Gaga Feminism
Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Using Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new kind of feminism, this “provocative and pleasurable romp through contemporary gender politics . . . is as fun as it is illuminating” (Ariel Levy, New Yorker)
Why are so many women single, so many men resisting marriage, and so many gays and lesbians having babies? Gaga Feminism answers these questions while attempting to make sense of the tectonic cultural shifts that have transformed gender and sexual politics in the last few decades. This colorful landscape is populated by symbols and phenomena as varied as pregnant men, late-life lesbians, SpongeBob SquarePants, and queer families. So how do we understand the dissonance between these real experiences and the heteronormative narratives that dominate popular media? We can embrace the chaos! With equal parts edge and wit, J. Jack Halberstam reveals how these symbolic ruptures open a critical space to embrace new ways of conceptualizing sex, love, and marriage.
Using Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new era, Halberstam deftly unpacks what the pop superstar symbolizes, to whom and why. The result is a provocative manifesto of creative mayhem—a roadmap to sex and gender for the twenty-first century—that holds Lady Gaga as an exemplar of a new kind of feminism that privileges gender and sexual fluidity.
Part handbook, part guidebook, and part sex manual, Gaga Feminism is the first book to take seriously the collapse of heterosexuality and find signposts in the wreckage to a new and different way of doing sex and gender.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Taking the outrageous self-presentation of shape-shifting, gender-bending pop icon Lady Gaga as a lodestar, University of Southern California English and gender studies professor Halberstam (Female Masculinity) defines a new kind of feminism based on a "maverick sense of bodily identity." "Going gaga" is not about music, fashion, or celebrity; it describes a constellation of behaviors that reject the traditions and institutions that reinforce notions of sex difference and individual rights. Halberstam argues that feminists who embrace gender ambiguity and unconventional family and romantic arrangements are "unbecoming women," or, in the lingo of the current political moment "occupying gender" in order to find true liberation. The book culminates in a "Gaga Manifesto," which suggests that we embrace "funky forms of anarchy" and accept the fluidity of identity and sexuality for the happiness and betterment of all mankind. Halberstam's discussion of authoritarian feminist mothers, pregnant men, and gay marriage incorporates both pop culture artifacts and academic theory, and the result is a satisfying but digressive romp through shifting contemporary conceptions of love, sex, and commitment.
