With her skimpy outfits, catchy pop music and tendency to put on outrageous live acts, it's clear that pop star Lady Gaga knows how to build a crowd around her. She wields the power of celebrity pretty well-but what does that mean, in the end?
That's one of the questions asked in a recent New York Times column by Nancy Bauer, Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Tufts University. She stumbles into a rabbit hole: taking a serious and critical eye toward the pop phenomenon known as Miss Gaga. She is woman, and you can hear her roar-but what exactly is she saying?
Brace yourself for a trip back to your college days if you read the whole Bauer column. She begins with a pretty relevant analysis of Gaga's "Telephone" music video, revealing outfits and all. But later in the column, she ties metaphysics, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in a tangent that gets pretty heavy (and might just be over-thinking the subject a bit).
That said, Bauer raises interesting points about what modern feminism in practice looks like, and more importantly, how it's interpreted by young women who grew up after the '70s. Gaga, obviously, is 24 and sees the flaunting of female sexuality as something empowering. Bauer concedes that there's power in sexuality, but wonders whether Gaga's alter ego, Miss Stefani Germanotta, is conflating sexual expression with self-objectification.
She notes that Lady Gaga wants to see herself as a breakdown of what femininity (and celebrity) is, especially as she told one interviewer, "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," Bauer contends. "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."
This is a question that more and more modern women are facing. The women's rights movement has undeniably made great strides in past decades, but the societal pressures to conform to cultural norms are still always there. Should a woman burn her bra or wear a push-up? They are presented with a choice-and both sides in that argument have claimed feminism as their own banner.
That conflict is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, unfortunately, though Lady Gaga is clearly provoking more people to discuss it. Of course, at heart Gaga is a bona fide performer, and one does have to wonder if all this talk about feminism is simply missing the point: Sometimes, pop music is just pop music.
If you're a fan of Lady Gaga and everything the colorful songstress stands for in music and otherwise, find Lady Gaga tickets to upcoming concert dates at Stubhub and observe her stage antics for yourself at a live performance.
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This article is sponsored by StubHub. StubHub.com is a leader in the business of selling Lady Gaga tickets, sports tickets, concert tickets, theater tickets and special events tickets.
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