphous multiplicity of the pre-Oedipal which underlies and precedes it,” through which, it can be proved that the
fluidity of the maternal pleasure in the pre-Oedipal exists “in any adult sexual pleasure (men’s as well as women’s)” (Sexual Subversion 117). It needs to be re-discovered so that we can reconnect with the mother. With regard to the multiplicity and fluidity of the female body and sexuality, it renders the feminine subject impossible to be defined and determined in that her body overflows when she speaks. In this case, any attempt to define her will be fruitless and inappropriate.
As she aims to resuscitate the access to the pre-Oedipal, Irigaray re-affirms the mother-daughter relationship and calls upon the assertion of maternal genealogy. In the patriarchal context, mother enacts the role of a castrated mother and is always restricted to the
reproduction of child-bearing and nurturing. She leads a life fully dependent on men and is thus trapped in the exchange among men.9 Under these circumstances, the mother is never a subject, nor can she claim herself as a woman for she lacks identity and autonomy. That the mother is unable to affirm her identity as an autonomous woman results in the daughter’s having “no access to the woman-mother” and “no woman with whom to identify with” (Grosz, Sexual Subversion 122-23). It is a vicious cycle in which women will always depend on men unless they break ties with the patriarchal language. Seen in this light, in “When Our Lips Speak Together” in which she utilize the subjects, such as “you” and “I,” to express the mother-daughter relationship, Irigaray states that “I love you who are neither mother (pardon me, mother, for I prefer a woman) nor sister, neither daughter nor son” (72). To get away from these roles and functions inscribed on women by patriarchy allows them to reconstruct a new bond between the mother and the daughter as well as to espouse feminine libidinal economy where women can speak with “an active subject-to-subject relation” (Grosz, Sexual Subversion 124). In this respect, the maternal genealogy will thence be established.
Along with Cixous and Irigaray, Julia Kristeva’s name is associated with écriture
féminine as well, even though she is known for her controversial criticism of feminism. Yet,
she also points out the blind-spots of psychoanalysis and introduces a discourse other than the symbolic as the only language system. Sharing Irigaray’s critique, Kristeva also criticizes Freud and Lacan for failing to recognize the significance of the pre-Oedipal phase, and the exclusion of femininity throughout the Western philosophical thoughts. She comments, “Our philosophies of language, embodiment of the idea, are nothing more than the thoughts of archivists, archaeologists, and necrophiliacs” (Revolution in Poetic Language 13). Within this context, she applies the notions of structuralism and psychoanalysis to put
9
Gayle Rubin delineates the exchange of women by men based on Marx’s class theory in her essay entitled “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex.”
forward “the semiotic” as to counter-balance the symbolic. In accordance with Irigaray, Kristeva assigns the symbolic to the Lacanian context; the individual enters the symbolic and becomes the speaking subject to perform his or her social roles in the process of acquiring language. Before so, it is of necessity to go through the mirror stage and the Oedipal complex, which designates the split from the mother and the repression of the pre-Oedipal or the pre-signifying in Kristeva’s terms. For her, the pre-Oedipal or the pre-signifying is the semiotic which the symbolic cannot fully repress.
Significantly, though they both focus on the pre-Oedipal stage, what distinguishes Kristeva from Irigaray lies in their attitudes toward the symbolic. Irigaray seems to flatly deny the symbolic and aspire to replace it with a sign system that espouses sexual difference. Conversely, Kristeva asserts the indispensability of the symbolic and argues that the symbolic and the semiotic are “inseparable within the signifying process that constitutes language” (“Revolution in Poetic Language” 92). She proceeds to explain, “[b]ecause the subject is always both semiotic and symbolic, no signifying system he produces can be either
‘exclusively’ semiotic or ‘exclusively’ symbolic, and is instead necessarily marked by an indebtedness to both” (93). Nevertheless, even though Kristeva reclaims the symbolic, it does not suggest that she accepts it. She is inclined to fulfill the potentials of the semiotic and attest to “its ability of transgressing and renewing linguistic theory and, consequently, also subjectivity” (Cetorelli 31). According to Kristeva, the symbolic centers around signification; in the symbolic domain, there is the law that regulates ideologies and language to ensure everything in accordance with the signifier/signified, and the subject is obligated to conform to the law to abstain the logos from collapsing. The semiotic, on the other hand, exists prior to the individual breaking away from the mother and involves the subject formation; in her sense, the semiotic is prerequisite to the symbolic (Revolution in Poetic
Language 68).
symbolic contains unitary, stable subjectivity and binary signification, and therefore she insists on the need to “move out of the enclosure of language in order to grasp what is going on in the genetic temporality which logically precedes the constitution of the symbolic
function” (“The Subject in Process” 140). Unlike that in the symbolic, the subject formation in the semiotic is always in motion. As Kristeva puts it, the semiotic features “not only the
facilitation and the structuring disposition of drives, but also the so-called primary processes
which displace and condense both energies and their inscription” (“Revolution in Poetic Language” 93). In this case, the subject formation demonstrates overflowing energies and drives, and the subject can never be fixated, suggesting the flexibility and the heterogeneity of language in the semiotic realm. To put it from another angle, the subject-in-process in Kristeva’s term corresponds to the fluid and multiple subjectivity, one characteristics of
écriture féminine.
In order to further elaborate on the semiotic, Kristeva applies the “chora,” a term she borrows from Plato’s Timaeus, to conceptualize the subject–in-process. The chora is “a non-expressive totality formed by the drives and their states in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated” (“Revolution in Poetic Language” 93). That is to say, the
chora embodies the mobility of the subject formation and resists to be situated. On the one
hand, the semiotic chora is the site of polymorphous drives which are in various forms and representation so as to stress heterogeneity (Grosz, Sexual Subversion 44). On the other hand, Kristeva notes that the drives are destructive and dubious. Thence, the semiotic chora, repressed as residues, acts to challenge and disrupt the symbolic. What is more, the
semiotic chora functions to enable the speaking subject to return to the mother, the
nourishing origin. Since the mother, in Freudian and Lacanian accounts, is marginalized and suppressed, the semiotic and the chora, involving the pre-Oedipal and pre-signifying phase, are “maternal and feminine” (49). In this case, the return to the mother represents the speaking subject’s identification with the femininity, and suggests the possibility to regain the
primal desire and jouissance in the close bond with the mother.
As to the necessity to reconnect with the mother, Kristeva puts forward the concept of the abject to explain the process of separation from the maternal. When entering the phallic social order, the newborn child has to separate itself from the mother and recognize the distinction between self and other, subject and object, through which the individual is subsequently constructed. Whatever is related to the maternal body is cast off, which Kristeva describes as the process of abjection. Since the maternal cannot be expelled in the social order in all respects, the abject appears in the form of unspeakable horror, vomit or bodily fluids. By doing away with these, the child assumes that he maintains the cleanliness of his body, and “constitutes his own territory, edged by the abject” (Powers of Horror 6). Kristeva uses the corpse to explain the notion of the abject. Since the corpse is terrifying, and it needs to be jettisoned, not because of the death but because it is the dead body which threatens the living and the society, for the corpse is no longer a subject in the society. Consequently, “[i]t is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Powers of Horror 4). To put it differently, these bodily reactions result from that which threatens and challenges our boundaries in the Symbolic Order. Yet, for Kristeva, the abject can be manifested through art, which
symbolizes that the bond with the maternal body would be revived and not regulated by the patriarchal codes.
Albeit their contentions seem to be different, the central idea of écriture féminine permeates throughout these three French feminists’ works; Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva all dwell on the linguistic aspect and assert the importance of the female body in posing a threat to patriarchy and constructing the female subjectivity. This emphasis on the female body, however, incites a great deal of questions and criticism. Some critics attack écriture
attributed to biological determinism. For instance, Ann Rosalind Jones is suspicious of the direct, intact association of the body with writing, and the extent to which the female body can dismantle the patriarchal forces that have deprived women of their autonomies for
centuries (“Writing the Body” 255). Jones proceeds to critique that the advocacy of écriture
féminine fails to take the differences among women into account, and she highlights the
importance to “understand and respect the diversity in our concrete social situations” (257). As women become undifferentiated in terms of different races, classes, and cultures, écriture
féminine will efface women’s various lived experiences, and return to the homogeneous
sameness in the patriarchal thoughts, which is against the primary aim of feminists. Gayatri Spivak, like Jones, criticizes French feminists for essentialist praxis and Eurocentric arguments on women. Sarcastically calling it “French High Feminism,” she disagrees with Kristeva and Cixous for essentializing the female body and attempting to apply Western psychoanalysis to all women. Spivak criticizes that the Kristeva’s arguments about Chinese women may appear to concern about the other but in fact is “obsessively self-centered” (“French Feminism in an International Frame” 158). She further questions Kristeva and Cixous’s praise of men of the avant-garde and points out their failure to expound how “man” can be “woman” as to écriture féminine.
Likewise, Irigaray’s theory of parler femme is also controversial in the respect of the female body and its reconnection with the maternal. Margaret Whitford contends that Irigaray’s privileging of the mother-daughter relationship in the pre-Oedipal phase and a new language system suggests her failure to look at political and social aspects in a society. Her criticism may correspond to Jones’s complaint of Cixous’s exaggerated glorification of motherhood. Toril Moi points out that even though Irigaray tries to avoid falling into essentialism, her theory of femininity nonetheless turns out to be an essentialist practice (Sexual/Textual Politics 142). Moreover, Irigaray’s association of women’s sexuality with fluidity, as Moi asserts, indicates her theory is still based on biological determinism and only
reproduces the sameness in patriarchal society.
These criticisms notwithstanding, I am inclined to examine the arguments of the supporters of the French feminism as I consider écriture féminine as a useful way to theorize about Lady Gaga. Pamela Banting disagrees with the accusation of essentialism and idealism against French feminists, and claims that they fail to truly grasp écriture féminine. Banting argues that the relation between the female body and language rests upon “a
fluctuating process of intersemiotic translation” rather than an anatomical representation (230). She applies linguistic concepts to show Cixous’s effort to deconstruct binary oppositions, and concludes that the idea of écriture féminine suggests an intertwining of speech, writing and the body.
Barbara Freeman holds similar arguments on écriture féminine as Banting does. Pointing to the misconception of écriture féminine that body and language are two separated entities, Freeman contends that in French feminism these two are correlated. To be more specific, the body is defined textually and language corporeally, which she regards as a contribution to asserting sexual difference (62). Significantly, the intermingling of the textualized body and corporealized text also indicates the connection between female
sexuality with speech, which not only poses a threat to patriarchy, but manifests the political function of écriture féminine. According to Freeman, “[t]he political and feminist force of Cixous’s position arises from the fact that it disturbs the masculinist conception of the feminine body as site of either plenitude or lack, and thereby undoes the binaristic thinking” (66). It is important to point out that the French feminists are in fact aware of women in other parts of the world. Cixous, as Anu Aneja points out, in her recent works which the critics fail to include in their analysis is dedicated to exploring the socio-political situations of women in the third world, for instance, Cambodia and India, and expresses “a widening interest in the story of the other, rather than a focus on the self” (23). Furthermore, we need to see the female body and motherhood as metaphors in the symbolic discourse, and
understand that the body and the text are culturally intertwined. All in all, the efforts of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva to reverse what have been coerced and provoke awareness of sexual difference provide us with a powerful way to fight against patriarchy and reclaim femininity as well as female subjectivity.
Following the lead of Aneja’s and Freeman’s arguments that écriture féminine is feasible, I submit that Lady Gaga embodies the notions of écriture féminine and serves as an example of how polymorphous and fluid the female body can be. The next section will give a brief introduction of Lady Gaga and the idea of why she is the embodiment of writing the body.
The Advent of Monster(s)
When Lady Gaga gained international success for her first full-length album The Fame in January 2009, the censorship in the music industry and Western society was changed hereafter. Being a pop star writing catchy music, Lady Gaga is famous for her bizarre, out-of-proportion dressing, over-exposure of her body, and the contentious issues in the lyrics of her music. Yet, being someone who disturbs social, cultural values, Lady Gaga is not the first one to trigger such criticism in the history of Western popular culture. Mae West in the first half of the twentieth century and Madonna in the 1980s can be regarded as her
predecessors.
Mae West challenged the patriarchal norms and showcased women’s sexuality through her comic performance. West’s performances directed people’s attention to sex; not only did she encourage active, even aggressive sexuality for women on the radio, but she also ridiculed male ego and played with the moral standards and regulations on Broadway or in movies at her time. June Sochen describes West as a performer-reformer. According to her, it is difficult for a female star to be both an entertainer and a reformer at the same time because “[r]arely did women’s roles break completely with expected conventions, thereby
attesting to the persistence of traditional cultural views” (12). West, by contrast, shattered this stereotype of women and cleverly wrote her female roles to turn over a new leaf of women along with her mockery of male-center views. Her performance appealed to both men and women, even though there were endless controversies about her. From this view, West, as a famous star, successfully raised people’s awareness and instilled new thoughts into society, epitomizing “the outrageous Eve” (Sochen 61).
While West’s career and impact spanned more than five decades, Madonna started her career as a singer in 1976 and has acquired popularity and fame through exercising sexual and sensational images in her music since the 1980s. Generally speaking, when Madonna first came to the mainstream music scene, people would associate her with Marilyn Monroe in that they shared the similar image as sexy blondes. Nevertheless, there are marked differences between Madonna and Marilyn Monroe; while Marilyn Monroe represents the blonde dream girl for American society, Madonna breaks this stereotype, and uses her body to challenge the patriarchal fantasy about women and transgress against the social order.
Although Marilyn Monroe had posted nude before she became famous, she did so because of poverty, not because she wanted to overturn the embodied image of woman. Madonna is the opposite of Monroe.
On account of her confronting the traditional perceptions about sex, gender, and
sexuality in her performance and music, she had to face both admiration and harsh criticism. Steve Allen, a comedian, asserts that the reason why Madonna has become famous and successful is “her willingness—even eagerness—to resort to the grossest sort of vulgarity” (6). Another critic Ray Kerrison compares her with Marilyn Monroe, criticizing that
“[w]here Monroe was subtle, Madonna is coarse” (6). For example, during her MDNA tour in Europe in 2012, Madonna deliberately stripped down her bra and exposed one of her nipples during her Istanbul performance; in another show in Rome, again, she showed her buttocks at the audience, for which she is labeled “slut” afterwards. Accordingly, these two
criticisms reflect men’s anxiety about the collapse of the stereotype of the ideal women and their body in the traditional context. By contrast, E. Ann Kaplan and Susan McClay praise and appreciate Madonna’s refusal to be defined by patriarchy and her conscious subversion of the woman image in Hollywood (Bordo 273).
Lady Gaga strikes the world with an even more progressive image than Madonna, although she also appears on the stage with the image of a blonde. She holds an
aggressively liberal attitude toward sex and her body, claiming the she is bisexual and enjoys heterosexuality and autoeroticism. Also, as aforementioned, Lady Gaga pushes the limit and plays with the boundary about sex and gender in her music, and her exaggerative
costumes demonstrates her manipulation of her body which transgresses against the common bodily concept. Moreover, her performances and action are highly suggestive and almost explicit about sexuality as she once put a “thing” in her genital area, making it appear like a penis and successfully inciting people sensational and outrageous terror.
Interestingly, Lady Gaga is known for running a “monster” family; her fans are called “Little Monsters” and herself “Mother Monster.” Lady Gaga first called her fans “Little Monsters” in a show when they were excited, sweaty, and waving their hands. She later is called “Mother Monster” by her fans out of their appreciation and admiration of her. The term “monster,” to some extent, befittingly characterizes many of Lady Gaga’s fans who are outcasts or those who are unwilling to comply with social norms. It also describes Lady Gaga herself as well. Since a great number of people disapprove of her, she is always censored with harsh words, one of which is monster. In this case, Lady Gaga’s application of the word “monster” not only reverses the criticism and mocks people’s mediocrity and lack of defining characteristics, but suggests the appreciation of a monster’s uniqueness and specificity. Overall, Lady Gaga draws the public attention to the tabooed issues of sexuality, gender, as well as race, and deconstructs the binaries through textualizing the body. To me, this interrelation between textauality and corporeality embodies Lady Gaga’s practice of
écriture féminine.
An Overview of the Thesis
This thesis is mainly divided into four chapters. The first chapter tries to theorize the idea of écriture féminine and briefly discuss the three transgressive female figures, Mae West, Madonna, and Lady Gaga. Even since Lady Gaga launched her career, the accusation of her imitating Madonna and the thinking of her as another Mae West have never stopped. These three figures indeed share distinguishing similarities; they are credited with the endeavor to confront the male-dominated society, and the female body plays a pivotal role in their art works. However, one cannot conclude that they all embody the theme of écriture féminine. Unlike West and Madonna, Lady Gaga showcases more aggressive sexual politics and how she represents her female body in her artistry is also fiercer. I will come back to the comparison of the three women at the end of the thesis in order to argue that the ways in which Lady Gaga is the most subversive of them all.
The second chapter will offer a textual analysis of Lady Gaga’s song lyrics. I will elaborate on the relation between Lady Gaga’s sexuality and speech to the practice of écriture
féminine. It is noteworthy that Lady Gaga not only writes or co-writes every single song of
hers, but brings her body into full play. In this sense, when writing her songs, she involves her bodily experiences in the lyrics, and manifests her enjoyment toward writing herself. Therefore, to delve into her lyrics will give an understanding of the textualization of her lived experiences and the inscription of the body in the text.
The third chapter centers on the representations of the female body in Lady Gaga’s music videos, her costumes in terms of the grotesque with regard to the female body, and her performances. I will analyze the narratives in her music videos and examine the ways in which she employs the female body as a vehicle to circumvent the masculinist discourse and empower others. Since it is evident that Lady Gaga goes through some changes in her
music, I will also inspect her transformation from a pop star to Mother Monster, the
significance behind this transformation, along with its relation to écriture féminine. Then the focus of this chapter will turn to her costumes. Usually, people are used to pinning women shots down to the image of a Barbie, who has a curvaceous figure and always dresses like a princess, and they tend to judge a female singer first by her appearance rather than her talent. Lady Gaga, being aware of this stereotype placed on women, always shows up in formless and outrageous costumes to upset how we should dress. Whilst people detect nothing but oddity, Lady Gaga’s costumes are in fact a practice of the grotesque and serve to counteract the masculine dualism and views on women’s bodies. In addition, Lady Gaga’ female body in grotesque costumes presents a new form of femininity that cannot be defined in accordance with social norms. Furthermore, since Lady Gaga claims herself as Mother Monster and her fans Little Monsters, I want to link the notion of monstrosity with the grotesque. In other words, Lady Gaga’s recourse to the monstrosity makes the female body not only a monstrous body but also a grotesque one, which is protrusive, plural and always changing. The significance of the grotesque body therefore corresponds to the idea of
écriture féminine.
Also, I will elaborate on what grotesque is before presenting a close reading of significance embedded in her costumes, since critics are at odds with the definition of the grotesque. For example, Noel Carroll argues that to define the grotesque, “a structural account” should be taken into consideration before the “functional account” (295). Contrary to Carroll, Wolfgang Kayser claims that the experience of the grotesque occurs to the
observer when our sense of the world is transformed and defamiliarized by abysmal farces. That is to say, he stresses the importance of the “act of reception” (180). Seen in the light, the grotesque costumes and Lady Gaga’s female body are powerful entities, through which she deconstructs our perception about the connection among identity, social roles, and costumes as embodied in the caricature of femininity envisioned by patriarchy.
As Lady Gaga always wears eccentric and tantalizing costumes during her
performances, the last part of the third chapter will be the analysis of performative acts. As is known to all, Lady Gaga never disguises her stance as a supporter of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual rights, and aside from her songs, she delivers this message in relation to the sex issues in her music videos and during her live performances. To be more specific, Lady Gaga’s artistry reflects her sexual politics. As Judith Halberstam contends in an interview with Jeffrey Williams, Lady Gaga’s sexual politics is quite open; when people suspect whether she is a hermaphrodite, she chose to remain silent and tactically directed their attention to gay rights (William 379-80). What further overwhelms the public is her refiguring Jo Calderone performing her song at VMAs 2011. This highlights her playing with the sexual boundaries to mock patriarchy and praising the polymorphous female body. The impact of Lady Gaga’s sexual politics will be inspected in like manner.
The final chapter will offer a comparison and contrast among Mae West, Madonna and Lady Gaga to explain why Lady Gaga employs the strategy of writing about the female body that goes much further than West and Madonna do, hence representing the idea of écriture
féminine. Also, as she has been engaged in a wide range of non-profit organizations to raise
awareness and fight for equality for everyone, I will look into the role of Lady Gaga as a social activist.
Chapter 2
Writing the Female Body: From a Pop Star to Mother Monster
Active in the pop music scene since 2008 and praised by many critics for her musical
achievements, Lady Gaga has, nevertheless, contributed to the debates regarding the art of women’s performances and the female body. As Lady Gaga is a strong supporter for stopping bullying and an advocate of LGBT rights, Lady Gaga’s fans regard her as an inspiration and are not ashamed to dress like her. With her eccentric and bold exertion of her body in her music, it is no surprise that this daring playing with her body comes with much criticism. Regardless of the critical acclaim and criticism, the female body plays such an important role in Lady Gaga’s music that I regard her music as a version of écriture
féminine. In this chapter, I will analyze Lady Gaga’s song lyrics to demonstrate how she
represents the idea of écriture féminine. Also, as there is a change in Lady Gaga’s music and style since her second album The Fame Monster, I will discuss the significance of such transformation along with my textual analysis.
Practicing É criture Féminine in Lady Gaga’s Song Lyrics
Up to 2012, Lady Gaga has released three self-authored albums, The Fame, The Fame
Monster, and Born This Way. These three albums mark her effort to write from her body
and deconstruct the social norms. Ann Rosalind Jones’s description of écriture féminine can best characterize Lady Gaga and her music: “to the extent that the female body is seen as a direct source of female writing, a powerful alternate discourse seems possible: to write from the body is to recreate the world” (252). To write from the body, as Cixous notes, is to explore the undiscovered and the repressed, “about their eroticization, sudden turn-ons of a certain miniscule-immense area of their bodies” (“The Laugh of the Medusa” 256). To assert the link between Lady Gaga and écriture féminine, however, does not suggest that she engages the practice of writing from the body in all three albums. While the first album
involves both her struggle against patriarchy and the beginning of her self-discovery, Lady Gaga makes the process of self-discovery and the practice of écriture féminine most explicit in the following two albums.
The Fame, released in 2008, is Lady Gaga’s first album and explicitly explores sexuality, love, violence, and power. According to Lady Gaga herself, this album, embellished in dance pop, “is about how anyone can feel famous… Pop culture is art. It doesn’t make you cool to hate pop culture, so I embraced it and you hear it all over The Fame. But it’s a sharable fame: I want to invite you all to the party, I want people to feel a part of this lifestyle” (qtd. in Herbert 91). Aside from this claim, The Fame, in an actual fact, represents Lady Gaga’s interrogation of the phases where a woman expresses the ambiguity toward her sexuality and patriarchy, and where she comes to liberation and celebration of the female power. These can be perceived, if we pay attention to the lyrics.
While The Fame celebrates being famous and clubbing, Lady Gaga manifests the conflicts between female submissiveness and the assertion of female empowerment in the lyrics of this album. For instance, “LoveGame,” released as the album’s third single, well reflects this conflict; it expresses both a woman’s obedience to a man and active female sexuality. Addressing the issues of love, sex, and desire in a provocative way, this song is reflective of pop music which features sex and desire within phallocentric contexts. In this song, the first-person “I,” while associating love and sex with games, repeatedly declares, “I wanna take a ride on your disco stick” (2). It is evident that this “disco stick” symbolizes a penis, as Lady Gaga herself states that it is “a metaphor for a cock” (qtd. in Herbert 84). In one regard, this declaration implies a woman’s sexual need. As the lyrics of “LoveGame” carry sexual connotations and the title suggests an interrelation between love, sex, fun, and man, it appears that women rely on men to enjoy fun and even pleasure. Hence in an interview with a Norwegian journalist in 2009, it is reported that Lady Gaga made a
statement, “I’m not a feminist. I hail men, I love men” (qtd. in Woodruff 28).10
This statement shows not only her need of men but also the stereotypical association of feminism with hated for men, as she seems to distance herself from feminism. Other lines of
“LoveGame” lyrics also indicate a woman’s passivity in sexuality; for instance, the “I” announces, “Got my ass squeezed by sexy Cupid/ Guess he wants to play/ Wants to play/ A LOVEGAME” (9-12). While the passive sentence structure suggests the “I” is in a passive condition, to put “love” and “game” together means that the man takes a frivolous attitude toward love and regards women as playthings and possessions. This woman’s passiveness in relation to men is further enhanced:
You’ve indicated your interest I’m educated in sex, yes And now I want it bad Want it bad
A LOVEGAME
A LOVEGAME. (29-34)
Seen in this light, Lady Gaga’s “LoveGame” conveys the messages of women’s sexuality and pleasure revolving around men and the phallic symbol, and their submission to and
dependency on men, which echo Luce Irigaray’s notion that “[f]emale sexuality has always been theorized within masculine parameters” (“This Sex Which Is Not One” 99).
However, instead of sexual passivity, I believe through her songsLady Gaga attests to active female sexuality which contradicts the passiveness in “LoveGame.” As discussed above, the declaration “I wanna take a ride on your disco stick” expresses her desire of a man’s penis, but it also shows the woman’s dominance over the man. While she boldly demands sex, the verb “ride,” referring to the position of a woman on top during intercourse,
10
As Abbie Woodruff points out in her dissertation, Lady Gaga, Social Media, and Performing An Identity, this statement has been quoted quite often on the Internet, but the interview video on YOUTUBE was removed and the original video is nowhere to be found (28).
can be interpreted how she treats the penis as an object and relocates the dichotomy between the male and the female, activeness and passiveness. The pre-choruses are indicative of Lady Gaga’s active sexuality as well: “Hold me and love me/ Just wanna touch for a minute/ Maybe three seconds is enough for my heart to quit it” (14-16). Usually, an imperative sentence situates the announcer in a position of authority, which hints that the “I” in “LoveGame” does not subject to any men. Nor is she a man’s possession because three seconds is enough for her to quit; even if she is playing a game, she declares her
independence and active attitude toward her sexuality. In this sense, the outspokenness and autonomy of female sexuality, as well as the submission to the male, not only in “LoveGame” but the whole album form a stark ambiguity explaining Lady Gaga’s conflicts about women and feminism.
Aside from “LoveGame,” Lady Gaga also presents the patriarchal scheme of female passivity in “Paparazzi,” the last single of the debut album which focuses upon Lady Gaga’s struggles about love and fame. The word “paparazzi” is of Italian origin and usually describes photographers who stalk celebrities and prominent people so as to take photos of them and reveal them to the public for personal profits, and thus the paparazzi and their targets form a relation between the chaser and the chased, the gazer and the gazed. In Lady Gaga’s song, the word “paparazzi” works as a two-fold metaphor; as this song is about love and fame, “paparazzi,” on the one hand, sticks with the literal meaning, and on the other hand is metaphorized as Lady Gaga herself. Suggested by the theme of The Fame, “Paparazzi” articulates Lady Gaga’s desire for fame, which contributes to her craving for love from paparazzi, i.e. the attention. On the whole, paparazzi play a pivotal and necessary role within the celebrity culture, because to be stalked means you are a celebrity. Therefore, Lady Gaga attempts to win the attention from paparazzi to become famous by staging herself “to satisfy our exaggerated expectation of human greatness” (Boorstin 58). To put it in Lady Gaga’s words, the central idea is “the media-whoring” (qtd. in Herbert 164).
It is noteworthy to point out that while Lady Gaga longs for the attention of paparazzi, i.e. to be followed and watched by paparazzi, she assumes the role of the gazed and paparazzi represent the male gaze. Notably paparazzi are almost always men and the male gaze is inherent in their photographs, which mirror a form of patriarchal scopophilia. Laura Mulvey elaborates upon the male gaze and scopophilia in her article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” and proposes the oppositions “between active/male and passive/female” (19). According to her, behind the camera are always heterosexual men who project their fantasies onto women. Hence, through the male gaze, women epitome men’s desire and their bodies are displayed as sexual objects. In this sense, Lady Gaga’s desire to be gazed by paparazzi exemplifies Mulvey’s explanation of how the male gaze presents the female figure erotically to satisfy patriarchy’s pleasure in looking. Moreover, as Lady Gaga uses the word “media-whoring” to depict her way of luring paparazzi, which corresponds to Daniel Boorstin’s notion of celebrity,11
it implies women’s subjugation to the male gaze and further reinforces the notion of the female body as the means to fulfill men’s fantasies, for “whoring” suggests prostitution and depreciation of women to an extreme extent.
From a different but more straightforward perspective, “Paparazzi” also discusses Lady Gaga’s love for a man and she compares the relationship between her and her lover to that between paparazzi and celebrities. Just like in the first-person narrator in “LoveGame,” the “I” in “Paparazzi” shows her love for her lover and hopes to be loved in return in the first verse, 12 as she says, “Got my flash on, it’s true/ Need that picture of you/ It’s so magical/
11 In The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America, Daniel Boorstin compares the celebrity with the classic
hero and contends that celebrity is “known for his well-knownness” (57). He argues that because of the Graphic Revolution in the media, the greatness that characterizes the hero has come to be replaced by
shallowness. That is, today the celebrity does not have significant qualities and the fame is built on an illusion; the media is both made and unmade by the media. The span of the celebrity’s fame is quite short; as Boorstin states, “the celebrity even in his lifetime becomes passé” (63). Hence, to be famous is to keep the media interested in you, the newspaper, magazines, television, etc. Boostin’s explanation of the celebrity reflects how nowadays people will do anything to become a celebrity, even to pose nude, like Kim Kardashian, and thus echos Lady Gaga’s usage of “media whoring.”
We’d be so fantastic” (3-6). Paparazzi being a metaphor of Lady Gaga, the “picture”
thereby represents the lover’s love returned to Lady Gaga since to take revealing photographs is the primary goal for paparazzi. In fact, the metaphor of Lady Gaga as paparazzi
presupposes that she reverses Mulvey’s idea of the dichotomy of male/active and
female/passive in the media. When Lady Gaga assumes the role of paparazzi to follow her lover, she is not passive anymore; she appropriates the position of the gazer, the chaser, and significantly transforms the male gaze to a form of female gaze. However, although she asserts the female gaze, Lady Gaga falls short to construct her female subjectivity as her female gaze identifies with masculinity: “I’m your biggest fan/ I’ll follow until you love me/ Papa,/ Paparazzi” (13-16). The chorus of “Paparazzi” evidently demonstrates the female figure’s submissiveness to her male lover. Additionally, Lady Gaga’s activeness revolves around the want of a man’s love, which diminishes her individuality. What is more significant is that she repeats the word “papa” several times throughout the song. Kevin Gaffney suggests that she is singing to her father: “I will not stop until you love me, papa (her real dad)” (31). The “papa” can also mean that her boyfriend represents a paternal figure. Whether it means her father or her boyfriend, “Paparazzi” reflects a kind of fixation on paternal love. Seen in this regard, whether “paparazzi” refers to Lady Gaga or the stalking photographers, the song “Paparazzi” is still composed within the masculine parameters. As argued earlier, The Fame symbolizes Lady Gaga’s self-discovery; she continues the conflicts in patriarchal societies in another song from the album, “Poker Face,” where her exploration of female sexuality is communicated. Generally speaking, poker face means a person void of emotions on the face and represents a shield. Lady Gaga employs the word as a shield of her sexuality against patriarchy. Like other songs from The Fame, in the narrative discourse of “Poker Face” lies her struggle with respect to a man, and the lyrics of this song show a sadomasochistic relationship between Lady Gaga and her lover. In the first verse, the singer sings, “Fold em’ let em’ hit me raise it baby stay with me/ (I love it)” (4-5).
