Full Description
Three years after entering the pop music scene, Lady Gaga became the most well-known pop star in the world. These thirteen critical essays explore Lady Gaga's body of work through the interdisciplinary filter of performance identity and cover topics such as gender and sexuality, body commodification, visual body rhetoric, drag performance, homosexuality and heteronormativity, Surrealism and the theatre of cruelty, the carnivalesque, monstrosity, imitation and parody, human rights, and racial politics. Of particular interest is the way that Lady Gaga's œuvre, however popular, strange, raw or controversial, enters into the larger sociopolitical discourse, challenging the status quo and altering our perceptions of reality.
Contents
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
The Sex of Lady Gaga
MATHIEU DEFLEM
Lady Gaga's Bodies: Buying and Selling The Fame Monster
ELIZABETH KATE SWITAJ
Body Language and "Bad Romance": The Visual Rhetoric of the Artist
JENNIFER M. SANTOS
What a Drag: Lady Gaga, Jo Calderone and the Politics of Representation
HEATHER DUERRE HUMANN
Follow the Glitter Way: Lady Gaga and Camp
KATRIN HORN
Lady Gaga and the Wolf: "Little Red Riding Hood," The Fame Monster and Female Sexuality
JENNIFER M. WOOLSTON
Surrealism, the Theatre of Cruelty and Lady Gaga
RICHARD J. GRAY II
Rabelais Meets Vogue: The Construction of Carnival, Beauty and Grotesque
DAVID ANNANDALE
The Fame Monster: The Monstrous Construction of Lady Gaga
ANN T. TORRUSIO
The Appropriation of the Madonna Aesthetic
REBECCA M. LUSH
Performing Pop: Lady Gaga, "Weird Al" Yankovic and Parodied Performance
MATTHEW R. TURNER
"I Hope When I'm Dead I'll Be Considered an Icon": Shock Performance and Human Rights
KARLEY ADNEY
Whiteness and the Politics of "Post-Racial" America
LAURA GRAY-ROSENDALE, STEPHANIE CAPALDO, SHERRI CRAIG and EMILY DAVALOS
Works Cited
About the Contributors
Index
