Lady Gaga Research Articles

“Game Over, Man. Game Over”: Looking at the Alien in Film and Videogames

In this article we discuss videogame adaptations of the Alien series of films, in particular Alien: Colonial Marines (2013) and Alien: Isolation (2014). In comparing critical responses and developer commentary across these texts, we read the very different affective, aesthetic and socio-political readings of the titular alien character in each case. The significant differences in what it means to ‘look’ at this figure can be analyzed in terms of wider storytelling techniques that stratify remediation between film and games. Differing accounts of how storytelling techniques create intensely ‘immersive’ experiences such as horror and identification—as well as how these experiences are valued—become legible across this set of critical contexts. The concept of the ‘look’ is developed as a comparative series that enables the analysis of the affective dynamics of film and game texts in terms of gender-normative ‘technicity’, moving from the ‘mother monster’ of the original film to the ‘short controlled burst’ of the colonial marines and finally to the ‘psychopathic serendipity’ of Alien: Isolation.

Meet the Editors: Dietrich A. Volmer

Meet the Editors: Dietrich A. Volmer

Little big voice: Vietnam’s “Lady Gaga” discusses always looking over her shoulder. Plus a song of hers translated and published in English for the first time

Little big voice: Vietnam’s “Lady Gaga” discusses always looking over her shoulder. Plus a song of hers translated and published in English for the first time

Bad Girls of Fashion: Style Rebels from Cleopatra to Lady Gaga by J. Croll

Jennifer Croll. Bad Girls of Fashion: Style Rebels from Cleopatra to Lady Gaga. Illustrated by Ada Buchholc. Annick Press, 2016.Vancouver journalist and fashion historian Jennifer Croll, author of Fashion that Changed the World (2014), has here shifted gears to acquaint younger readers with the role of fashion in the history of women’s empowerment and liberation. Through the lens of biography, Croll traces the gradual rise of Girl Power reflected in, and partly driven by, the fashion choices of forty women, all of them “Style Rebels.” She divides them into ten categories that include Leaders, Modernizers, Instigators, Gender-Benders, Radicals, Decadents, and Freaks.Egypt’s Queen Cleopatra VII and England’s Queen Elizabeth I crafted their regal images partly through their fashion choices; Cixi, the Dowager Empress of China, also outlawed the binding and deforming of girls’ feet; the excesses of Frances’s Queen Marie Antoinette helped to seal her doom; Amelia Bloomer and George Sand (aka Aurore Dupin) scandalized nineteenth-century society by shunning traditional women’s clothing; Coco Chanel replaced traditional corsetry and petticoats with comfortable fashions (and gave the world an eponymous perfume); fashion magazine editors Diana Vreeland and Anna Wintour reigned as arbiters (many said “dictators”) of late-twentieth-century fashion; artists as geographically and culturally diverse as Japan’s Yoko Ono and Rei Kawakubo and Mexico’s Frida Kahlo influenced fashion with their idiosyncratic styles; movie stars such as Louise Brooks, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, Diane Keaton, and Cher Bono became trend-setters in fashion by expanding acceptable boundaries of femininity and gender; while pop-star singers Madonna, Lady Gaga, Björk, Rihana, Nicki Minaj, Beth Ditto, and the ladies of Pussy Riot pushed still further the limits of attention-grabbing self-expression in their attire (or lack of it).Croll’s cast of characters is a large one—this is only a partial list—but one that she stage-manages adroitly. It’s also one that could have been considerably expanded; one notes, for example, the absence of such iconic, fashion trend-setters as Katherine Hepburn and pioneer aviator Amelia Earhart. Book designer Natalie Olsen has provided a stunning layout, one awash in bold colours, and illustrated with both photographs and original, caricature portraits by Polish illustrator Ada Buchholc. In this serious contribution to social history, the author neither shuns, nor sensationalizes, but treats lightly some of her subjects’ love affairs, marital infidelities, sexual preferences, and the role and influence of Lesbian fashions. These nonetheless mark this excellent book as one best suited to older, the publishers suggest ages 12+, and adult readers. Recommended for all public, high-school, and academic curriculum libraries, as well as specialized women’s studies collections.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Merrill Distad Historian and author Merrill Distad enjoyed a four-decade career building libraries and library collections.

A Tale of Two Tributes: Bowie Remembered at the Grammys and the Brit Awards

This article explores the politics of remembrance through performance tributes and covers of Bowie’s work, specifically the Lady Gaga tribute at The Grammys and Lorde tribute at The BRIT Awards. We consider the specifics of performing cover versions for televised broadcast and post-broadcast, and examine appraisals of both tributes from interdisciplinary perspectives, including popular music, media and gender studies. Each female performer’s tribute and their subsequent reception is examined in terms of how discourses of genre, authenticity, gender and queerness are played out through media commentary. We argue that these appraisals are shaped by notions of authenticity and gender stereotypes, and we explore the decisive role the media plays in shaping public taste and preference. Moreover, we argue that the language used to appraise these tributes reveals expectations around what a cover or a tribute should be, and how it should relate to the artist being remembered. Finally, in analysing the performances by Lady Gaga and Lorde queerly, we acknowledge the extent to which Bowie’s own queer aesthetic has influenced the music and performance personae of both Lady Gaga and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Lorde.

Camp revamped in pop culture icon Lady Gaga: The case of ‘Telephone’ and ‘Born this Way’

Abstract This article addresses the ultimate pop icon Lady Gaga; in particular I will analyse how camp sensibility informs her gender and sex discourses as well as her acts of transgression and commodification. Using as a framework Pamela Robertson’s feminist camp in the 1990s and its revision by Helen Shugart and Catherine Waggoner in the 2000s, it is my main contention that Gaga problematizes camp and its subversive potential yet again. Thus, drawing on and contesting J. Jack Halberstam’s queer reading of the artist in Gaga Feminism, this article proves how her campy outfits and her videos ‘Born this Way’ and ‘Telephone’ open feminist camp to new concerns, especially through her affective engagement with her fans, which converts the artist into a hypermodern product. In featuring herself as ‘Mother Monster’ followed by her ‘little monsters’, she updates Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway 2004) to revamp Otherness and belongness as culturally significant concepts.

The Middle Ages in the Modern World: Twenty-First Century Perspectives by Bettina Bildhauer and Chris Jones

Reviewed by: The Middle Ages in the Modern World: Twenty-First Century Perspectives by Bettina Bildhauer and Chris Jones Marina Gerzić Bildhauer, Bettina, and Chris Jones, The Middle Ages in the Modern World: Twenty-First Century Perspectives (Proceedings of the British Academy, 208), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017; hardback; pp. xx, 346; 21 b/w, 16 colour illustrations; R.R.P. US$135.00, £85.00; ISBN 9780197266144. The Middle Ages in the Modern World: Twenty-First Century Perspectives offers a fascinating array of international and multidisciplinary reflections on medievalism. The introduction by Bettina Bildhauer and Chris Jones presents a broad history of the continuing evolution of the idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ from the fourteenth century to the present day. The collection is then divided into three themed sections, with various genres and areas, such as film, literature, politics, and Byzantinism, discussed across all the sections. One of the major strengths of this wide-ranging collection is its diversity of voices and of subject matter, with topics ranging from how Old Norse sagas are used as evidence by climate change deniers, to the way that Lady Gaga employs medieval iconography in her music videos. Part I of the collection looks at medievalism in politics and histories. Bruce Holsinger’s chapter traces the origin of the idea of the ‘medieval Warm Period’ to a naïve reading of Landnámabók, highlighting the afterlife of the idea of the ‘Warm Period’ in political discourse regarding climate change in order to argue for a more engaged relationship between natural sciences and the humanities. Eamon Byers, Stephen Kelly, and Kath Stevenson examine the connection between cultural nationalism and the figures of Cú Chulainn and Saint Patrick in their chapter, showing how these figures were used to give legitimacy to political affiliations during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Patrick Geary argues that nineteenth-century scholars such as Alexandre Herculano, Jules Michelet, and Felix Dahn served as proto-celebrities, whose writings reflect a time when medieval origin myths were used to bolster European nations. Andrew Lynch’s chapter analyses the attitudes towards and representation of the Middle Ages in a selection of children’s histories from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, arguing that these works often feature the beginning of the British nation, war, and religion as ‘the chief signifiers of the Middle Ages’ (p. 90). [End Page 194] Part II of the collection looks at practising medievalism. Celebrated German author Felicitas Hoppe reflects on her experience in adapting Hartmann von Aue’s verse romance Iwein into the young-adult novel genre, highlighting the importance of female characters Laudine and Lunette, both in von Aue’s original and in her adaptation. Museum curator James Robinson’s chapter draws on his experience of curating the Treasures of Heaven exhibition at the British Museum to outline the parallels between the medieval cult of saints and contemporary celebrity culture. Composer and musician Graham Coatman’s chapter analyses the way that medieval music is used by British composers such as Benjamin Britten, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Judith Weir, arguing for their role as examples of a broader trend of medievalism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-garde music. Archivist Fani Gargova demonstrates that ‘the political dimension of medievalism […] can only be understood through an investigation of archival material’ (p. 152), examining previously unknown photographs that prove the sustained contact of three early twentieth-century Byzantine scholars. Chris Jones’s chapter provides a rich overview of medievalism in recent British and Irish poetry, highlighting the renewed turn to the medieval in contemporary verse, and offering insightful reflections of his own involvement with two projects: the translation of Seamus Heaney’s versions of Robert Henryson’s Fables into a digital app; and the creation of poetic riddles capable of being published on Twitter. The joint chapter between Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri and Lila Yawn focuses on the medieval revival festival Calendimaggio held in Assisi, and Pasolini’s left-wing medievalist Trilogy of Life, and provides insight not only into the nostalgia for, and a selective reevocation of, the medieval past, but also the importance of medievalism in Italian culture and politics. Part III of the collection centres on medievalism...

Preventing Overdiagnosis of Acetabular Labral “Tears” in 40-Plus-year-old Patients: Shouldn't these be called Labral “Fissures” Instead?

Acetabular labral tears represent a common finding on magnetic resonance imaging of the hip. Labral tears can arise from a multitude of underlying pathological processes or they may be an asymptomatic incidental finding. The prevalence of labral tears and their lack of specificity make this an area vulnerable to potential overdiagnosis. The overdiagnosis of labral tears leads to overtreatment by exposing patients to unnecessary surgeries as well as complications ranging from unsatisfying outcomes to deep venous thrombosis. This risk is compounded by the tabloid popularization of labral surgeries by celebrities such as Lady Gaga, which could potentiate patient perception of a two-tiered level of health care. Following a similar situation with spine nomenclature, one solution to this issue is to reclassify "labral tears" as "labral fissures" in some or all cases to mitigate the acute traumatic connotation of the term "tear."

Students prioritize mental health but can't find resources, survey reveals

Students don't know where to turn for resources on mental health, according to a study by the Born This Way Foundation, which was founded by Lady Gaga in 2012.

Students prioritize mental health but can't find resources

Students don't know where to turn for resources on mental health, according to a study by the Born This Way Foundation, which was founded by Lady Gaga in 2012. The survey, entitled “Kind Communities — A Bridge to Youth Mental Wellness,” received responses from 3,015 participants aged 15 to 24, as well as more than 1,000 parents, in an online survey. More than half of the students surveyed said they believed mental health was important, but a much smaller percentage of students surveyed reported seeking help for mental health concerns.

Lady Gaga: American Horror Story, Fashion, Monstrosity and the Grotesque

Stefani Germanotta, better known as Lady Gaga, is known as much for her personae and extreme and outrageous styling as she is for her performances and music. What makes Gaga so interesting is that she crosses a diversity of media forms including fashion, music and television to define her celebrity status. She also incorporates digital media artifacts such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and uses her website Monsters.com to mobilize her fans. In many ways, Gaga (or The Haus of Gaga) employs the use of multimedia formats to propel and saturate her image as a self-stylized fashion icon across a global range of fashionscapes. This article explores Lady Gaga as a cipher for new forms of gender politics and the effects of digital fashion imagery on consumers via the convergence of new technologies. By examining “Hotel,” season five (2015–2016) of the television series American Horror Story (FX, 2011–present), as well as Gaga’s music videos and styled performances off and on stage, we argue that these politics are made manifest through the deployment of fashion as a conduit in exploding not only gender binaries in the construction of language, but the discourse of gender itself.

Gaga x Richardson as ghosted photo-memoir: exposure, consent, and uncomfortably creeping boundaries

Lady Gaga’s star image has been read by scholars as a ‘hypermodern gospel of liberation’ (Corona 2010) and ‘a symbol for a new kind of feminism’ (Halberstam 2012). Her reputation for progressivenes...

Beyond the Classic: Lady Gaga and Theology in the Wild Public Sphere

There is a rich vein of theology running through much popular culture as exemplified by the artistic output of Lady Gaga, a discussion of which lies at the heart of this article. Such theological engagement with popular culture, it is argued, is an important task for public theology because this is a locus in which theology is already present in the public sphere. This suggests an approach to public theology that moves beyond David Tracy’s notion of the ‘classic’ in the context of hypermodernity. The case for this new agenda is presented in a twofold structure. Firstly, the theopolitical significance of Lady Gaga’s pop art is established. Secondly, a way of conceiving the ‘publicness’ of theological engagement with popular culture is articulated in dialogue with Habermas’ conception of the wild public sphere.

“That’s What It Felt Like, ‘You’re Pathetic’”: Creaky voice, Affective Stance, and Authentication in the Speech of Lady Gaga

This paper contributes to research on the social meaning of creaky voice in American English by offering an intraspeaker analysis of the speech of Lady Gaga, an American pop star. While pop stars have anecdotally been said to employ creaky voice extensively (Jaslow 2011), few linguists have examined the extent of their use, or what they may be using it to achieve. This study, combining statistics, discourse analysis, and media studies, argues that creaky voice has a core indexical meaning linked to “low emotional energy”, and Lady Gaga draws on this meaning to portray herself as “serious” and “downtrodden”.

The Big Glamorous Monster (or Lady Gaga’s Adventures at Sea): Improving Student Writing Through Dramatic Approaches in Schools

Drawing on assets-oriented, sociocultural theories of imagination and learning, the authors argue that the improvisational qualities and expanded resources of dramatic approaches to teaching make a positive difference in the quality of and persistence in students’ story writing. The authors describe findings from a controlled quasi-experimental study examining the outcomes of an 8-week story-writing and drama-based program, Literacy to Life, implemented in 29 third-grade classrooms in elementary schools with and without Title I funding located within the same urban school district in Texas. Pre- and post-measures of writing self-efficacy, story building, and generating and revising ideas showed significant positive results, especially for students in schools that receive Title I funding. Research findings and the sociocultural theoretical framework argue for increased resources in support of opportunities for students to practice combinatorial imagination and use cultural knowledge for creative writing, as was made possible through the Literacy to Life program.

Sex and Sexualities in Contemporary Indonesia: Sexual Politics, Health, Diversity and Representations eds. by Linda Rae Bennett and Sharyn Graham Davies

Reviewed by: Sex and Sexualities in Contemporary Indonesia: Sexual Politics, Health, Diversity and Representations eds. by Linda Rae Bennett and Sharyn Graham Davies Annemarie Samuels (bio) Linda Rae Bennett and Sharyn Graham Davies, eds. Sex and Sexualities in Contemporary Indonesia: Sexual Politics, Health, Diversity and Representations. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. 328 pp. In June 2014 I watched waria dancers perform traditional feminine Acehnese dances on stage in Banda Aceh. It was a splendid performance in which the dancers' techniques, dress, and cosmetics betrayed a high degree of professionalism and many hours of training. It was also a courageous performance. Although the audience consisted mainly of sympathetic students, activists, and NGO workers, a raid by the radical Islamist FPI (Front Pembela Islam, Islamic Defenders Front) and the police was a serious risk. Surveillance of sexuality in general and denunciation of LGBTI in particular has increased in Aceh in the past years, especially in the capital where the government openly joins forces with FPI and related groups. Yet the performance for a crowd of activists took place in a hopeful atmosphere where people embraced diversity, and which may be equally characteristic of the past decade's blooming NGO scene and democratization process. While Aceh cannot be considered representative of the rest of the archipelago, the range of developments taking place in the province resonates with the assessment of the edited volume Sex and Sexualities in Contemporary Indonesia: Sexual Politics, Health, Diversity and Representations. As the editors, Linda Bennett and Sharyn Davies, note in their introduction to the volume, in terms of sexual politics, the post-Suharto era is characterized by "the constant vacillation between diverse voices—some progressive, some conservative and many in between" (10). A decade and a half after the fall of Suharto, the editors asked a highly experienced and multidisciplinary group of researchers to take stock of the dynamics of sex and sexualities in Indonesia. The result is a collection of fifteen insightful and often surprising chapters that address a broad range of topics using data from a wide variety of sources and places. The book is divided into four sections: sexual politics, sexual health, sexual diversity, and sexual representations. An encompassing introduction by the editors and a sparkling afterword in the form of a dialogue with two important gay activists/academics, Dédé Oetomo and Tom Boellstorff, provide general reflections on the volume's central issues and point at new directions for research. The volume's strength lies not only in its timeliness and the high quality of the individual chapters, but also in the broad scope of the compilation that makes several significant contributions to the study of sex and sexualities in Indonesia. It does so in three major ways. First of all, this collection of studies and perspectives offers an assessment of current developments in the field of sex and sexualities. By analyzing discourses, public sentiments, health concerns, and limits and possibilities of diversity, among other topics, the chapters together provide a rich view on (mostly) [End Page 91] recent historical developments and the present state of affairs, forming an important addition to earlier scholarly work in this field.1 A major topic of interest in this respect is the rise of Islamic conservatism and the increasing public presence of radical Islamic groups that influence sexual politics. Tracing relations between Islam and gender politics in Indonesia since the period of the New Order regime, Kathryn Robinson (chapter two) points out that both the New Order ideology and the Islamist discourses that have gained ground in the Reformasi era have promoted a patriarchal, heteronormative gender order. Despite Islamic political parties not being successful during elections, radical Islamic groups have pushed conservative agendas by mobilizing public opinion, such as the mass support for the adoption of 2008's anti-pornography bill, the highly mediatized demonstrations against Lady Gaga's 2012 visit, and the growing public agitation and protests against LGBTI Indonesians.2 Interestingly, as Robinson notes, it is exactly the democratic space opened up by Reformasi that has enabled radical Islamist discourses to thrive. Yet, this same space has also enabled progressive women's activists to be heard, most successfully in 2006's adoption of the...

Fashionable flesh: Meat as clothing

Abstract Society’s fascination with women’s bodies is well known, so it is therefore unsurprising that many people strive to articulate and draw attention to the pervasive objectification of women. Dresses made of animal flesh have been variously fashioned by a diverse group of figures including activist Ann Simonton, punk musician Linder Sterling, artist Jana Sterbak, and singer Lady Gaga. The effectiveness of these works is only achieved through the collaborations between celebrity and designer, artist and press, and activist and media. Dependent upon each other, these works thrive on controversy and public attention. The audience is needed to fully objectify both the model wearing the clothing and the clothing itself, doubling the objectification. By exploring the societal implications and scandals that these works provoke, we can examine the way that these meat dresses have the ability to push the viewer to consider how women’s bodies are actually consumed in daily life.

Product Placement in Music Videos – Classical and Special Solutions

One does not even have to watch today’s music videos very attentively in order to recognize that brands appear in them from time to time. However, this was not always the case. The changing policies of Music Television, the introduction of VEVO (a music video channel launched on Youtube), and the widening use of product placement in general have all played a significant role in the changes of the landscape, the increasing number of product placements in music videos. The paper examines the spread of brand/product placement in music videos, also known as the Lady Gaga effect. The study focuses on two aspects of product placement: on the one hand, which music genres it is the most widely used in, and on the other hand, what its most common (classical and special) types are. The author describes the notion of product placement drawing on different definitions, then discusses several typical and unique examples of brands and artists involved in product placement in pop, electronic, rock, and more than anything else, hip-hop music videos. Through a discussion of various historical and contemporary examples (most of them visual or auditive), and their relation to business, the study proves that product placement in music videos has become an increasingly popular tool in the world of marketing.

Lady Gaga and Popular Music: Performing Gender, Fashion, and Culture. Edited by Martin Iddon and Melanie L. Marshall , M. New York: Routledge, 2014. 302 pp. ISBN: 978-0-415-82452-1

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Undutiful daughters: Growing up in feminism and psychoanalysis

2014 saw a surge in discussions in the media and in feminist circles around who is a feminist and what it takes to be one: critics proclaimed that pop singer Beyonce is not a feminist; Katy Perry and Lady Gaga reject the label; and Roxane Gay published a collection of essays, Bad Feminist (2014), on the topic. This paper works from and against the claim that third-wave feminism is rife with “undutiful daughters” and reads many of today’s feminists as “bad psychoanalysts” whose investment in reading desire often leads to a misreading. In positioning American pop sensation Lana Del Rey vis-a-vis Sophocles’ Antigone, I argue that these undutiful daughters ask us to interrogate what it means to make one’s desire ambiguously legible, and how that might work with, from, or against third-wave feminism. This paper contends that Del Rey and Antigone’s childlike attitudes, and their decision to remain undutiful daughters, offer a new model of willfulness that is integral to feminism today.