There is much to disdain about Lady Gaga. On the surface, her music and persona are entirely derivative, she seems concerned mainly with acts of conspicuous consumption, and she adheres to a fascist body regime beholden to elitist, white, hyper-feminine beauty norms.

Why, then, devote a column to her? One very good reason is her immense popularity. The past year has seen her explode onto the pop charts—her songs “Just Dance” and “Poker Face” were two consecutive Billboard #1 singles, both from her debut album “The Fame.” This is no small feat.

But there is another, deeper reason to spend time thinking about Lady Gaga. While it may be simple to dismiss her outright as a bit of normative pop fluff, this, I argue, misses the point. In fact, Lady Gaga makes a very explicit attempt to shrewdly, purposefully—even politically—expose the nature of our fascination with pop icons by making it her mission to foreground the artifice of her own performance. As opposed to those pop stars to whom Lady Gaga is often (and erroneously) likened such as Madonna and Christina Aguilera, Lady Gaga in fact makes it her chief purpose to expose pop’s artificiality; her performance is the performance of fakeness.

In other words, because Lady Gaga is always performing, she simultaneously never actually exists, fully inhabiting Richard Dyer’s assertion that “we never actually know [stars] directly as real people, only as they are to be found in media texts.”1 Onstage and off, in interviews and in her lyrics, Lady Gaga collapses the distinction between star image, character, and performance, thus emphasizing pop’s own artifice.

By extension—and here is the crux of my argument—because the chief mechanism that she uses to perform fakeness is her own body and its particularly gendered politics, whether singing about it, flaunting it, adorning it, or talking about it, Lady Gaga interrogates the performative nature of gender, sex, and sexuality and their relationship to celebrity. Because she highlights her own performativity using these tools, it is impossible to read Lady Gaga straight, in all connotations of the term. Rather, I want to claim Lady Gaga as queer.

In this vein, Lady Gaga has less in common with Madonna and Britney Spears, and much more in common with David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, and Andy Warhol (her name, in fact is a reference to the Queen song “Radio Ga Ga” and she maintains her own Factory-esque group of collaborators called the “Haus of Gaga” that she works with to design her outlandish costuming).

“I’m filling an enormous hole. There’s a wide-open space for a female with big balls to fill.” —Lady Gaga2

Example one, highlighting constructed fakeness: In a widely-circulated video interview earlier this year with Australian journalist Alison Stephenson, Lady Gaga states that all she looks for in a partner is “a big dick.” After Stephenson asks her, “And what else?” she shakes her head and, in hilarious deadpan, says, “That’s it.” It becomes clear through her answers in this clip that she is, in the words of sociologist Erving Goffman, putting up a bald-faced, exaggerated “front,” giving an embarrassed-sounding Stephenson a run for her money. And if we had any lingering doubts, we are reminded explicitly in this interview that “Every minute of my life is performance.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

When a woman pop star with Lady Gaga’s visibility “has the balls” to declare in an interview that all she wants in a partner is “a big dick,” traditional discourses of gender and sexuality are shaken. On one level, she is taking a page out of a classic feminist playbook, turning the tables on men by reducing them to sex objects—indeed, even body parts—in the same way that women have been traditionally objectified. However, if we are to believe that Lady Gaga is consciously exposing the artifice of fame and celebrity through her own performativity, we can then also read this comment as targeted toward the same culture industry that catapults Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Britney Spears to the top of the tabloid racks for mere genital obsession—indeed, the same culture industry that would demand the majority of Stephenson’s questions be about marriage and female reproduction.

Example two: In the long-format video for the song “Paparazzi,” directed by Jonas Akerlund, Lady Gaga actually performs the idealized version of her own performance, which soon becomes dismantled before her eyes. Framed as an old Hollywood feature film, Lady Gaga stars as herself, as the “film” opens in a hyper-luxurious bedroom with a model-esque Scandinavian boyfriend. He ultimately betrays her for a paparazzi photo op, leaving her crippled. Lady Gaga, memorably dancing in a metal suit and on crutches, works her way back for revenge, eventually poisoning her boyfriend. In a momentary break, she calls 911 and admits, “I just killed my boyfriend,” which leads to a media circus, and greater fame. The video closes with a Paris and Lindsay-esque mug shot. Lady Gaga firmly situates her own performance of celebrity in concert with those performances that we have all already seen, but who are entirely less reflexive.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are many more instances that highlight the visibility of her performativity—the fact that her “real identity,” Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanoatta, manifested as a news cycle topic in its own right and that she apparently refuses to answer to her real name; a ridiculously challenging and outlandish “acoustic” performance of “Poker Face” for AOL Music (video below); the title of her album, “The Fame,” which begs reference to Warhol; and the persistence of incredulous, homemade fashion—bubble dresses, outfits fashioned out of Kermit the Frog (above), and “costumes” that often include masks.

And speaking of masks, as if taking a page out of Goffman, Lady Gaga “shocked” the media when she recently appeared at an MTV news conference in Malta wearing a full black face mask that revealed only her nose and coiffed blonde hair. Suddenly the lyric “No he can’t read my poker face,” seemed to morph into a political statement on stardom. As Dyer points out in Stars, citing Bela Balazs, the close-up has long been thought to be a chief mechanism to channel a star image—the face as primary identifier.3 When Lady Gaga, a conflated star image/character who exposes the artifice of her own performance, purposefully obscures her own face at a high-profile media event in “real life,” she is unquestionably calling attention to the performative nature of celebrity itself.

The queer leap I want to make here is that, as observed by José Esteban Muñoz, marginal populations often “disidentify”: grapple with mainstream identity performance and adapt, adopt, and/or rework this performance to their needs and desires.4 Another way of saying this is that queers are, more so than “majoritarian” populations, primed to recognize the performance of the everyday—or, as Chicago sociologist Robert Ezra Park observed long ago:

“It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role…”5

It is difficult to suggest that Lady Gaga, with her Upper East Side prep school background, comes from any sort of marginal existence. However, I assert that her performance of fakeness, though not nearly as political as Muñoz’s acts, nevertheless functions in a disidentificatory manner. In much the same way that Muñoz’s queers dismantle and recuperate everyday performance, Lady Gaga’s highlighted artifice of pop performativity itself becomes a queer act—in all senses. This complicated, queer space is the same that leads to “rumors of bisexuality” and that enables her to channel masculine modalities while simultaneously appearing hyper-feminine. Additionally, to cite her privileged, white background as evidence for a counter-argument that she is therefore somehow slumming it is to adhere to a silohed sort of identity politics and to ignore why masses of queers “get her,” through their own acts of dis/identification—her politics, as result of her problematizing the performance of celebrity, make her absolutely, justifiably queer.

“I’m not sure who this person is, to be honest… I don’t know if it is a man or a woman.” —Christina Aguilera, on Lady Gaga6

If Lady Gaga can’t be read straight, her whole act becomes suspect. Her peroxide hair and leggy, pantsless outfits, her fascist body image, her “Love Game” and penchant for “big dicks” must be read queerly, as inhabiting a dual space wherein she exposes the artifice of the culture industry at the same time that she profits from it, actually landing on magazine covers and in the tabloids. Case in point: though her videos are steeped in bling, when she sings, “It’s good to live expensive and you know it,” we begin to wonder if we can read this straight. Is she really promoting conspicuous consumption? Or is she poking fun at the culture industry, and by extension, us? She shed some light on this, at least, in an interview with the Times of London: “I don’t give a f*** about money. What am I going to do with a condo and a car? I can’t drive.”

Hers is a queer space, indeed.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note: This column owes a huge debt to an excellent, thought-provoking blog post by my friend and colleague Alyx Vesey at Feministmusicgeek.com.

Image Credits:
1. Lady Gaga displays her poker face.
2. Lady Gaga on German TV.
3. “I wouldn’t like people to see me—me—in any other way than my music and my stage performances.”

Please feel free to comment.

1. Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1982. p. 2
2. Collins, Hattie. “Lady GaGa: The future of pop?” Times Online, 14 Dec. 2008. Accessed 6 Aug 2009
3. Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1982. p. 16. Dyer does critique Balazs’ assertion, but nevertheless recognizes its enduring cultural import.
4. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1999
5. Quoted in Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959. p. 19
6. Collins, Hattie. “Lady GaGa: The future of pop?” Times Online, 14 Dec. 2008. Accessed 6 Aug 2009

Let’s play a game of probability for a moment. Let’s cast back to a time just before this summer’s Beijing Olympics and wonder who might answer the following question in the affirmative: Have you ever heard of Australian diver Matthew Mitcham?

Certainly, Australians might answer “yes” more often than, say, Americans. Perhaps gay Australians might answer “yes” more often than straight Australians, since Mitcham made waves coming out as gay in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald on May 24, 2008—and we gays tend latch on to our out celebrities. In fact, American gay and lesbian newsmagazine The Advocate ran a cover story with Mitcham just in time for the Olympics, so we might also say that American gays and lesbians might be more familiar with Mitcham than straight Americans.

Let’s get really specific now: I’d wager that NBC diving commentators Ted Robinson and Cynthia Potter were familiar with Mitcham, as were the handful of news producers responsible for NBC’s extensive Olympic coverage. He was, after all, probably the highest-profile Australian male diver at the games.

I’d wager that they were also familiar with the fact that he is gay—in fact, the only out gay male athlete at the Beijing games—and that he has a pretty dramatic story: Young diving phenom, groomed from an early age to join the elite ranks of the sport, takes a year off to find himself, combat depression, and, well, be a teenager. Then he makes a comeback earlier this year, snatching gold at one of the international diving community’s highest-profile meets. After qualifying for the Australian Olympic team, his family has trouble scraping together money to send his partner, Lachlan, and his mother to be with him in Beijing. American company Johnson & Johnson steps in, awarding a $5,000 grant to send Lachlan to Beijing—the first ever given to a same-sex partner through their Athlete Support Program. Sydney’s gay and lesbian community bands together to raise funds to have Mitcham’s mother join him.

The point of this probability exercise? Where one falls in the terrain of discourse around certain topics is a function of, among other things, particular identity categories. Conversely, those identity categories also shape the way information is controlled. No real surprise, I hope—but necessary to point out, because of what followed after the men’s 10-meter platform finals.

Mitcham performed the highest-scoring dive in the history of the Olympics, a back two-and-a-half somersault with two-and-a-half twists, receiving four perfect 10’s. His score on this dive, 112.10, propelled him past Chinese diver Zhou Luxin to give him the gold medal, upsetting a Chinese men’s and women’s diving gold medal sweep. As the stunned crowd realized what had happened, Mitcham burst into tears, head in hands.

Then, as if it never happened, we never saw the medal ceremony. (NBC relegated it to its web site.) We never saw a reaction shot from Mitcham’s partner after his final dive, and we never saw him run into the stands after receiving his medal to give Lachlan a hug and kiss.

And that was the last we heard. Until members of the gay blogosphere started wondering why such a dramatic upset received so little coverage. Clearly, there were no Americans on the podium, and it’s no secret that NBC doesn’t think that makes for good TV. But then we started wondering why NBC commentators Robinson and Potter never even mentioned the historic fact that Mitcham was the only openly gay male athlete at these games, especially after his epic final dive clinched the gold. Or why they never showed Lachlan’s reaction in the crowd, as we are used to with so many other (straight) athletes.

NBC was not present at the impromptu press conference Mitcham gave—on what seems like a Beijing sidewalk—standing next to his mother and Lachlan, thanking them both, and even giving Lachlan a nuzzle or two. This evasion was not solely a symptom of American indifference; the Australian Broadcasting Corporation houses a clip of a different press conference on its web site—shot seemingly at the same time on the same Beijing sidewalk—but without Mitcham’s mother and partner by his side.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bloggers from AfterElton.com, a gay entertainment blog, managed to get a hold of an NBC spokesperson regarding both the omission of the medal ceremony and the erasure of Mitcham’s sexuality. Here’s what he had to say:

“In virtually every case, we don’t discuss an athlete’s sexual orientation…Not every athlete has a personal discussion. I could show you 500 athletes we didn’t show. We don’t show everyone. We don’t show every ceremony.”

Bloggers were quick to point out that the sexual orientation of many, many athletes gets “discussed” all the time by NBC as part of its normative, heterocentric discourse: a tabloid-fueled love triangle between Italian and French swimmers; the spotlighting of track-and-field athlete Sanya Richards’ fiancé. And what about that incessant footage of Olympic officials combing the sand at the beach volleyball courts searching for Kerri Walsh’s lost wedding ring? Never mind, also, that other major print and web news outlets managed to tastefully mention the historic nature of Mitcham’s sexual orientation at these games without eclipsing the story of his win.

Days later, NBC Olympics president Gary Zenkel issued this terse apology:

“We regret that we missed the opportunity to tell Matthew Mitcham’s story. We apologize for this unintentional omission.”

I’d like to borrow a concept from Haitian-born historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot at this point. As he wonders why the Haitian revolution has all but disappeared from the annals of history, he proposes the idea that, to the writers of history, the possibility of black slaves organizing and staging a successful rebellion was “unthinkable.” Key to explaining this is what he calls “formulas of erasure”:

“What we are observing here is archival power at its strongest, the power to define what is and what is not a serious object of research, and therefore, of mention.”1

Serious object of mention, indeed. Taking Trouillot out of a historiographical context and applying him to the shaping of contemporary media—and knowing what we know NBC and its commentators knew at the time of Mitcham’s win—we might replace the word “unintentional” in Zenkel’s apology with the word “unthinkable.” That an openly gay elite athlete would win gold at his sport’s most important competition? Unthinkable. That he would be a comfortably openly gay elite athlete, to boot? Unthinkable. That a major American broadcast network would dare to allow this reality on the air? Unthinkable.

Mitcham himself wants to be known as more than a “gay diver”; at issue here is not whether NBC decided to pigeonhole him as such. It is rather the purposeful, systematic erasure of his sexuality from their coverage, for his story could only awkwardly at best fit into their particular brand of feel-good heteronormative discourse. What is most insidious is that erasures of this sort are often not proactively orchestrated. Again, Trouillot:

“Effective silencing does not require a conspiracy, not even a political consensus. Its roots are structural.”2

We don’t know who made the call—if at all—to exclude Mitcham’s partner, to relegate the medal ceremony from broadcast coverage, or to silence any mention of his unique story during commentary. But that is, in fact, the crux: we won’t, because there is no paper trail.

Like a series of nested dolls, the further our own particular identity categories remove us from the terrain of this discourse, the more invisible Matthew Mitcham becomes, even after his epic victory. The average gay TV and sports blogger probably knows who he is, but the average American? Probably not, because an athlete’s sexual orientation is “not discussed.” If this all feels like gay bloggers are making a big deal out of nothing, then that’s precisely the point.

*NBC diving commentator Cynthia Potter’s name was corrected from the original version of this post.

Image Credits:

1. Matthew Mitcham in the 10-meter platform final
2. What we didn’t see: Mitcham on the podium
3. Mitcham after learning he won the gold
4. Mitcham about to embrace his partner in the stands

Please feel free to comment.

1. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. 99.
2. Ibid. 106.