None could name any other major pop star, or pop culture personality right now, who they could say the same about – any other artist who could stand accused on the grounds that they were just too impossibly inventive
Camille Paglia has already been to work on some of these questions in a piece in the Sunday Times last weekend...And what seemed to irk her most was what she considers Gaga's fundamental lack of sex appeal. "Gaga isn't sexy at all," she wrote. "She's like a gangly marionette or plasticised android. How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? . . . Marlene and Madonna gave the impression, true or false, of being pansexual. Gaga, for all her writhing and posturing, is asexual."
What was interesting about Paglia's article was its implication that, in order to be a star – and particularly a female star – you have to be sexually appealing. All of which apparently ignored the fact that, for her fans, one of Gaga's key attractions is precisely her dismissal of traditional, feminine sex appeal, of the need to be charming, of the values and aesthetic of other female singers: the ripe, pert bodies, the pretty, familiar costumes.
She has often been compared with a drag queen and, in many ways, this seems apt. Part of the brilliance and beauty of drag, of course, is that it can potentially expose sex roles – most often femininity – as a performance. A drag queen in enormous false eyelashes, teetering heels, a tight dress, heavy makeup, a voluminous wig, talon-like nails, is mimicking a woman, while underlining that what's expected of women is in no way natural. With her increasingly bizarre getups, Gaga does the same."
This article is rather enormous, but presents some pretty interesting ideas about what Lady Gaga's various wacky wardrobes represent (if you have rhotacism, that sentence was awesome). I always saw her as a feminist (hell, i saw her as an everything-right-there-is-to-stand-for-ist) but this is a cool breakdown of the many ways in which she is. It also points out several ways what most people would dismiss as 'fashion' or 'wardrobe malfunctions' actually make a strong but subtle point. Sometimes people don't look past the shock value of a clothing style or an action to see what it really means; after all, to cause shock at all, something must violently break social norms. By figuring out what shocks us, we can trace our way back to what we consider 'normal'. Sometimes, those things need challenging (for example, what does it mean about our society if the mere image of a woman on a toilet shocks and offends us? Once again i've found my way back to bathrooms. read the article to know what i'm talking about)
