Lady Gaga's Born This Way

She took the world by storm in 2008 with the release of her first studio album The Fame and shows no signs of slowing down. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, formally known as Lady Gaga, has an overly exaggerated on-stage persona, and is an artist that is like no other, attracting the attention of the media and scholars ever since. She has built an empire based on self-love – a song, album, and nonprofit foundation based on "empowering youth" and "inspring bravery" (Lady Gaga, 2017). Through both her music and her eccentric appearance in the media, Lady Gaga has been able to challenge dominant gender roles publicly, and often in over-dramatic ways (Musulin, 2012). Everything about her from the way she dresses to the lyrics of her songs,

This paper will argue that Lady Gaga 's "Born this Way" speaks to gender performativity by highlighting individual empowerment, and the need to put an end to stereotypes and stigma surrounding minority groups, while using Gaga Feminism as an illustration of

Within his article, "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal" Jack Halberstam states that "… instead of pitting bodies with vaginas against bodies with penises, I argue that we are living in a new world where the categories of male and female are rapidly being updated all around us" (Halberstam, 2012). In saying this, Halberstam is offering Gaga up as a symbol of a new form of feminism, known as Gaga Feminism; here, Halberstam "makes sense of the tectonic cultural shifts that have transformed gender and sexual politics in the alst few decades" (Halberstam, 2012). He explains Gaga feminism as rejecting the fixed roles of males and females, while celebrating the dissemination of old social models of desire, gender and sexuality (Halberstam, 2012). Instead, it recognizes multiple genders, that contribute to the collapse of our current sex-gender systems, offering up new forms of relation, intimacy, and technology (Halberstam, 2012). Gaga Feminism is further described as "the phony, the unreal, and the speculative," coming from the destabilization of the gender system apparent by the visibility of trans people, the economic collapse, and alternate family structures (Kustritz, 2014). In saying this, Halberstam makes mention that Gaga Feminism derives from the performer, and encapsulates everything she stands for, but it is not limited to the artist herself (Halberstam,