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.