Gaga Feminism?

In 2012, author J. Jack Halberstam released a book titled Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. In it, the author forwards a new theory of feminism, a “gaga feminism,” one that is “a form of political expression that masquerades as naïve nonsense but that actually participates in big and meaningful forms of critique… a scavenger feminism that borrows promiscuously, steals from everywhere, and inhabits the ground of stereotype and cliché all at the same time.” This definition seems an apt demonstration of what scholar Carisa R. Showden calls “girl-power” or “Girlie,” or even “postfeminist” feminism, a feminism that focuses on individualism, on consumerism, and a push to “reclaim traditional models of heterosexual power relations as pleasurable rather than demeaning and to embrace standard tropes of feminine sexuality” ("What's Political about the New Feminisms?" Frontiers, 2009).

In this sense, Halberstam’s use of Lady Gaga and her theatrical celebrity is entirely appropriate: she is nothing if not the ringleader of embracing standard tropes of (fantastical) feminine sexuality. However, as Showden (and others) have pointed out, there are just a few problems with branding Lady Gaga and her minions as feminist activists.

First and foremost, definition of terms. According to Lady Gaga, she is not a feminist; she’s a feminist. How is that possible? Defining what a feminist is. In 2009, Lady Gaga gave an interview in which she was asked, “Are you a feminist?” (See Lady Gaga on Double Standards & Feminism). Her reaction was instant and powerful: “No! I’m not a feminist!”

Years later, in 2011, she responds to questions about feminism again, only this time, she has prepared a lovely little speech in which she details all of the reasons why she is a feminist (See Lady Gaga on Feminism). Under a postfeminist framework, the pop artist’s dubious explanation is precisely what “new” feminism is, what it does, and the standard by which feminists and non-feminists are differentiated: it is, in part, women jumping on the objectification bandwagon, where “women as well as men participate in female objectification—making sex objects of other women and of themselves, ‘ironically’ adopting the male gaze as their own” (Showden). At the same time, it is paradoxically “a rejection of all of those things” (Gaga) taught to children to ensure societal conformity, things like standards of dress and behavior, for example.

Which brings us to a second problem: confusion. Showden characterizes this problem as a tendency for Girlie feminism to “confuse a determined reclamation of femininity with a feminist statement on agency,” in which freedom and empowerment are “illusory given the individual’s inability to control the reading of her actions.” Thus adopting an attitude of “I can do whatever I want because I want to do it” is mistaken for activism; materialism and consumerism mistaken for empowerment. “In fields of social inequality,” cautions Showden, “the adorned body…has a material significance.” For this reason, only denial and ignorance (Gaga, anyone?) make Girlie feminism and all its trappings unproblematic, a terminal issue that leaves us precisely nowhere.

Ignoring problems and still-existing inequalities, oppressive systems and demeaning objectification is not the same as eradicating it, no matter how loudly one sings, dresses or rebels. Adopting a degrading male gaze and uncritically objectifying oneself is pointless, without a political agenda to forward or a specific inequity to critique. The nonsensical “girl-power” logics of today’s pop feminists mask and delegitimize the real work taking place beneath the neon glare, the activists and advocates, both feminists and beyond, who work in the hopes of effecting actual socio-political change instead of merely slapping a glitzy wig on it and calling it a fancy name.