Inspirational Post

As it may or may not come to surprise you, Lady Gaga serves as the epicenter of my inspiration. Her chameleon transformative abilities astound even her most avid fans when she makes any sort of appearance. In celebration of her ten year career anniversary, I was asked to write a piece for GagaDaily, her biggest fan site– the site that claims Lady Gaga visits the site to hear the latest gossip and the remarks her fans are making. I wrote that piece a few years ago, but the main article still serves for the homepage– all you have to do is click “Read More”. If you click on the song reviews, you’ll find pieces of me scattered throughout the post. Lady Gaga has been giving me life since 2009– with her blessing I married Emily Dickinson under the pale moonlight one alcohol injected spring break in Cleveland circa 2014– and I see no signs of our transfusion ceasing any time soon. Especially not after our “Applause” Joanne World Tour moment in Cleveland, OH.

I’ve come to submerge myself in what I call Gaga Epistemology. This is a next level version of Gaga Feminism as expanded upon my J. Jack Halberstam. “Gaga feminism is a politics that brings together meditations on fame and disability with a lashing critique of the fixity of roles for males and females (2012, p. 5). We take the feminist sense and expand it to the level of an epistemology when we engage in the desperate “need to teach and learn about are all the fringe sexualities that become targets for homophobic and transphobic policies and attitudes (2012, p. 11). Gaga knowledge is the knowledge of the freak, the monster, the rebel, and the ostracized. It’s gender, sex, race, bodies, and celebrity studies mashed into a paste. When we look at the excluded, we find answers to what it means to be part of an inner circle. I am currently reading The Performance Identities of Lady Gaga as well as pieces about sexuality, gender, and monstrosity as well as an article on how the site Pinterest functions as a factory for knowledge production in order to produce my next essay.

But this post isn’t about finding the answers to those questions or really going into much detail on what it means when we apply the concepts of gaga to our perception, experience, and mundane living. The key take away from this nerdy rift is that Gaga theories of knowledge are what propel me– the surreal, absurdist, dada echos of reality.

My most recent discovery in this realm of epistemology was the book 3 Word Rebellion by Dr. Michelle A. Mazur Ph.D. “At it’s core, the 3 Word Rebellion encapsulates the change you want to create in the world with your message” (2019, p. 11). The challenge of the rebellion is to minimize the length of your message to pack the biggest punch. Lady Gaga does this with her album Born This Way where she validates and affirms her moniker as Mother Monster; she has a place in her paradigm for all her misfit fans. Her 3 word rebellion functions as it should. It gives a name for her mission and more importantly, it includes her audience in the heart of the message. That’s the real secret of the rebellion: you’ve got to make room for your audience to come along on the journey with you.

Pop culture is filled with these three word quips that capture the eye of the beholder and transfix their mind to a meta message: something that’s bigger than the initial message itself. The 3 word rebellion is bigger than the company who creates it. Born To Die, for me, stands out as an exceptional sound in this movement. The 3 word rebellion becomes and provides the frame the business or public figure uses in order to position themselves in the conversation that’s didactically already in motion around them. These three words carve a space for the person using them. The words give the rebel a chance in a market that proves already saturated with sound; a 3 word rebellion echos and warps glass faster than a diamond can slice it.

Moving through the text, the book poses theoretical context and frames as well as real world examples of 3 word rebellions in action. Once you start looking, you begin to notice these little mantras everywhere in the advertising realm. The book doubles as a workbook so that you can create your own 3 word rebellion. After performing the exercises and spending the energy percolating over the concepts before me, I chose a 3 word rebellion of my own:

We wear kaleidoscopes #WWKS

I picked this phrase because I believe the world is more complicated than our typical prescriptions allow us to see. There is intersectionality of inter-dimensional proportions everywhere, if only we would choose to perceive it. Forget rose colored glasses. Try wearing kaleidoscopes and watch how much your world changes in the link of an eye. When we were these devices, when we enhance our cyborg form with this technology, we begin to see the world differently. The answer to social justice and equity is a shift in perspective, a glance at what could be, but not not yet exist generally. When we wear kaleidoscopes, we make the fantastic more. We make what was once mundane, phantasmagoric.

Works Cited

Halberstam, J. Jack. (2012) Gaga Feminism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Mazur, A. M. (2019) 3 Word Rebellion. Seattle, WA: Communication Rebel Press.