Ma Ma Ma Marry the Night: The Streetwalker, The Theologian & The Feminist

By Ingrid Pruss

This is the fourth piece in our series on “Marry the Night.” For the previous pieces, click here.

Lady Gaga’s performance of “Marry the Night” on the UK television show The X Factor opens with Gaga singing from beneath a lit cross, a sacred symbol that is also a secular mathematical sign, its x and y axes connected with the valentine shape, symbolic both of Saint Valentine who was beheaded and of the only thing that can connect opposition, which is the binding and magnetic force of Love. Lady Gaga’s song manages to link the world of imaginary street-walking, which is the literal meaning of marrying the night, to the world of intimacy with her dark side to achieve wholeness and thereby holiness, or self-actualization, realizing the divine image within. Behind the cross is a full moon. The images Gaga uses in this particular performance of “Marry the Night” carry with them an excess of meaning to achieve polysemy. Gaga uses images and icons from sacred and mythic realms that bring with them residual authority to empower her humanitarian message of not giving up on oneself after facing adversity.

Gaga stands behind an iron grate of a mausoleum, or perhaps the grate of a confessional, her right hand crossed over her heart in profession of truth and/or confession of sin, which St. Augustine believes is ultimately a confession of faith, making her commitment in song to marrying the night, to exploring the streets on her own, to confronting her dark side, to being alone without grieving, to looking at her own otherness and making peace with it, and/or to creating in solitude; she accepts her decision and all the ramifications that go along with it. As the song progresses, she gains ardor and confidence in her words, and acquires the ability to take off the old woman, so to speak, and to put on the new one. She comes to life, resurrected, as her true self, for in her commitment to the Night, she finds her light, akin to those who take the via negativa.

As Gaga exits the crypt or tiny church, like a female Christ rising from the dead, the audience discovers that she, like the medieval Green Knight who exits Camelot’s court in the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight holding his head, holds her own head in her own arm; but unlike the Green Knight, who arrives whole and asks for a challenger to decapitate him, Gaga’s decapitated figure arrives onstage a fait accompli, her audience having no clue of her history. Given the gist of the song, and the mythical female images of moon, heart, and night used thus far, the viewer/listener is lead to believe the figure was a victim of some kind of unspecified tragedy at the hands of patriarchy. Moon, heart, and night are common and repeated images in the sonnet sequence tradition, which are a series of poems that create a narrative usually constituting a long and detailed complaint about love. In light of this, Gaga’s trauma when dropped by her first record label wounded her to the core. And in this performance of the song, Gaga picks up her shattered being and commits to move forward by re-investing in her work instead of buying into that company’s evaluation of her.

The audience surmises the body is upper class because of the lace outfit and ornate necklace, but the blood around the neck speaks of female sacrifice that conjures up both suffering in love as well as religious devotion. Once again Gaga uses a host of icons in this performance – from the cross to the grate and the blood – which provides overtones of the sacred to the lyrics. These overtones provide a great deal of power and authority to the overall message of her performance. Matthew Fox writes that Christ is not just the light in everything but He “Is also the wounds in all things.” Furthermore, the decapitated body image conjures up some early French Feminist pieces of writing by Helene Cixous such as “Castration or Decapitation,” for example, which deal with a time in women’s history when woman was threatened with decapitation if she did not follow male orders. Since woman could not be castrated, given her biology, cutting off her head was the next best punishment. Actualizing this threat on two female leaders in front of 180 women, the Chinese General Sun Tse convinced the 180 to repress their desires and follow the King’s commands. In Gaga’s performance, however, the woman refuses repression. Gaga reverses the narrative by resurrecting the decapitated woman.

Additionally, the movement in the song “Marry the Night” from decapitated female to young, active, whole womanhood parallels what Helene Cixous speaks of in her famous Laugh of the Medusa, wherein she writes about “woman’s seizing the occasion so to speak, hence her shattering entry into history which has always been based on her suppression. To write and thus to forge for herself the anti-logos weapon. To become at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system” (264-65). The song reflects the refusal to allow anyone to suppress her energy and to hold her back from exploring what New York, the streets, and her imagination have to offer.

The first three quarters of The X Factor performance portray Gaga as a singing severed head held by the decapitated corpse; the concept of a singing severed head reminds one of Orpheus, the poet that could make the stones move, whose decapitated head recited poetry while floating down the River Lesbos, after being separated from his body. Orpheus is the primary mythic representative of the great patriarchal poet; here, Gaga is the great Goddess of Pop Music.

 Gustave Moreau, Head of Orpheus

Finally, the decapitated head is reminiscent of Kristeva’s concept of abjection, which includes and describes any threat to the integrity of human identity; at the place of the wound, skin breaks open, and what should remain inside – blood – drips outside of the body. Seeing the human body in such a compromised state disturbs people and reminds them of their mortality, making the wound socially unacceptable for public display except perhaps in museum paintings. Interestingly, when individuals hurt, they hole themselves up behind closed doors in hospitals or in their homes to suffer in solitude as if their wounds were something to be ashamed of; however, in Gaga’s performance of this song, she transforms this shame by showing her stigmata so to speak, displaying the major wound of decapitation, the wounding unto the death, and her determination not to allow it to kill her, but to resurrect herself and recover to produce art out of her pain. Her marriage to the Night is a fertile one. The fruit she produces are her performances of her music live, in CDs and on video captured on DVDs. Feeling empowered fuels her excitement at the multiple possibilities ahead of her.

In the lyrics to the song, “Marry the Night,” Gaga refers to the via negativa directly in the words, “Gonna make love to this dark/ I’m a soldier to my own emptiness.”[i] Sheldrake and Fox write, “The negative way is the way of darkness, suffering, silence, letting go, and even nothingness. Emptiness. Emptying. All these are prayer: experiencing silence; being emptied of images, verbal, oral, and imaginative; letting go; and suffering. It’s not just about asking to be relieved from our suffering, it’s about entering into the process, to learn” (Fox & Sheldrake 115). Gaga guards her own emptiness; therefore, emptiness is not something to be dreaded and eschewed, but a necessary ingredient of her creative endeavors. Once again Gaga’s diction carries with it dual associations – secular and sacred. The idea of emptiness connects to Christ’s kenosis – His choice to empty Himself of the Godhead to take on human form. It makes perfect sense, that the next line contains the result of this, i.e. the light, or the assertion “I’m a winner.” Gaga willingly enters into the darkness, into the process of letting go in order to learn, and it is inside of that very darkness that she discovers divine energy.

Ma ma ma marry the night

Ma ma ma marry the night

So begins the refrain, which not only stylistically echoes the refrain of Pokerface (Pa-pa-pa –Pokerface)[ii] and Judas (Jud-a-a Jud-a-a) but also sounds like someone saying either, “Mamama Mary, the night,” or “Mamama, marry the night”; the former functions as an address to the Mother Mary or the Virgin Mary, and the latter represents self-encouragement/self-convincing to go ahead with committing herself to the night, whatever that might mean to her – perhaps something frightening. The syllabic repetition of “Ma ma ma” is reminiscent of what feminist critic Julia Kristeva calls the chora, which reflects the child’s early relationship to the mother’s body and its sounds.[iii] Gaga’s inclusion of the alliterations and rhythms of the prelinguistic state in the song’s refrain is an important part of her song since it is a significant step toward wholeness and healing and it forms a significant part of everyone’s personhood. Furthermore, the semiotic is a subtext of discourse repressed by patriarchy and looked down upon as disruptive, contradictory, and meaningless or nonsensical. Gaga’s use of it in the song’s refrain highlights its true nature – its musicality and poetic beauty.

After the first verse and refrain, the very next stanza Gaga sings is sonically altered. The final syllable of every word is met with an echo, which makes one think of the myth of the female character by that very name. In Echo’s adventures with the self-interested Narcissus, her body is totally destroyed by this male’s rejection of her, and all that is left are bones. Her bones are turned into a cave, and she is only able to repeat Narcissus’ last syllable. Unlike Echo, Gaga will not allow anyone to take her life and power away from her. She will guard and protect it all, even her emptiness. She will not give up on life. If there is going to be any echo, it will be of her own voice, not of anyone else’s. Hence, her echo is not one of powerlessness but one of emphasis. The echo in Gaga’s song reveals that she is her own partner. Not only does she not need a man, she can parent herself. Unlike the mythic Echo, who can never again begin her own conversations, Gaga initiates her own language. She can be both parent and child. Analyzing subjectivity in French psycholinguistic feminism, critic Valerie Cetorelli asserts that according to Cixous, “woman’s writing is also an echo of the voice and body of the Mother who dominates the fantasies of the pre-Oedipal baby, providing thus a link to the pre-symbolic union between the self and m/other” (29). Thus, the first step toward healing in this song is a rapprochement in the mother-daughter relationship within herself.

Similar to the song “Judas” in which Judas, according to Gaga, “was not a betrayer [but] was just part of the over-arching destiny of the prophecy,” (qtd. on dtrtministries.com), so too in “Marry the Night” many opposing forces must be confronted, examined, and included in order for Gaga to achieve her creative dreams; she must marry the night in order to have the time and space to create. As she says about “Judas,” “Those things in your life that haunt you are just part of what you must go through in order to become great” (qtd. in Potter). This rich concept explains the visual symbol of the cross at the beginning of the performance that represents the need to own one’s crosses, the crypt or the need to die to one’s self-centeredness, the decapitated body or the need to confront one’s humanity and thus one’s vulnerability, and the need to marry the night or to couple with one’s darkness, in other words, to embrace one’s own otherness. Yin must love Yang. Anima must make peace with Animus as Carl Jung might say, or as Marjorie Garber, quoting postmodern Cuban writer, Severo Sarduy, puts it, in her book Vested Interests, “Transvestism … is probably the best metaphor for what writing really is: …not a woman under whose outward appearance a man must be hiding, ….but rather….the coexistence, in a single body, of masculine and feminine signifiers; the tension, the repulsion, the antagonism, which is created between them…” (Sarduy qtd. in Garber 150). We must have the ability to cross over to the other side in order to be imaginative creators. Marrying the night is one of Gaga’s metaphors for crossing over.

Many fire lit lamps line the stage and mist rises across its surface creating a mysterious and sacred aura. Dancers are silhouetted to appear – on the cusp of reality and fantasy – surreal. The movement in the song “Marry the Night” begins to change – first in the lyrics and then in the action onstage. The shift from decapitated female to young, active, whole womanhood parallels what Helene Cixous speaks of in her famous Laugh of the Medusa when she writes about “woman’s seizing the occasion so to speak, hence her shattering entry into history which has always been based on her suppression. To write and thus to forge for herself the anti-logos weapon. To become at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system” (264-65). The song reflects the refusal to allow anyone to suppress her energy and to hold back from exploring the streets of New York and all they and her imagination have to offer. The lyrics shift from the negative, “I’m not gonna cry anymore” to “Love is the new denim or black” and “Get your engine ready ‘cause I’m coming out front,” as Gaga returns to the crypt/church in her decapitation costume, only to come out transformed in minimalist clothing.

She takes off the dead self, almost molts, and puts on the living self; at this point the music changes to techno and the lights flash much more like Star Wars saber-lights-gone-to-disco-strobes across the entire stage, and Lady Gaga comes out as we are more accustomed to seeing her in a black lace bodysuit and black knee high boots, energized and dancing full throttle. This is Lady Gaga married to the night, working until all hours, in love with what she does and doing it with panache.

Marrying the night allows Gaga to write and to exorcise the spirit of death in order to move forward with newfound fire. When Gaga sings, I can almost hear Helene Cixous reminding those of us who have had the courage to say “no” to repression, shame and fear, those of us who have begun the process of exploring the scary territory on the other side: “We the precocious, the repressed of culture…we are black and we are beautiful” (878). Have you married the night yet?

Works Cited

Cetorelli, Valerie. Re-Thinking Subjectivity in French Psycholinguistic Feminism: A Path through Irigiray, Cixous & Kristeva. Essex Graduate Journal of Sociology. Vol. 10 (2010). 24-41. Web. 27 November 2011.

Cixous, Helene and Annette Kuhn. Castration or Decapitation? Signs. Vol. 7 No.1 (Autumn,

 1981( 41-55). JSTOR. Web. 29 November 2011.

Cixous, Helen and Keith and Paula Cohen. The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs. Vol. 1 No. 4 (Summer, 1976) 875-893. JSTOR. Web. 28 November 2011.

http://dtrtministries.com/2011/04/27/lady-gaga-says-judas-video-celebrates-faith/

Fox, Matthew. Qtd.in Sermon Notes. 22 March 2009. St. Mark’s Anglican Church. http://www.southhurstville.anglican.asn.au/pdf/Sermon%20090322%20Lent%204.pdf Web. 11 August 2010.

Fox, Matthew and Rupert Sheldrake. Natural Grace: Dialogues on creation, darkness, & the soul in spirituality & science. Image: 1997.

Gaga, Lady. Marry the Night. X-Factor Performance. YouTube. November 2011. Web. 25 November 2011.

Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross Dressing & Cultural Anxiety. Routledge: 1997. Print.

Potter, Brett David. Lady Gaga: Monstrous Love and Cultural Baptism. Mediation. 15 May 2011. http://theotherjournal.com/mediation/2011/05/15/lady-gaga-monstrous-love-and-cultural-baptism/30 November 2011. Web.

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[i] I did not want to skip the image “warrior queen” in the first stanza, which almost makes one think of an Amazonian queen, but because of the length of the paper, I will put the explication here instead of in the text. When Gaga calls herself a warrior, she is using the term metaphorically, reminiscent of what she said in an interview she had with the Wall Street Journal after her performance of “Bad Romance” at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. When asked to extrapolate upon her idea of art, she replied as follows: “For me, art is a lie, and the artists are there to create lies we kill when we make it true. Francesco and I were like warriors on stage, trying to make a true moment….Art is life, life is art -– the question is what came first?” (emphasis mine). Here, Gaga’s use of the simile is about fighting as artists or investing all they had in their art to get their message across. The image is not one of violence but is simply a depiction of the struggle and energy it takes to make a single moment of “true” art – art that reveals a sincere message.

[ii] The song “Pokerface” begins with the chorus singing the syllables “ma ma ma ma ma.” For the refrain, Gaga sings, “Pa pa pa pa pa pokerface.” Thus, we have both “mama” and ”papa” in this song. It is difficult for me to believe Gaga was not aware of this. This syllabic repetition reinforces the use of Kristeva’s semiotic/chora.

[iii] Kristeva appropriates the term chora from Plato, but unlike Plato, Kristeva does not conceptualize it to be a preverbal space or type of timeless time prior to history. It is more of a liminal rhythmic experience the child has through the maternal body before that child is subjected to societal constraints. Kristeva does not describe the chora in terms of a container or in terms of containment.

According to Kristeva’s understanding of language acquisition, before a child learns to speak, the child responds to the sounds and rhythms of the mother’s body, her heartbeat and her cooing sounds. This is parallel to the stage when a child gets a sense of whether they are loved by the faces mirrored to them from their mother or caretaker, something psychologist D.W.Winnicott called mirroring, which he found very important to a child’s healthy development. Kristeva emphasizes this pre-syllabic or semiotic period, since whenever language is taught the focus is on the symbolic stage of language acquisition and the semiotic stage is looked down upon as nonsense syllables instead of being seen as the roots of the poetic part of our language.

Author Bio:

Ingrid Pruss, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English at Western Connecticut State University where she teaches 16th and 17th century British literature, poetry, critical theory, and women’s studies. Her work has been published in the George Herbert Journal, JAISA, Quay, and online in Seam Ripper. She loves presenting ideas at conferences and is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge through teaching.

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Puke On Gaga – Honoring Vomit

By Rachel Clark

In this short film, used both as an opening to the second act of the Monster Ball tour and previously exhibited within the SHOWstudio exhibition “Inside/Out,” Gaga is first seen elegantly dressed in a Marko Mitanovski gown. Standing atop a small marble podium in a plain studio setting, her all white costume and stony expression are reminiscent of the classical sculpture of Greece and Rome. The sharp constructs of Gaga’s dress, whilst shifting gracefully in the breeze of a wind machine, reflect the textual carving of fabric in Renaissance masterpieces such as Bernini’s “Ecstasy of Saint Theresa.” In an unflinching, powerful stance, Gaga embodies these two celebrated canons as a perfectly constructed object, stationed in homage to fine art and high fashion for the twenty-first century.

Yet, within seconds, the image is disrupted. We hear Gaga scream “Make it Stop!” on the overlaying soundtrack as her legs are reversed, thereby challenging the previous illusion of the ideal, and forcing its reassessment in the wake of this now divided human body. She is at once a beautiful object and a physically fractured human subject as the statement “I’m A Free Bitch” begins to permeate the disco beat soundtrack. These two declarations provide a subtle commentary to the visual discord. “Make It Stop!” is screamed like a battle cry, functioning as a catalyst for the corruption of the harmonious opening scene. The classical quest for visual perfection is abandoned in favor of the twisted image Gaga becomes. In this disruption, Gaga is freed from art’s confining rules regarding the beautiful and logical, and becomes capable of embodying the monstrous and fantastic in its place.

The title “Puke On Gaga” is taken from the film’s following segment, wherein the New York performance artist Millie Brown is seen straddling a now seated Gaga, vomiting a stream of sparkling, luminous paint upon her. Significantly, Brown is dressed in all black, wearing an outfit that fans of Gaga will associate with her pre-Gaga Stefani Germanotta Band stage attire. Gaga has also previously referenced Stefani Germanotta in the video for “Telephone,” where she cast her younger sister as her younger self.  The effect in this case is that we bear witness to Stefani Germanotta vomiting on Lady Gaga.

Some have suggested that the vomit should be interpreted as an act of disgust, an expression of a repressed disappointment felt by Germanotta that her past identity had to be erased in order to achieve worldwide success as Lady Gaga. It could be that this is an act of rebellion against the superficiality of the Lady Gaga construction, but then, how does this sit with Gaga’s frequent refusal to separate these two personas? As she herself often attests, Stefani Germanotta was always Lady Gaga: “I don’t want anyone to separate who I am with my makeup on from who I am without it. I’m the same person.”

Modern artists have frequently explored their relationship to their own bodily fluids. Marcel Duchamp upturned his urinal, Piero Manzoni canned his “Artist’s Shit,” and today, Millie Brown performs by vomiting rainbows of colored milk onto blank canvases in order to “use [her] body to create art in a way that challenges people’s perception of beauty.

In a literal act of artistic regurgitation, Brown/Germanotta turns her insides out, and splatters the superficially ideal image of Gaga with the glittering colors of her interior self. There is no medium of creation other than the physical body in this moment. Against the traditions of formal art training and beauty, which the unwavering Gaga-as-sculpture represents, there are no words, no consumable images, only a visceral demonstration of the potential of turning what is inside us into an artistic act.

In Gagavision 43, Gaga states, “the creative process is fifteen minutes of vomiting … it all happens in fifteen minutes this giant regurgitation of my thoughts and feelings, then I spend days, months, years fine tuning. But the idea is you have to honor your vomit, you have to honor those fifteen minutes.” What does it mean to honor one’s vomit? Why does Gaga feel affinity with what would be an abject act? The answer, I believe, lies in the physicality of the act itself. Our bodily expulsions are the most primal of life experience, and we are often powerless to control them. When our bodies reject these fluids, they are forced outside ourselves as we are forced outside of ourselves when we observe them. As Julia Kristeva has argued, they are made by and of us, yet they embody an entire otherness in their gross exterior existence. To observe the abject is to briefly rupture consciousness, as the many paradoxes of subjectivity and objectivity come to dwell upon a terrible truth of physical existence. To honor one’s vomit is to honor the power of this realization: that we can never escape bodies, that before culture we are animals, and that understanding is not akin to reality. This sensation, a compelling leap into deep thinking and primal repression, has been described by Giles Deleuze as a “discordant accord,” and its potential to create a collision of the senses can be understood as central to the world’s most affective works of art. Via a stream of shimmering blue Gaga invites us to find this artistic potential inside of ourselves, and regurgitate our own thoughts and feelings without shame or regret.

As we hear Gaga scream “Make It Stop” once again, the film cuts to a close up of Gaga eating a raw bovine heart. The story goes that Nick Knight challenged her to do this as means of externalizing the traumatic fears she faced concerning her father’s heart surgery. The effect is a conceptual reversal of the previous image of externalized artistic creativity, as we watch Gaga devour the symbolically laden internal organ.

One must not only produce to create art, but also consume: such is the cyclical nature of creativity. In her first V Magazine column, Gaga asserts the necessity of consumption to inspiration: she considers the act of re-appropriation as both transformative and radical. In Gaga’s interpretation, the creation of art is marked with violence and suffering, as illustrated in the grotesque images of self-induced vomiting and eating raw flesh. As tears of blood are seen to run down her cheeks as she bites, her voice is heard listing the names of tragic beauty queens in what is both a tribute to the damages of fame and a testament to its immortality.

The final scene shows Gaga in the studio being decorated, powdered, gagged, and bound by Matty Dada (the creative director of Haus of Gaga at the time of filming). Gaga retains her silent, objective composure, becoming the passive puppet of fame that the world’s superstars are commonly imagined to be whilst her image is physically developed by a rough-handed assistant. Her alteration by the hands of Dada becomes gradually more aggressive, the connotations of bondage increasing as Gaga is bandaged, blind-folded, braced, and strapped to pieces of wood that imitate the hoisting of a figure onto an easel, or even crucifix. Again a theme of immortality emerges, and the famous vessel becomes an icon of worship. Gaga has adopted religious iconography across her oeuvre, and here, once again, we find fame fashioned as a new religion and Gaga suffering for the love of her fans.

This construction via an act of extreme styling represents the modern-day public persona. Manipulated to the point of abstraction, Gaga objectifies herself as a celebrity, whilst casting a shade of violence over the ritual of getting done one’s “hair and make-up.” Beauty and pain go hand-in-hand for women the world over, but Gaga pushes the boundaries of these expectations, forever forcing confrontation with unspoken truths through her elaborate performances of celebrity such as this.

In all, the film’s sequence works to remind us of what we often forget – that our sense of reality is a fragile construction. She challenges first the classical notion of beauty, severing it with a simple twist of her legs, before “honoring her vomit” across the ideal object and staining it with her creative juices. In the final scene, we see the literal process of beauty being constructed, but it is rendered exploitative and disabling. This seemingly innate sense of what makes another person attractive is one of the many false truths our lives are constructed upon, and Gaga pushes us to examine what thought really is. By tapping into the Deleuzian “discordant accord,” she liberates her Little Monsters by making these strict social expectations ridiculous, and by offering art as a means of salvation. The real art here is not the beautiful mannequin the viewer is first introduced to, or her final subtly Christ-like transformation, but the artistic regurgitation upon them. By honoring our vomit, we confront our subjective existence within the raw meat of our bodies and recognize that it is only through imagination and creative expression that we can be free.

Author Bio:

Rachel Clark is a 22-year-old Cultural Studies postgraduate student, BA Hons in Art History and Museum Studies, with a keen interest in contemporary art, memory studies, and postmodern theory. She is currently based in Leeds in the North of England. As an avid fan of techno and electro, Gaga isn’t her usual cup of tea, but she was ‘enlightened’ by her dear Mum, who took her to see the Monster Ball live – She’s been a little monster and proud ever since!

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Holy Fool • Holy Scheiße

By Meghan Vicks 

The following is a companion piece to STIGMATAVISION 1: Holy Fool. 

Cause it’s a hard life, with love in the world.

And I’m a hard girl, loving me is like chewing on pearls.

When Lady Gaga sings “I’m just a holy fool” in “Judas,” she succinctly articulates the status she now occupies. Meaning, the role of the “holy fool” fittingly describes Gaga’s aesthetic and, especially, how the public reacts to her. Traditionally, the holy fool embodies the most squalid and debased of men, and, at the same time, the most godlike and perfect of men; what is most glorified is present in what is most sullied. Likewise, as we’ve written ad nauseum here at GS (we believe in honoring our vomit, too), Lady Gaga is another such figure who places sacred and meaningful aspirations in the most dismissed and illegitimate of today’s cultural figures, the pop starlet.

As artists, we are eternally heartbroken.

But the “holy fool” may also perfectly describe this phenomenon of academic and creative studies on Lady Gaga, which, in the first place, seek to take Gaga seriously as a subject of academic discourse (that is, we bring what is often regarded as the trash of culture [e.g. pop music and performance] into the space of high culture [academia]), and, in the second place, aim to challenge our own epistemological foundations, to reconsider what legitimate scholarship looks and reads like, just as Lady Gaga has forced us to reconsider (once again) what legitimate art looks and sounds likes. And as Lady Gaga’s spectacle, like the Holy Fool’s, often ignites people to outrage, to throw stones at such a figure who would dare to challenge the lines between the sacred and the profane, so we here at Gaga Stigmata provoke our readers to lash out just by engaging in an academic project that studies Lady Gaga. Stones are thrown from both sides of the line: by those who think we’re reading “too much” into Lady Gaga, who think we should just enjoy her project for what it is (meaningless but fun! pop music, they say); and by those who think we’re misappropriating theory, sullying that sacred thought by applying it to Lady Gaga’s hairbow or her video for “Born This Way.” These are the ones who advise us to use our talents for something that “matters,” or who tell us how disappointed they are that all this energy is being spent on a figure like Lady Gaga. How many times have we been offered the philosopher’s straightjacket? We’re writing our way to Bedlam, sullying with glitter the Ivory Tower, or spoiling the lighthearted pop party with our persnickety analyses that unearth much more in “Just Dance” than a simple party song.

Do you know the feeling, when your heart is so hurt, that you could feel the blood dripping?

However, we maintain that people’s reactions to Lady Gaga and our readers’ reactions to Gaga Stigmata say a great deal about how challenging and meaningful a figure like Lady Gaga actually is, and tell us much about what academic study like GS does: that is, both Lady Gaga and Gaga Stigmata make us uncomfortable precisely because they dare our epistemologies to uphold themselves, they challenge what we know about culture, knowledge, art, politics, gender, academics, music, etc. They threaten our precious borders, forcing us to encounter the abject – that impossible and unthinkable ambiguity that resides on the outside, in “the place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 2). Gaga and GS bring us face-to-face with “a ‘something’ that [we] do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes [us]. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, or a reality that, if [we] acknowledge it, annihilates [us]” (ibid). So we revolt (vomit), rage against their abject that so threatens our knowable world.

Of course, such reactions speak volumes about the public’s expectations of the pop star and academic discourse, but they are also, at times, a kind of sin. People self-righteously judge, call names, wish misfortune upon, condemn, censor, and lament both Gaga and GS. They throw stones, but do not pause to consider that maybe these stones are part of the point.

I don’t want the 5 dollars in your pocket, I want your soul.

A spectacle – either in pop music or in academic discourse – that forces people to react, that challenges basic assumptions, that merges the sacred and the profane. It is in this way that both Lady Gaga and Gaga Stigmata are reminiscent of the holy fool. For he resides precisely in the neverland between the sacred and the profane: he is the spectacle that performs against a Janus-faced background of official pomp of the state/church (//s academia) and ribald culture of folk laughter (//s Gaga). This notion of performance is central to both the hagiography of the holy fool, and to the popular understanding of the figure: his foolishness was often seen as his choice, as a willful acceptance of humiliation and suffering. His folly was therefore a deliberate spectacle of self-debasement, an intended kenotic performance through which his self was emptied and relinquished for the sake of the salvation of others.

The effects of this spectacle were many in form and single in intent – to variously bring the spectators closer to the divine. One desired effect was to lead the audience directly into sin, to encourage their taunts and abuses of the fool. The fool would then ask God’s forgiveness for their sins: “The ‘madman’ prays for forgiveness for his fellow ‘madmen’” (Murav 25). Another effect was to unmask and stage the degraded state of humanity, and its concurrent need for redemption. Again, the fool’s performance and spectacle comes to the forefront. A third effect was to provide a site of resistance against official culture in the figure of the fool. In all, the holy fool’s inverting and inverted figure and performance do not simply intend to demonstrate the relativity of existence, but endeavor to draw the sacred to the debased human world.

We are not just Art for Michelangelo to carve, he can’t rewrite the agro of my furied heart.

In the past few months leading up to the release of her sophomore album Born This Way, Gaga’s been repeatedly saying, “let the cultural baptism begin.” It’s time, she tells us, to clean culture of its sins, and Gaga herself is the kenotic figure through which this will happen. Like the holy fool whose spectacle reveals society’s degradation and actively affects its spectators, drawing them in and forcing them to react to the degraded culture embodied in the holy fool, ultimately rousing them to sin against him so that he can pray for their redemption, so Gaga provokes and challenges us, causes many of us to sin against her precisely so that the culture as a whole may be baptized – emptied of its sins through Gaga, who forces their release upon her figure. She invites us to stone her: rage against Gaga, so that she can cry for us. Empty your hatred upon her, so that she can pray for your redemption. The point is, the stones are necessary for the baptism to take place – the cultural baptism cannot occur if people keep hidden their various sins, prejudices, and hatreds. All these must be purged (vomit, again) in order for cultural cleansing.

I want the deepest, darkest, sickest parts of you that you are afraid to share with anyone because I love you that much.

We perform the role of the holy fool as well, finding the highest, most sacred meaning in this free bitch who makes millions singing pop music and trotting her bare ass all over creation. Our writings threaten some readers, forcing them to sin. And we shed tears. It therefore happens that stigmata of Gaga’s wounds have begun to bleed through our writings, strangle our words. Gaga Stigmata is shedding its italics, becoming literal, corporeal stigmata. We embody her – our criticism takes on her flesh and tears; we vomit her puke.

Like Kate in STIGMATAVISION 1, we break out in Gaga’s rash. It’s physiological, not just mental, this reaction/relationship to Gaga. This art/criticism makes us anxious precisely because it forces us to dress in our former wedding attire and confront those ideas/people/ideals to which we were once wedded and now can no longer be. We’ve evolved, and the blood spilling from our words and onto our wedding dresses is proof of the growing pains.

We work, so maniacally, to reconsider and revise what academic writing does and looks like, while loving so sincerely (like a spouse, maybe) the academy. We also love Lady Gaga, so much that when she bleeds on stage we feel blood soaking through our shirt, replacing the ink in our pens as we write our research. But we remember that love is like a brick, which is a lot like a stone – it can also build a house or sink a dead body.

Prejudice is a disease. And when they come for you, or refuse your worth, I will be ready for their stones. I belong to you.

So throw your stones: give us this day, our daily Scheiße. We’ll take it to the Electric University, light it up in those ivory halls. Let the academic baptism begin.

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