Not too long ago I wrote a post about whether Lady Gaga is an example of sexual liberation or the epitome of capitalist consumerism, which I take to be a prominent form of self-subjugation. Today, over at the NYT's philosophy blog, Nancy Bauer writes the following about Lady Gaga:
The tension in Gaga’s self-presentation, far from being idiosyncratic
or self-contradictory, epitomizes the situation of a certain class of
comfortably affluent young women today. There’s a reason they love
Gaga. On the one hand, they have been raised to understand themselves
according to the old American dream, one that used to be beyond women’s
grasp: the world is basically your oyster, and if you just believe in
yourself, stay faithful to who you are, and work hard and cannily
enough, you’ll get the pearl. On the other hand, there is more pressure
on them than ever to care about being sexually attractive according to
the reigning norms. The genius of Gaga is to make it seem obvious —
more so than even Madonna once did — that feminine sexuality is the
perfect shucking knife. And Gaga is explicit in her insistence that,
since feminine sexuality is a social construct, anyone, even a man who’s
willing to buck gender norms, can wield it.
Gaga wants us to understand her self-presentation as a kind of
deconstruction of femininity, not to mention celebrity. As she told Ann
Powers, “Me embodying the position that I’m analyzing is the very thing
that makes it so powerful.” Of course, the more successful the
embodiment, the less obvious the analytic part is. And since Gaga
herself literally embodies the norms that she claims to be putting
pressure on (she’s pretty, she’s thin, she’s well-proportioned), the
message, even when it comes through, is not exactly stable. It’s easy
to construe Gaga as suggesting that frank self-objectification is a form
of real power.
The rest of the post goes on to discuss the legacy of feminism with a generation of Gaga-aware young women. She concludes that it's not so easy to tell the difference between practices of freedom and self-expression and practices of self-objectification or self-instrumentalization.
Recent Comments