Hipster misogyny and Gaga feminism

Rev. Marisol Caballero
July 27, 2014

When Theodore Parker said, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe… but from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice,” he never could have imagined the current landscape of dialogue around gender equality.

Prayer

Oh, what a week in evening news!
Spirit of Life and Love,
God of many names,
Help us find a place of meaning
between disconnected apathy
and overwhelming helplessness.
Allow our ears to recognize that
Suffering knows no border,
Our voices of empathy and solidarity to be heard,
And our hands to be active in the cause for peace.
Open our eyes, also, to see the need for healing
In our neighbors and in ourselves, as well,
As we remind ourselves that we,
And our closest communities,
Are worthy of our time and concern.
In the name of all that is good, and holy, and true,
We pray.
Amen.

Sermon

If anyone has ever listened to a couple of my sermons or has spent more than five minutes talking to me, they will find a multitude of clues to the fact that I am a relatively unashamed pop culture junkie. I am fascinated by the ways in which and the speed with which the media influences all aspects of our lives- politics, our vocabulary, and even the price we pay for goods. Over time, even for the most disconnected, pop culture will inform how we think- what is funny, what infuriates us, even what is or is not relevant.

This is why, when I look around the world and in our backyard at all that women and girls continue to endure, I wonder what affect pop culture has had in it all. How is it, that 2014, saying the “F-word” is still so shocking? Yes, folks, I’m talking about the word, feminist. This isn’t exactly the crowd that would be too shocked by feminism, but something is amiss when in the first quarter of 2012,49 state legislatures had introduced 916 bills to restrict access to women’s health care. And, just this past April, an Equal Pay for Equal Work bill was defeated in the nation’s House. A week ago, I saw a photo online of a young woman holding a sign at a women’s healthcare rally, which read, “Didn’t my grandmother already have this conversation?” So true. What is happening?

A UU publishing house, Beacon Press, recently published a book by J. Jack Halberstam, a female-bodied professor of ethnic and gender studies at USC who happily occupies the ambiguous space between genders. The book is “Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal” Halberstam introduces gaga feminism, a “feminism of the phony, the unreal, the speculative” that is inspired by pop icon performance artist and singer, Stefani Germanotta, known as Lady Gaga.

Halberstam says that, gaga feminism is “simultaneously a monstrous outgrowth of the unstable concept of “woman” in feminist theory, a celebration of the joining of femininity to artifice, and a refusal of the mushy sentimentalism that has been siphoned into the category of womanhood… [gaga feminism] does not simply tie feminism to a person or to a set of performances, rather it uses the meteoric rise to fame of Lady Gaga to hint at emerging formulations of gender politics for a new generation.”

Halberstam walks in the footsteps of generations of, “activists of all stripes and queer activists in particular [who] have always looked to pop culture for inspiration and have refused facile distinctions between culture and reality,” saying that, “Gaga is a hypothetical form of feminism, one that lives in between the “what” and the “if.”

I read Halberstam’s book thinking, “Yes, and… ?” Being inventive, creative, rejecting culturally imposed ideas of what is normal, sexy, or attractive sounds wonderful as a personal life choice or as an artistic conviction, but does it necessarily work as a political ideology? How does a hypothetical feminism combat an actual, to borrow the language of the media, worldwide political and household war on women? And, I question whether a new school of feminist thought should be inspired by a musical provocateur who has demonstrated a sadly poor understanding of the F-word, herself, as she was quoted as saying, “I’m not a feminist. I hail men, I love men, I celebrate American male culture – beer, bars, and muscle cars.” It’s disheartening to hear that the tired stereotype of feminists as man-haters still permeates after all of these generations.

She then turns around and makes statements such as, “When I say to you, there is nobody like me and there never was, that is a statement I want every woman to feel and make about themselves,” confusing all of us. Is she a feminist or not? Is the confusion part of the performance? After all, ambiguity and any form of attention getting combine to form the brand of performance art Lady Gaga is known for, moreso than her music that, on its own, does not carry a unique sound. Weird Al Yankovic satirized her dance ballad, “Born This Way,” with the lyrics, “I may be wearing swiss cheese or maybe covered in bees, it doesn’t mean I’m crazy, I perform this way.”

Another pop diva that has critics on the fence in understanding her as a true feminist or misguided opportunist is Beyonce Knowles Carter. Several months ago, Beyonce released a powerful, sex-positive album that surprised the world. She independently recorded and produced a full album, complete with music videos to a slack-jawed, stunned world that never saw it coming. The album is chocked full of unapologetic sexually explicit lyrics and images. One song, “Flawless,” was deemed Beyonce’s “Feminist Manifesto” by MSNBC’s Melissa Harris Perry because, during the track, audio from Nigerian author, Chimamanda Adichie’s Ted Talk entitled, “We Should All Be Feminists” was sampled. She speaks of how girls are taught to aspire to be someone’s wife, rather than to reach their fullest potential, while boys are encouraged to succeed. In the video, Beyonce, embodying her best butch persona, then mocks that expectation of marriage and physical beauty by singing, “My diamond, this diamond, my rock, this rock… tell ’em I woke up like this.” Feminist columnist Jessica Valenti, a panelist on Harris Perry’s show predicted that this would be the “album that will launch a thousand women’s studies papers.”

A few years ago, she released a song which asked “Who Run the World?” and answered, definitively, “Girls.” She “raises a glass for college grads” and then, in the next verse, seemingly advocates for women using their sexual prowess toward manipulation. These contradictions are what have old-school feminists, myself sometimes included, taught to reject the objectification of the male gaze, confused by today’s pop stars that are hailed as champions of women, which in turn, confuses young, would-be feminists into a rejection of the F-word.

After the release of Beyonce’s surprise album, Adichie asserted in an interview,

If a woman is sexually overt is she still feminist?

Whoever says they’re feminist is bloody feminist. And I just feel like we live in a world where more people need to be saying it and we shouldn’t be looking to pull people out of the feminist party. And I think the reason I find myself reacting so strongly to questions offemale sexuality is … there’s something very disturbing to me about the idea that a woman’s sexuality somehow is not hers. So when certain feminists who will say, it’s about the male gaze, it’s for the man, there [is] a kind of a self-censoring about that that’s similar to what they’re fighting.

So as long as women have the choice … why shouldn’t women own their sexuality? Why shouldn’t a woman who does whatever with her sexuality identify as feminist? I’ve just always found that very troubling. It’s almost unfeminist to make that argument that if you shake your booty, you’re not feminist.

But I’m thinking, well, do you want to shake your booty? Shouldn’t you have your choice to shake your booty? … 1 want us to raise girls differently where boys and girls start to see sexuality as something that they own, rather than something that a boy takes from a girl.

Here’s where I admit- First off, how cool is it to belong to a faith tradition in which we can legitimately and openly allow our faith to be informed by such figures as Lady Gaga & Beyonce! And secondly, I should tell you that I am not really a fan of Lady Gaga and I am a fan of Beyonce, so there is a bias there that I cannot avoid easily, but I do see many similarities in the debate surrounding their feminism. Perhaps, whether or not women in the spotlight identify as feminists matters less than if they are showing others the value of female artistic autonomy, the chance to define who you are. This is, sadly, still an act that is still to be considered as transgressive, both for the famous and the anonymous woman.

Why should we care about the celebrities whose names are tossed around in contemporary feminist debate? Well, for one, the complexity of the conversation around contemporary feminisms points to the complexities of current misogynies. Not all oppression of women comes packaged in the obvious with restrictive health care laws that define conception as the beginning of life. These days, young men are feeling freer to use misogyny as a cheap laugh and call it irony, but there is a fine line, indeed, between what is well-done satire that will point out the absurdity in hatred and what is actually hate speech disguised as irony. This brand of mistreatment of women has been dubbed “hipster misogyny,” as a nod to Lindy West’s now famous 2012 article on the feminist site, Jezebel, “A Complete Guide to Hipster Racism.”

Alisa Quart writes in New Yorker Magazine, “Like Hipster Racism, Hipster Sexism is a distancing gesture, a belief that simply by applying quotations, uncool, questionable, and even offensive material about women can be alchemically transformed.” Now, instead of solely relying on the classic sexist approaches of interpersonal sexual harassment and cat-calls and institutionalized glass ceilings with unequal pay, we now must also confront the attitude of the dismissive and extra-hurtful, “Relax, it’s just a joke!”

In an editorial piece on the firing of misogynist extraordinaire, Dov Charney, former CEO of American Apparel, Tom Hawking reminds us that, “It’s not like misogynist culture ever really went away, of course – a trip to any sort of frat party will be enough to remind you of this. But in the late ’90S and early ‘0 as, it was cast as something transgressive, a daring reaction against politically correct orthodoxy. Look, we’re being sexist assholes! Aren’t we daring! If you don’t like it, you’re just a square! And, of course, there was always the ubiquitous defense of irony – no, look, we’re getting drunk and harassing women, but we’re doing it ironically! a special sort of cynicism: the nihilistic appropriation of misogyny for personal gain, dressed up in a pretense of irony and satire.”

It is this brand of humor that leaves me unable to stomach such shows as “Family Guy” and such movies as “The Hangover,” but turning a blind eye to the increasing complexities of emerging misogynies and the feminisms that emerge to combat it does nothing to effect positive change. If we are to understand ourselves as helping to bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice, then we must notice where love and acceptance is losing its foothold, including and especially instances when we are a part of it. We should endeavor to understand why rape jokes are laughed at and why young women feel that shocking, grotesque, or hyper-sexualized imagery by pop stars is liberating. We must, for lack of a better description, go gaga.

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