EJAC 37 (1) pp.

39–55 Intellect Limited 2018

European Journal of American Culture

Volume 37 Number 1
© 2018 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ejac.37.1.39_1

José M. Yebra
University of Zaragoza

Camp revamped in pop

culture icon Lady Gaga: The
case of ‘Telephone’ and ‘Born
this Way’1

Abstract Keywords
This article addresses the ultimate pop icon Lady Gaga; in particular I will analyse Lady Gaga
how camp sensibility informs her gender and sex discourses as well as her acts pop camp
of transgression and commodification. Using as a framework Pamela Robertson’s queer camp
feminist camp in the 1990s and its revision by Helen Shugart and Catherine feminist camp
Waggoner in the 2000s, it is my main contention that Gaga problematizes camp monstrousness
and its subversive potential yet again. Thus, drawing on and contesting J. Jack transgression
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 femi- 1. The research carried out
for writing this article
nist camp to new concerns, especially through her affective engagement with her is part of a project
fans, which converts the artist into a hypermodern product. In featuring herself financed by the Spanish
Ministry of Economy
as ‘Mother Monster’ followed by her ‘little monsters’, she updates Haraway’s and Competitiveness
Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway 2004) to revamp Otherness and belongness as (MINECO) (code
culturally significant concepts.

39
José M. Yebra

FFI2015-65775-P). The 1. Camp as contested territory: From gay camp to gaga

author is also grateful
for the support of the feminism
Government of Aragón
and the European Social
Being originally an aesthetic discourse or sensibility concocted by gays to
Fund (ESF) (code H05). codify their illicit desire and identity, camp has undergone an uneven and
problematic evolution. It has been regarded as transgressive and conserva-
tive, appropriating and appropriated, essentially homosexual, but also feminist
and queer. From this premise, namely camp’s contestedness and multiplic-
ity, this article addresses how Lady Gaga, who, I contend, is one of its latest
practitioners, performs and negotiates it in the context of current American
culture. More concretely, I will explore how camp informs her gender and sex
discourses as well as her acts of transgression and commodification as cultur-
ally significant issues. To do so, the article will focus on camp as a repository
of pop culture and a site of contestation. In particular, the article will tackle
feminist camp as articulated, performed and embodied by female pop celebri-
ties, as claimed by Pamela Robertson (1996) and Helen Shugart and Catherine
Waggoner (2008). This will constitute the framework to explore Lady Gaga’s
camp, which I relate not only to Robertson, Shugart and Waggoner, but also to
Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and J. Jack Halberstam’s Gaga Feminism.
The OED defines camp as ‘ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatri-
cal, effeminate or homosexual’. In ‘Notes on camp’ Susan Sontag explains its
elusiveness because, ‘to snare a sensibility in words, one must be tentative and
nimble’, especially because talking about camp is ‘to betray it’ (1964: n.pag.). In
this sense, camp recalls queerness (and vice versa) because the latter eludes
definition, being ‘whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the
dominant’ (Halperin 1997: 62). However, although queerness and camp are
two sides of the same coin, namely the concept and its means of aesthetic
expression (Ceballos Muñoz 2004: 164), camp does not necessarily endorse
queer transgressiveness. In fact, when Sontag ‘mainstreamed’ the concept to
a widespread non-exclusively gay audience, she claimed it to be ‘disengaged,
depoliticised – or at least apolitical’ (1964: n.pag.). Camp was allegedly just
an aesthetic sensibility – either ‘low theatrical camp’ or ‘serious high camp’
(Isherwood 1954: 110) – which originally eased gays’ subcultural configuration
and group affiliation. The fact that camp was born as a counterdiscourse to
escape institutional homophobia can be considered political, though. Moreover,
camp’s frivolity, which some critics oppose to the political undertones of parody
(Kiernan 1990), is not necessarily conservative. This position gained terrain
with the outburst of AIDS, when critics like Butler, Babuscio, Halberstam and
Meyer contested Sontag’s view claiming camp to be an: ‘oppositional queer
critique’ (Meyer 1994: 10). Beyond the effect of AIDS, camp is performative, its
theatricality being mostly an act of mimicry and appropriation, either conserv-
ative or transgressive. For Jameson, camp is akin to postmodern pastiche, thus
lacking ‘the satiric impulse of parody, and equal[izing] all identities, styles and
images in a depthless ahistorical nostalgia’ (in Robertson 1996: 4). Yet, for those
who claim camp to be a way of resistance, it ‘redefines […] cultural prod-
ucts not just nostalgically but with a critical recognition of the temptation to
nostalgia, rendering both the object and the nostalgia […] through an ironic,
laughing distanciation’ (Robertson 1996: 5). Dwelling over camp’s ambivalence
between pastiche and irony/parody, Robertson speaks of pop camp (or camp
Lite) and queer camp. The first addresses the camp democratized/appropri-
ated after the consumption logic of pop culture. That is, unlike original camp’s
marginality, watered down pop camp recognizes its ‘consumerism and desire

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 Camp revamped in pop culture icon Lady Gaga

for access to the dominant culture’ (Robertson 1996: 129). As a stylistic appro-
priation of ‘authentic’ camp, Shugart and Waggoner argue (drawing on Booth
[1983], Robertson [1996], Ross [1999] and Sontag [1964]), pop camp is ‘devoid
of resistive potential’ (2008: 21). As for queer camp, it draws on queer theory
as a site of resistance, contestation and anti-essentialism. Hence, in opposition
to camp Lite, it ‘emphasizes the other side – camp’s ability to signal difference
and alienation from the dominant’ (Robertson 1996: 129). Pop camp appropri-
ates dominant cultural issues, as it is appropriated by mainstream culture; by
contrast, queer camp is not parasitic as it draws on its own subculturalism to
be transgressive.
An article in February 1993 in the New Yorker claimed: ‘Camp is dead,
thanks to Madonna’ (in Robertson 1996: 118). In a similar vein, Daniel
D’Addario argues that Spielberg-produced television series Smash (2012–
2013) ‘does for camp what Schindler’s List did for the camps: it simplifies it,
flattens it out and repackages it for mass consumption’ (2012: n.pag.). In other
words, when camp turns pop or Lite, it betrays itself and ‘the thrill is gone’
(D’Addario 2012). In the critic’s view, Lady Gaga’s camp is redundant because
she ‘name-checks Liberace and dresses like a drag king […] but she’s more
popular than just about any pop star […] and she’s too controlled, too calcu-
lating, too self-aware to be camp’ (D’Addario 2012). Does it mean then that,
in the era of postmodern (self)consciousness, camp is no longer feasible? If
queer camp is no longer viable, why do critics like Horn (2010, 2012) and very
especially Halberstam (2012) still claim cultural products like Gaga to be sites
of camp transgression? Are artists like Lady Gaga a proof of the commodifica-
tion of the very act of transgression threatening with normalizing queer camp
not as a positive development of de-stigmatizing Otherness, but as a reflec-
tion of late capitalism?
Robertson, Shugart and Waggoner argue for a feminist camp; one that,
unlike gay camp, does not appropriate female stars and feminine aesthetics,
but ‘offers feminists a model for critiques of gender and sex roles’ (Robertson
1996: 6). The engagement between camp and feminism has obvious implica-
tions. Feminist camp relies on masquerade, or double mimesis, rather than on
drag parody, as gay male camp does (Shugart and Waggoner 2008: 18). On
the other hand, feminist camp goes beyond Moe Meyer’s conception of queer
camp, which he reduces to gay and lesbian (1994: 1–22), and endorses Doty’s
understanding of camp as a queer discourse ‘in opposition to or at variance
with the dominant, straight, symbolic order’ (Robertson 1996: 9). Thus, feminist
criticism surpasses the counter-cultural potential of camp drag, which ‘reveals
the performance of gender identity, but […] cannot effectively dismantle
gender identity’ (Robertson 1996: 11). Transgression as an act of resistance to
(Gramsci’s) Hegemony occurs when female masquerade takes the poetics of
carnival and transgender to the extreme. When the female masquerades femi-
ninity, the (ironic) distance between imitator and imitated, appropriator and
appropriated collapses and the transgressive act puts to the fore the very logic
of mainstream culture, particularly common sense (Hebdige 1979: 11). When
pop artists like Mae West, Joan Crawford and Madonna masquerade, they do
not operate in the way Bakhtinian carnival does. That is, in transgressing the
status quo and the logic of Hegemony and common sense, carnival purports
a transient and elusive act of resistance. Yet, ‘the carnival fails to fundamen-
tally change official culture’s hierarchical distinctions’ (Foust 2013: 9). The
feminist camp the artists below embody constitutes, however, a cutting-edge
performance (Russo 1986; Lockford 1996; Hanke 1998; Tseelon 2001) since it

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José M. Yebra

‘mimics a constructed identity in order to conceal that there is nothing behind

the mask; it simulates femininity to dissimulate the absence of a real or essen-
tial feminine identity’ (Robertson 1996: 12). With this in mind, it is the aim of
this article to explore the resistive potential, if any, of Lady Gaga’s persona and
camp in her public appearances and videos.
It is uncertain whether there is currently room for real transgression once
so-called ‘reality’ has been subsumed into the hyperreal (Lipovetsky 2005).
‘Traditional’ authenticity seems no longer plausible and neither is it the
‘aura’ that Adorno and Benjamin claimed to be intrinsic to art. In their view,
mass-produced culture is uniform, which deprives art of its very aesthetic
essence and political commitment. The concern of Adorno and Benjamin
about photography and cinema has only increased with virtual technology.
Everything – art included – is reproduced ad nauseam at different ontologi-
cal levels. Moreover, it is increasingly difficult to shock audiences perma-
nently exposed to millions of images. It is a fact that too much imagery
about the Other normalizes it. Yet, in spite of this process of normalization,
western culture has always found an Other in which to sublimate the abjec-
tion within, namely the shocking effect audiences still claim for in the era of
(post)simulacra. When western culture has allegedly made ‘hetero-normal’
gayness culturally palatable, camp has become a test bench of a new engi-
neering in post-identity politics. Gaga turns the screw further when she
claims for ‘authenticity’ in, by definition, ‘inauthentic’ camp. This she does by
re-appropriating and normalizing queer/geek/freak Others. Gaga does not
exclusively impersonate females and femininity (‘Telephone’). She opens the
scope of impersonation beyond gender differences into post-humanism and
monstrousness, which could typify transgressive camp signs ‘distinct from
the broader contemporary camp/pop environment’ (Shugart and Waggoner
2008: 6). In this vein, for example, Gaga’s video ‘Born this Way’ draws on Donna
Haraway’s 1985 Cyborg Manifesto. Moreover, in re-articulating a monstrous
camp, as will be shown, she reconceptualizes community, belongness and
Otherness, and refurbishes celebrity-fandom relation. This relates with Gaga’s
politics of viewer response. In assuming her spectators’ free affiliation to the
multiple meaning her texts purport, a more conservative stand (whereby there
would be a single dominant text/interpretation available to passive spectators)
is discarded. Yet, it could also be argued that the free affiliation and identifica-
tion between Gaga’s (texts) and her fans are informed by a Hegemonic order,
e.g. mass consumption, to which they are pleasurably ascribed.

2. Lady Gaga’s own sense of camp

Lady Gaga became a worldwide phenomenon with her debut album The Fame
(2008) and its extended version one year later. Since then, she has built up
a very effective iconography, which appeals to the senses and emotions and
responds to the anxiety of ‘being’ camp in the current dystopia. Gaga is an
impersonator, a ventriloquizer of former voices, a performer of transient signs,
a sign herself. Being a multi-layered construct, she self-consciously addresses
and deconstructs cultural referents, particularly female camp icons like those
addressed by Robertson, namely Mae West, Joan Crawford and Madonna. In
aligning camp with gender and sexuality through these celebrities, Shugart
and Waggoner argue that their analysis picks up where Robertson left off.
Following this logic of juxtaposition, this article aims to be yet a new step after
Robertson, Shugart and Waggoner. I will briefly address the former’s approach

42   European Journal of American Culture

 Camp revamped in pop culture icon Lady Gaga

to Madonna as a camp predecessor of Lady Gaga. Next, I will draw on how, 2. I discard Macy Gray
from the analysis
according to Shugart and Waggoner, transgressive camp is articulated in because her campness
female pop celebrities like Gwen Stefani as a forebear to Gaga.2 is not as related to
Robertson approaches Madonna as a problematic phenomenon, a sign of Gaga as Stefani’s is.
sexual liberation, but also of mass consumption and commodification, and a
galvanizer of feminist issues such as sex, gender, pornography and fashion. Be
it as it were, the star is, ‘especially in her Boy Toy and material Girl incarnations
[…] the epitome of the newly defined camp style, embracing crass consumer,
like pop, and updating it through new media forms’ (Robertson 1996: 123).
More than anybody before, Madonna represented the chameleon that shifts
gender roles and imagery for the sake of transgression and/or late-capitalist
overconsumption. Thus, she has played the role of the ultimate simulacrum
to a long list of ‘queerable’ women and signs, becoming ‘a semiotic montage’
(Coombe 2006: 728). For example, when impersonating Marilyn Monroe as a
material girl in her eponymous clip, Madonna is ironically distancing herself
from the stereotype of the Boy Toy. Besides, rewriting the naïveté of Monroe’s
impersonation bestows the actress a sense of control and irony from the stere-
otype she performed (Robertson 1996: 126). Madonna’s gender bending in
videos like ‘Justify my Love’ (1991) or ‘Erotica’ (1992) – where she ‘identifies
herself with a wide range of sex and gender roles’ (Robertson 1996: 130) – and
her meta-masquerade in ‘Vogue’ – drawing on ‘gay subcultures, Hollywood
stars, and feminist camp’ (Robertson 1996: 131) – make up the artist’s rheto-
rics of control and power. Indeed, for this same reason, the actual transgres-
siveness of Madonna’s camp has also been questioned. Her transgressive
discourse has often been considered ‘an appropriation of style rather than a
substantive politics’ (Robertson 1996: 133). In other words, her practices do
not discard the Hegemonic system. They simply reverse the structure of power
relations in Patriarchy (Robertson 1996: 134). Thus, being well-wrapped into
the recognizable format of an MTV video-clip, Madonna turned out a palat-
able post-modern good for a wide audience. All in all, the artist puts forward
the strength and weakness of camp when it becomes (or is appropriated by)
mainstream or has access to (or appropriates) the mainstream. In short, the
original marginality of camp as a site of resistance is put to the fore, turning
instead into a site of ambivalence.
Drawing on Robertson, Shugart and Waggoner delve into the politics and
poetics of transgressive feminist camp. Their focus is on tracing how resistive
strategies ‘intersect with the aesthetic practices and sensibilities that charac-
terize the contemporary mediated context in which camp occurs’ (Shugart
and Waggoner 2008: 19). With this purpose, they explore four cultural
phenomena, two characters (Xena, from the eponymous television series, and
Karen, from the sitcom Will and Grace), and two female artists, May Gray
and Gwen Stefani. Although all four phenomena are analysed following
the same methodology, I will briefly address the case of Stefani as a singer
and forebear to Lady Gaga. After establishing the qualities and character-
istics of (feminist) ‘authentic’ camp – namely parody, irony and incongruity,
aesthetics and style as excess, performance as previous to and constitutive of
identity as agency, resistance and nostalgia – they move to pop camp as an
eminently American product. Nevertheless, the all-American products/char-
acters the critics explore conjoin both types of camp (Shugart and Waggoner
2008: 46). That is, camp dominant and resistive discourses inhabit Xena,
Karen, Gray and Stefani. And Shugart and Waggoner prove it by addressing
issues like ‘trope, spectacle […] anchor and foil’ (2008: 48). These artists and

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José M. Yebra

characters ironize tropes on gender and sexuality (Shugart and Waggoner

2008: 53). Spectacle, as cultural/aesthetic performance, implies in all these
cases ironic distance and juxtaposition to denaturalize gender discourses
(Shugart and Waggoner 2008: 57). Foils ‘are characters that serve as the
contemporaneous backdrop against which camp emerges as such’ (Shugart
and Waggoner 2008: 58). Finally, anchors are also contemporary characters
against whom the new camp sign/product gains meaning, albeit via ‘ironic
congruence rather than contrast’ (Shugart and Waggoner 2008: 58). All
these features together serve Shugart and Waggoner to claim for the resis-
tive potential of the four cultural products mentioned above. To briefly illus-
trate this, I will address their insightful study of Gwen Stefani, who foreruns
Gaga’s sense of camp. The trope Stefani mostly relies on is that of vintage
sex symbol ‘in the vein of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield’ (Shugart and
Waggoner 2008: 120). Yet, hers is not a simple appropriation, but a deviance
(Shugart and Waggoner 2008: 122), an invocation as well as a modification
of the trope (Shugart and Waggoner 2008: 124). The campness of Stefani’s
spectacle relies on excess and juxtaposition (2008: 125), mostly achieved
by performances ‘pushed […] to attain an excessive, caricaturish quality’
(Shugart and Waggoner 2008: 126), and ‘theatricality and irony’ (Shugart
and Waggoner 2008: 127) by sporting ‘incongruous articles of clothing […]
juxtaposing, [for instance] a conventional evening gown and combat boots’
(Shugart and Waggoner 2008: 127). Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera are
the foils against whom Stefani comes out as a transgressive camp practitioner
(2008: 131). The three share youth, beauty, sexuality and excess (2008: 131).
However, Stefani stands out from her foils because, although she celebrates
female sexuality, she does not fit the female object stereotype in the way
Spears and Aguilera do. As Kristen Lieb argues, both artists were lucky to
earn ‘a chance at redemption and rebirth as a “good girl”’ (2013: 122) after
their careers went astray for a while. By contrast, Stefani has never embodied
that pop camp trope, holding instead a transgressive camp stand whereby she
asserts her agency (Shugart and Waggoner 2008: 138). Using excessive bras to
flaunt her very small breasts is a case in point (Shugart and Waggoner 2008:
140). That is, she actively plays with stereotypes on ultra-femininity, using
them to deconstruct them on their own terms. Stefani’s anchor (the prede-
cessor she comes and distances from) is Madonna (Shugart and Waggoner
2008: 136). Indeed, although Madonna is the referent that makes Stefani
culturally meaningful, they differ as figures of rebellion. Madonna being an
innovator, and camp being a ‘[too] subtle and duplicitous’ (2008: 136) instru-
ment of transgression, she is not consistently camp in the way Stefani is.
In what remains, I will address Gaga’s camp poetics and its cultural signifi-
cance. To what extent do the tropes she embodies, her sense of spectacle and
her (dis)engagement with feminist camp, as performed by her anchors and
foils, really transgress? As Lieb recalls: ‘One of Gaga’s signature rallying cries
is “I’m a free bitch”’ (2013: 1). Yet, is she being politically meaningful or just
posing? For some, she performs the same ‘old-school sexual fantasy’ of foils
such as Spears or Aguilera, only ‘differentiated by a dash of modern freak’
(Lieb 2013: 1). For others, Lady Gaga is the ultimate camp phenomenon in
the genealogy, ‘the last manifestation of a long line of feminine and queer
performers who […] produce[d] funky forms of anarchy’ (Halberstam 2012:
139). Who is the original and who the copy is difficult to say. Madonna is
Monroe and Dietrich and Mansfield, and Gaga is all of them together when
she is Madonna. Be it as it were, in masquerading camp divas and dragging,

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 Camp revamped in pop culture icon Lady Gaga

Gaga updates Judith Butler’s gender performativity, addressing gender as a 3. As Lieb recalls, ‘By
November 25, 2012,
mere performance without a reference (because the models she masquerades Gaga had 31,494,610
are deferred ad nauseam), as a series of acts that make social meaning through Twitter followers, and
repetition and mimicry. Gaga is to Youtube what Madonna was to the MTV 53,835,491 likes on
Facebook, staggering
because she has transformed the postmodern parody of the latter into a viral figures for each venue’
product that performs gender and sex as well as it is performed and negoti- (2013: 20).
ated by active spectators. In other words, whereas Madonna held agency over
her gender performance (although she could only re-arrange pre-established
gender discourses), Gaga’s agency is engaged with that of her fans, who help
her configure the gender tropes she performs through their intense interven-
tion on social networks.3 To assess the transgressive potential of Gaga’s camp-
ness to articulate her gender discourse in context I will first make reference to
her impersonation as Jo Calderone and her bizarre outfits. Next, I will address
two clips, ‘Telephone’ (2009b), featuring Beyoncé, and ‘Born this Way’ (2011)
because they put forward Gaga’s account of feminist camp and her opening
out of this aesthetics to post-humanism respectively.

2.1. Dragging on camp as Jo Calderone

As Lieb recalls in the life cycle model for Female Popular Music stars, there is
a limited number of tropes for celebrities to perform to avid audiences (2013:
87). As a rule, most of these celebrities start impersonating the ‘good girl’ and
‘temptress’ models. Next, they change of focus and the music industry compels
them to choose among the roles of ‘diva’, ‘whore’, ‘exotic’, ‘provocateur’ or ‘hot
mess’ (Lieb 2013: 110–11). Only the most privileged have access to a ‘self-
imposed exile’, ‘protected status’, ‘gay icon’ and eventually ‘legend’ (Lieb 2013:
91). If the life cycle used to take a whole career, Lady Gaga has inhabited five
phases (‘temptress’, ‘exotic’, ‘provocateur’, ‘whore’ and ‘gay icon’) at once (Lieb
2013: 129). All being variations of performative femininities for consumption,
Gaga seems to rebel against them as she over-uses and burns them. In fact,
rather than phases to embody as a female celebrity, she uses them as inter-
changeable roles one can put on and off at will. Yet, she still needs them for
self-articulation.
Gaga turned the screw on Lieb’s life cycle theory when she appeared in
male drag at the 2011 MTV music awards. Her anchor Madonna had also
appeared in male attire (‘Vogue’) or assuming male-female-trans positions
(‘Justify my Love’). But she had never dubbed herself a male alter ego in the
way Gaga did as ‘Joe Calderone’. Gaga’s foils, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Miley
Cirus and Rihanna are even further away from her transgender trope: Perry,
turning from ‘good girl’ to ‘temptress’ and occasional ‘provocateur’; Swift,
mostly a ‘good girl’ hiding a ‘temptress’; Cyrus, as the epitome of the Disney
‘good girl’, turning to failed ‘provocateur’; and Rihanna as the ‘exotic tempt-
ress’ on her way to ‘gay icon’ status. Although Gaga’s male impersonation has
been dismissed as derivative (Lieb 2013: 7), it is politically meaningful. When
Jo Calderone rejects Gaga’s camp excess and artifice and claims ‘I want her
to be real’, s/he is ‘demanding that audiences really listen to her for a change’
(Lieb 2013: 7). It is Jo’s de-camping Gaga’s camp that rewrites camp as a femi-
nist instrument. Through her excessive male impersonation as Calderone she
is de-sexualizing her role. Indeed, unlike female excess, male excess is invis-
ible and thus, Lieb suggests, when she is in male attire, audiences are forced
to focus on her vocal performance rather than on the sexualization of female
spectacle.

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José M. Yebra

4. In trying to be the girl 2.2. Dragging on camp as a public persona

next door and unique
at the same time, Gaga If in impersonating Calderone Gaga performs herself in transition from
puts to the test the female to male, she frequently camps femininity by juxtaposition, excess and
intrinsic contradiction
and tension of incongruity in her public appearances. Her extravagant outfits have made
(American) pop culture. her into a style icon, a woman ‘who loves to underline her uniqueness and
who wants to make a statement’ (Anon. 2010: n.pag.). She transgresses the
limits of harmony as a camp practitioner since ‘to engage in camp behav-
iour is to be intensely aware of style [no matter how] crassly extravagant that
style might be’ (Edwards and Graulund 2013: 73). Moreover, if the dandy was,
as Sontag argues, the answer to the lack of originality in the age of mass
culture, Gaga embodies the neo-camp dandy. She enjoys, participates and
makes fun of popular culture,4 making good Sontag’s view whereby ‘the
connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves’
(2013: 48). Camp, Sontag points out, is ‘the love of […] the “off”, of things-
being-what-they-are-not’ (1964: n.pag.). Outrageous, weird or ludicrous, her
imagery re-articulates camp to an omnivorous audience in search of emotions
to comply with or reject blatantly. She plays a hybrid between the pre and
post-human, human, animal and object; an updated version of Haraway’s
cyborg in sum. Some of Gaga’s most outrageous-looking outfits, as recalled
in Glamour magazine (Anon. 2018: n.pag.) – which I will quote along the next
paragraph – prove this point.
She appealed to the primordial when wearing a ‘reptilian-inspired leather
number [that] completes an airport look’, or her iconic head-to-toe meat
dress (2010 MTV VMAs). She put forward her nostalgic liminality when look-
ing at the future on retro-futurist attires like the ‘disco ball mirrored corset and
matching mask’ at Glastonbury festival in 2009, or under the appearance of a
Robocop replicant wearing ‘a pair of YSL Trib Twos’ at a London hotel in 2010.
Other times, she has looked what she is not: ‘Wrapped up like a present’ at the
02 Arena in London in 2010, or an artificial black flower when she sported ‘a
huge plastic […] hat […] and matching rose petal mask’ at MAC Viva Glam
party in 2010. The artist has transgressed the bounds between human and
animal wearing an antler hat at the Capital FM Jingle Bell Ball in 2009 or
metonymically blending with her iconic ‘unforgettable Philip Tracy lobster hat’.
Gaga has also fashioned rare femininities, the old-fashioned nun’s cornette
she has repeatedly worn on and offstage, combined with a transparent dress,
being a case in point. Equally disturbing is the saint-like halo hairpiece and
mystic expression she matched with a ‘sheer lace jumpsuit’ and catwalk posing
at a Marc Jacobs After Party in 2009. Dressed in a red latex outfit as a fairy-
tale Elizabeth I, Gaga put forward the performativity of royalty when meeting
Queen Elizabeth II at the Royal Variety Performance in 2009. Likewise, the
artist deconstructed red carpet femininity and glamour as a crucified zombie
in a white-tiered overcoat at the 2010 Brit Awards. On ‘The Tonight Show with
Jay Leno’, she updated Morticia Addams into post-humanness with ‘prosthetic
pyramid horns grafted onto her skin’. All in all, Gaga is a market-oriented
female drag queen/king that somehow re-appropriates glam rock sexual
ambivalence and style as a way of resistance (Hebdige 1979: 62). Drawing on
Volonisov, Hebdige argues that signs are the arena of class struggle (1979: 17).
In current pop culture, signs are still pregnant with meaning. Thus, humble
objects are appropriated by subcultural groups and given ‘illegitimate’ uses
(Hebdige 1979: 18). Although Gaga cannot be considered subcultural stricto
sensu, the way in which she appropriates, for instance, the phone in her clip

46    European Journal of American Culture

 Camp revamped in pop culture icon Lady Gaga

‘Telephone’ can be aligned with the appropriation/transformation of humble

objects accomplished by subordinate groups.

2.3. Gaga’s feminist camp in ‘Telephone’

Released in 2009, ‘Telephone’ is a ‘Thelma-and-Louise revenge fantasy co-star-
ring Beyoncé’ (Kaufman 2010: n.pag.). The video continues where ‘Paparazzi’
left off, Gaga going to jail after killing a lover who ‘did her wrong’ (Zafar 2010:
n.pag.). Despite being the victim of an abusive partner, she is treated like a
criminal. Henceforth, the video turns prison into an all-female scenario where
genders are deconstructed as far as performative tropes. Labelled as a ‘prison
for bitches’ (a clear reference to Gaga’s appropriation of bitch as a trope for
female freedom), the protagonist is escorted by two butch-looking ladies. She
is next rendered vulnerable, being stripped of her clothes and left alone in her
cell. Yet, once led to the prison yard, she gains freedom despite being chained,
with lesbians gazing at her while she returns their gaze. Moreover, the song
‘Paper Gangsta’, ‘a song about girl power’ (Zafar 2010: n.pag.) is played on
the radio. Not only does prison ironically become a site of freedom against
male abuse, it prompts appropriation of ‘humble objects’ in a camp fashion.
She wears glasses made of smoking cigarettes, thus veiling reality ‘and blur-
ring the genders of the women around her’ (Zafar 2010: n.pag.); she wears
Diet-Coke-for-hair-rollers, a wink at Warhol’s pop art that she recasts; and
finally she starts dancing only dressed in police tape. Apart from the camp
incongruity these objects convey, the video is scattered with product place-
ments, particularly Gaga’s ‘heartbeats headphones’. She thus turns the screw
on Warhol’s pop art, rendering consumption strategies against themselves.
Female celebrities are brands for consumption as well as the products associ-
ated or sponsored by them. Hence, why hide it?
Drawing on Roland Barthes, Hebdige argues that our task as spectators/
consumers is ‘to discern the hidden messages inscribed in code on the glossy
surfaces of style to trace them out as “maps of meaning”’ (1979: 18). Gaga’s
telephone (and the video) is a case in point. She picks up the phone when
Beyoncé goes to bail her out. Yet, she does not pick it up any more when
presumably a male calls her: ‘You called, I can’t hear a thing/ You’re breaking
up on me/ Sorry, I cannot hear you/ I’m kinda busy/ Stop callin’, stop callin’/ I
don’t wanna think any more’ (Lady Gaga 2009b). In fact, turning camp incon-
gruity and juxtaposition to the extreme, Gaga’s head literally becomes a tele-
phone to paradoxically address broken or flawed communication. Once out
of prison, Beyoncé drives Pussy Waggon, the truck in Tarantino’s Kill Bill, on
their way to a restaurant where her partner (played by Tyrese) is waiting for
her. Despite Beyoncé’s kindness to Tyrese, he soon proves to be a trouble-
maker who abuses both his girlfriend and the rest of the clients. Thus starts
both women’s revenge fantasy. Beyoncé tries to poison her partner, though
she fails. It is then that Gaga prepares a mass poisoning in the kitchen. The
scene re-camps different signifiers to deconstruct stereotypes, particularly the
perfect housewife ‘portrayed heavily in the 1950s pop culture’ (Zafar 2010:
n.pag.). The gender stereotype is transgressed through camp incongruity.
‘Alternating between Japanese and comic book subtitles, the video chan-
nels Gaga’s beloved pop pioneers Roy Liechenstein and Andy Warhol’ (Zafar
2010: n.pag.) whereas she dances and prepares poisoned sandwiches with
Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip. In short, the classic housewife trope turns a
drag-queen-murderer-Gaga who camps with her effeminate dancers in the most

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José M. Yebra

unexpectable scenario, the kitchen of an American middle-class household.

As the mass poisoning takes place and is reported on the news, Gaga and
Beyoncé begin an epic break dance that, in Zafar’s view, celebrates ‘a new
America […] that steers away from gender constructs’. Indeed, Gaga imper-
sonates Wonder Woman, a heroine of the 1940s appropriated by the feminist
movement. It is ‘an Amazon princess […] created as a distinctly feminist role
model whose mission was to bring the Amazon ideals of love, peace and sexual
equity to a world torn by the hatred of men’ (Zafar 2010: n.pag.). Thus, the
apparent shallow meaning of a pop camp video turns a queer camp one. Gaga
and Beyoncé’s joint adventure puts forward girl power against male abuse, but
it also deconstructs stereotypes. Gaga mutes from a ‘bad girl’ in a ‘prison for
bitches’ to a vulnerable naked prisoner, to object/subject of desire in the prison
yard, to campy lady in a huge Pamela hat leaving prison, to reoffending crimi-
nal/drag queen, to fugitive escaping with her female partner. The last scene is
also a piece of camp performance. Despite the mass death both women have
perpetrated, they prance wearing long dresses and are veiled as if mourning
for/celebrating their victims in the middle of the desert. The incongruous irony
of the scene and its echoes from westerns (albeit updated to meet feminism)
and from Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994) makes up an ‘authentic’ campness
that cuts Gaga off her foils. Yet, Gaga’s expansion of camp within and beyond
the limits of gender was to unwrap even more in ‘Born this Way’.

2.4. ‘Born this Way’: Monstrous camp and fandom revised

For critics like J. Jack Halberstam and Paris Shih, the ‘Gagaian’ grotesque
body overcomes Madonna’s normalizing discourse on a double axis. It trig-
gers ‘on the one hand, the death of the traditional gender boundary; on the
other hand, the birth of queerness, monstrousness, and grotesque androgyny’
(Shih 2012: 32). Gaga reframes grotesqueness as edible and representable,
reducing the vestigial, primitive and fantastic/traumatic into a recognizable
shape, no matter how monstrous it is. This is her aporia and hubris. She feels,
Shih argues, she ‘has solved the problem of camp, and has already ‘queer-
ized’ the dominant culture’ (2012: 32); a position Halberstam endorses when
dealing with Gaga’s video ‘Born this Way’ (2011). Released in 2011, it quickly
became a worldwide success and culturally relevant for two main and related
reasons: the clip draws on Haraway’s cyborg manifesto to camp post-human
monstrousness as a site of transgression; and, paradoxically, ‘Born this Way’
uses that same monstrousness to re-articulate fandom and identity.
The cover of the album shows the diva half female, half motorcycle. This
hybridity, she argues, ‘is meant to be symbolic of the fact that I’m endlessly
always changing in so transformative […] ways’ (Gregory 2011: n.pag.). Thus,
Gaga takes camp to the extreme, not only playing with gender performativ-
ity, as anchor Madonna (and Stefani) had done before, but transcending the
limits between human and non-human and post-human. The cover and the
clip draw on Haraway’s feminist Cyborg manifesto, which addresses a future
where ‘machines could be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly
selves’ (2004: 36). In the critic’s view, classic organic holism would be replaced
by a science fiction feminism of female mutants and cyborg monsters. Indeed,
Haraway recasts monsters into technologically created and operated cyborgs
which put an end to restrictive dualities like self/other, mind/body and animal/
human (2004: 35). She claims for a ‘flow across boundaries [… where] no
objects, spaces or bodies are sacred in themselves’ (Haraway 2004: 22) and

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 Camp revamped in pop culture icon Lady Gaga

everything is replaceable, interfaced, and coded. Gaga’s grotesquerie and

excess in the apocalyptic scenario she devises in ‘Born this Way’ are the last
manifestation of the anxieties addressed by Haraway. It goes without saying
that Gaga’s iconography partakes of the current fashioning of vampires,
zombies and others, which both confirms and trivializes Haraway’s inaugural
essay. Yet, the monstrous aesthetic of ‘Born this Way’ also helps Gaga to delve
into the liminal space between transgression and its normalization. Her exces-
sive theatricality adapts camp to new discursive requirements and her outfits
incorporate technology into her post-human body. Playing a hermaphrodite
(something Madonna would have never done), a cyborg-motorcycle, a prime-
val monstrous reptile (taking a shower in ‘Bad Romance’ video, 2009a), or a
weird drag-queen walking on hoof-like heels (also in ‘Bad Romance’), Gaga
makes spectators laugh at and reconsider the possibilities of camp aesthetics
and (post)human representation. All these are camp manifestations of Gaga’s
transformative bodies whereby western culture reasserts its ability to adapt to
new scenarios with new iconographies.
Gaga’s cyborg monstrosity in ‘Born this Way’ has not only an aesthetic
purpose. It is mostly an instrument of emotional identification and affilia-
tion between the artist and her fans. If Gaga is so successful, it is because
she embodies and re-camps the sacred charisma of medieval religious relics.
She claims to be/have the aura exclusive of ‘authentic’ art objects (Lindholm
2008: 13), which allows her to gather people together providing them ‘with
meaning, unity and a surpassing sense of belonging’ (2008: 1). In short, Gaga’s
conception of fame as camp and monstrous reconciles the transience of the
Internet era with an underlying spiritual anxiety through emotional engage-
ment. For her fans, camping as a cyborg-monster after Gaga is marginal
as well as unique and ‘authentic’. Thus, the emotional affiliation of Mother
Monster and her little monsters renegotiates fandom and exposes the double
drive of American pop culture. Both leader and fans pursue and are attached
by aiming at uniqueness and standardization. Gaga has democratized the
idol’s aura as an affordable commodity: ‘Everyone can do what I’m doing […].
I’m just a girl from New York City who decided to do this, after all. Rule the
world!’ (Gregoriadis 2010: n.pag.). Thus, she proclaims the availability and
desirability of exceptionality. The problem comes when this exceptionality,
understood as transgressive difference, is normalized. Warner laments the
process of depolitization/desexualization of queerness voiced, among others,
by Andrew Sullivan’s post-gay manifesto in The New Republic (1999: 52). If
Otherness/campness is subsumed into the Same as a commodity, perhaps no
dissidence is feasible. If gays want to be ‘normal’ and marry like everyone else,
queer politics misses its point because the movement becomes a mere simula-
crum (Warner 1999: 79–80); if camp loses its marginal stamina, it may become
a mere brand in the market. For Halberstam, Gaga’s manifesto, or ‘Gaga
feminism’ in ‘Born this Way’, still prompts resistance against normalization.
The Gagapocalyptic scenario of ‘Born this Way’ is, Halberstam argues, the
aesthetic manifestation of ‘Gaga feminism’, ‘the most recent marker of the with-
ering away of old social models of desire, gender and sexuality, and a channel for
potent new forms of relation, intimacy, technology and embodiment’ (2012: 25).
In this vein, the birth of a new unprejudiced race delivered from a campy
diva at the beginning of the video apparently draws on Halberstam’s ‘Gaga
feminism’, which is outrageous because ‘it is for the freaks and geeks, the losers
and failures, the kids who were left out at school’ (2012: 29). Yet, in my view,
although ‘Born this Way’ camps apocalypse and rebirth in a rather incongruous

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José M. Yebra

fashion – a semi-naked Gaga prances and poses telling little monsters not to
be drags but queens in a surrealistic scenario – it discards the political purpose
of Warner’s end of normality and Halberstam’s anarchy model.
For The Vigilant Citizen (Anon. 2009), the clip is inspired by ‘The Illuminati
Manifesto’. Other voices claim it to be the artist’s own response to cultural
anxieties. And yet, for others, it is just a banalization of these concerns to ‘sell’
more than anyone else on the net. All in all, like other Gaga’s videos, ‘Born
this way’ is rather ambivalent. In the first three minutes the artist narrates
her manifesto, namely the cosmic battle between Good and Evil. Halberstam
describes it as ‘some weird sci-fi about choosing good over evil’ (2012: 132).
Gaga’s allegedly pseudo-religious Illuminati imagery deliberately breaks the
bounds between both forces. In fact, the ‘capital HIM’ she mentions at the
beginning of the video is, for The Vigilant Citizen, a cryptic reference to both
God and the Devil (Anon. 2009: n.pag.). Her persona and videos are the
metafictional product of ‘Haus of Gaga’, a Warholian semiotic laboratory
after Warhol. Assisted by talented counsellors, Gaga is a creator who devises
artistic pieces like ‘Born this Way’ where her alter ego (a sort of intradiegetic
demiurgos) creates life: a monstrous blasphemy itself. Drawing on Surrealism,
Francis Bacon (Zafar 2011: n.pag.), German expressionism and folk tradition,
self-proclaimed ‘Mother Monster’ works out her way into immortality. While
uttering her manifesto on Armageddon, she delivers life. In a post-apocalyptic
aquatic scenario generated by a computer, Gaga gives birth to herself in
the form of homunculi (feminculae in the video), i.e. small human beings
created through alchemy. The iconography is theatrical and ambiguous,
using ‘juxtaposition, absurdism, and elements of the unconscious to make
a case for an escape from rationalism and social/societal restrictions’ (Zafar
2011: n.pag.). It echoes and juxtaposes religious and pagan symbols in a way
that recalls her anchor Madonna’s but none of her foils’: the Virgin Mary and
Baphomet, Armageddon and renewal, Gaga mothering an ‘infinite unpreju-
diced’ race and a black-and-white (anti)-Gaga shooting a machinegun. It is
a utopic/distopic world which recalls the primordial moment of birth (notice
the uterus-like shape human figures form and live in the video), though it
really aims at regeneration, like Haraway’s cyborg world (2004: 38). After the
virtual representation of a human-like cosmic birth, Gaga’s mitosis starts
off. Her head generates new heads/homunculi in a sort of surreal lab; noth-
ing strange though, the homunculus being the little man inside the head of
the little man inside the head ad infinitum. Gaga’s mothering a new species
juxtaposes Haraway’s manifesto and Nazi’s eugenesia in a scenario that
recalls and overlaps post-human cyborgs and ‘WWII imagery’ (Zafar 2011:
n.pag.). Haraway’s words look visionary in view of ‘Born this Way’: ‘Stripped
of identity, the bastard race teaches about the power of the margins and the
importance of a mother like Malinche’ (2004: 34). The critic’s use of meta-
phors to prompt the survival of the margins from a revolutionary politics –
which claims for a monstrous world without gender – intensifies in Gaga’s
manifesto. The video primarily aims to shock a wide audience, but it mostly
demands her fans’ affiliation to articulate subalternity as both unique and
recognisable, human and post-human, pop camp and queer camp. Hence, it
is my contention that Gaga’s manifesto is not the anarchist, queer, antinor-
mative end of normal life Halberstam claims (2012: 133, 135). The clip vindi-
cates well-defined identities in a liberal humanist fashion instead.
Whether Gaga is a puppet of the Illuminati or a self-conscious artist, the
messianic message of a brand new race of unprejudiced Gagas emerging

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 Camp revamped in pop culture icon Lady Gaga

after an epic Armageddon is just a symptom of current anxieties, the sing-

er’s powerless aspirations to transcend postmodern immanence among them.
Whereas (gay) camp aesthetisized and trivialized religious imagery, (Gaga’s)
camp commodifies it. Indeed, there seems to be no way out of commodifica-
tion for female pop stars. ‘Born this Way’ starts in a queer camp tone, juxtapos-
ing incongruous scenarios and featuring genderless monsters that challenge
human shapes. By contrast, in the rest of the video, once the music starts, the
lyrics prove politically correct by breaking with prejudice and vindicating and
emphasizing difference. There is somehow a clash between camp costumes
(Halberstam 2012: 137) – which draw on this critic’s conceptions of ‘creative
anarchy, gaga anarchy, gaga feminism’ (Halberstam 2012: 140) and the end of
common sense – and the politics of affirmation the lyrics convey. That is, her
self-tolerance lyrics are at odds with the imagery along the video. After making
reference to the self-hatred many youths feel when looking at themselves in
the mirror (‘There’s nothin’ wrong with lovin’ who you are’), ‘Born this Way’
prompts their metamorphosis into what-they-are(-not) in a campy way. The
formula of classic fairy tales is revamped to meet renewed (yet old) anxieties.
Their wish fulfilment fantasy is one of self-approval, freaks/geeks overcoming
the shame of being the abject Other and becoming ‘normal’ instead.
The video is thus torn between camp excess and a politics of toleration
and inclusion. ‘It does not matter if you are gay, lesbian, bi, black, latino’ or any
other because, Gaga’s lyrics say, ‘you were born this way’ (2011). Her message
is thus messianic and equalitarian, but also deterministic because it reduces
gender, sexual orientation and race to biological factors. There is no wrong
in divine creation and hence prejudice and discrimination are unfounded.
Essentialism is mixed up with queer constructivism though, because, the
lyrics continue, we ‘are all born superstars’ (2011). Gaga’s followers perform
their ‘inborn’ identity: ‘My mother rolled my hair and put my lipstick on in
the glass of her boudoir’ (2011). Once Gaga’s anonymous monsters/super-
stars put on their make-up, they are ready to ‘camp’. Not only does the video
raise the debate between essentialism and constructivism, it also delves into
the liminal state between being/life and non-being/death. With this purpose,
coloured and black-and-white images are interspersed and juxtaposed
throughout. In coloured stills, the artist and dancers pray, dance and embrace
each other while staring at a light, which illuminates their faces from above:
again the incongruity between dancers posing as if in religious ecstasy, while
moments before Gaga asserts her sexuality with a crotch grab (Zafar 2011:
n.pag.), makes up a camp effect. In a similar vein, the ironic incongruence
goes on when, alongside these messianic sequences, an irreverent Gaga in
black-and-white foreshadows post-mortem scenarios. In skeleton make-up
she dances and flirts with death with skeleton-tattooed Rick Genest. Their
‘danse macabre’ displays an aesthetics of the abject which eventually Gaga
camps through. With skeleton make-up and blonde hair extensions, Gaga
ends up blowing a gum bubble, hence neutralizing the tanathos iconogra-
phy and relativizing all said and done before. Yet, despite the transgressive
iconography, the clip still endorses common sense and, somehow, normaliza-
tion. In claiming for the uniqueness of one’s identity as a sign of difference,
Gaga is adapting the logic of liberal humanism and common sense to twen-
tieth-century liberation movements. In other words, she is claiming for the
Other (gay, lesbian, gay, bi, black, latino) the same right to assert their identity
as for the ‘normal’. Halberstam’s anarchy theory is thus more aesthetic than
political in the video.

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José M. Yebra

5. One of the butch-like 3. Concluding remarks

guards who take
Gaga to prison in the Lady Gaga is the ultimate practitioner of camp in current American music
‘Telephone’ video also industry. She emerged as a different diva, one that used her clips, perfor-
says ‘I knew she didn’t
have a dick’ (2009b), mances and attire to shock audiences anew. Yet, her use of transgression as
after her strip search. a mode of resistance is ambivalent to say the least. As the article has shown,
the artist swings between pop camp and queer camp. She resists and partici-
pates in the conventions the music industry and popular culture convey. Gaga
constitutes a step forward in feminist camp, continuing and breaking away
from her anchors and foils, questioning gender roles and applying Butler’s
performativity to denaturalize fixed identities in ‘Telephone’, in her masquer-
ade as Jo Calderone and in her public appearances. Simultaneously, however,
she endorses those same identities from a strategic essentialism, particu-
larly in ‘Born this Way’. Gaga updates feminist camp as well, especially when
addressing Haraway’s post-humanist monstrosity in order not to queer camp
and renegotiate the fan-idol affiliation. Otherness is no longer something to
be afraid or ashamed of. It is something to be proud of and constitutive of
renewed social relations. Moreover, the classic unilateral relations idol-fan are
replaced by bidirectional ones. And hence, the signs a pop star conveys are
not univocal, but re-negotiated every time a spectator is confronted with the
artistic event. With this in mind, it is particularly problematic to decide what is
transgressive and how it is articulated. It is in this scenario that Warner’s ‘end
of normality’ and Gaga’s camp performativity must be understood. Yet, this
article concludes that she is not the anarchic force Halberstam argues.
Gaga is not in the line of feminine anarchists like ‘Emma Goldman […]
Grace Jones, Shulamith Firestone […] Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovic […]
Ari Up of the Slits or Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex’ (Halberstam 2012: 139);
or, at least, not less than in line with Madonna, Steffani, Aguilera or Spears.
Thus, although Gaga argues that ‘people need to come up with better refer-
ences than Christina and Gwen and Madonna all the time’ (Halberstam
2012: 139), she is undergoing the same Lifetime Cycle as these super stars
and, in consequence, she is as much a brand as they are. She turns the
screw, inscribing camp in the monstrous, addressing the post-human, play-
ing with the idea of the anarchic, and using technology to articulate her
discourse and her persona. She even posted a picture alongside the message
‘LADY GAGA IS A HERMAPHRODITE! LOOK AT THIS PIC OF HER D*CK
#DoWhatUWantWithMyBody’ (Anon. 2013: n.pag.),5 thus dismantling gender
roles. Her alleged hermaphroditism turns from a biological ‘fact’ to a tweet.
Gaga uses pop culture (and new technologies) against it but within it. This
is her cultural ambivalence: unique, yet the girl next door; transgressive, but
without breaking with liberal humanism. No matter how much she camps
herself and the other through irony, excess and theatricality, Gaga is stuck to
pop culture’s ‘common sense’ as long as she endorses ‘authenticity’, tolerance
and inclusion. It is ethically and politically sensible to extend the rights of the
classic liberal humanist subject to others; Gaga’s camp aesthetics and politics
of fandom and in/ex-clusion prove it.

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Suggested citation
Yebra, J. M. (2018), ‘Camp revamped in pop culture icon Lady Gaga: The case
of “Telephone” and “Born this Way”’, European Journal of American Culture,
37:1, pp. 39–55, doi: 10.1386/ejac.37.1.39_1

Contributor details
Jose M.Yebra is a lecturer in English at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). After
finishing her Doctoral thesis on contemporary British fiction, he has published
articles and book chapters on British literature such as ‘Neo-Victorian

54   European Journal of American Culture

 Camp revamped in pop culture icon Lady Gaga

Biofiction and Trauma Poetics in Colm Tóibín’s The Master’ in the jour-
nal Neo-Victorian Studies and ‘“A terrible beauty”: Ethics, aesthetics and the
“Trauma of gayness” in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty’ published by
Rodopi (NY and Amsterdam). He has also participated in conferences with
papers on postmodernism, trauma and gender studies. He has coorganized
conferences on Irish Studies and Transmodern narratives at the University of
Zaragoza in 2016 and 2017. He is also a member of a project on Transmodern
literatures in English financed by the Spanish Ministry of Education and
Competitiveness led by Dr Susana Onega.
Contact: Facultad de Ciencias Humanas y de la Educación, Despacho 100,
Calle D. Valentín Carderera, 4, 22003, Huesca, Spain.
E-mail: jyebra@unizar.es

José M. Yebra has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.

www.intellectbooks.com    55
 intellect
www.intellectbooks.com
publishers
of original
thinking

Metal Music Studies

ISSN 2052-3998 | Online ISSN 2052-4005
3 issues per volume | First published in 2015

Aims and Scope

The journal provides a focus for research and theory in metal music studies,
a multidisciplinary (and interdisciplinary) subject field that engages with Editor
a range of parent disciplines. The journal provides a platform for high- Karl Spracklen
quality research and theory and aims to be a unique resource for metal Leeds Beckett University
K.Spracklen@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
music studies. The journal provides an intellectual hub for the International
Society of Metal Music Studies. Short Articles/
Reviews Editor
Call for Papers Niall Scott
University of
Contributions welcome from scholars in the parent disciplines of music Central Lancashire
theory, musicology, aesthetics, music technology, performance, art, policy NWRScott@uclan.ac.uk
studies, politics, cultural studies, economics, pedagogy, sociology, linguistics,
psychology, history, regional studies, theology, philosophy, and natural
sciences. The journal will accept shorter pieces from those involved in the
metal music industry.

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