Pop singer Lady Gaga
Is Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night an example of “gaga feminism” at work? That’s a question I asked my class after reading to them excerpts from Judith Jack Halberstam’s book Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (2012).
To understand the concept, some history of how Halberstam came up with the designation is useful. Halberstam, born anatomically female but generally seen as male, talks of how the children of his partner, 3 and 5, labeled him:
Both were at an age when gender is not so fixed, and so, upon meeting them for the first time, I got what was for me a very predictable question from them both: “Are you a boy or a girl?” When I did not give a definitive answer, they came up with a category that worked for them—boy/girl. They said it just like that, “boygirl,” as if it were one word, and moreover, as if it were already a well-known term and obvious at that. Since naming has been an issue my whole life (as a young person I was constantly mistaken for a boy; as an adult, my gender regularly confuses strangers), this simple resolution of my gender ambiguity within a term that stitches boy and girl together was liberating to say the least.
Gaga feminism, Halberstam says, involves applying such child’s openness to the complexity of relationships. As Halberstam notes,
Children are different from adults in all kinds of meaningful ways. They inhabit different understandings of time, and experience the passing of time differently. They also seamlessly transition between topics that adults would ordinarily not connect in polite conversation…; and often, they place the emphasis differently than adults might by making questions about sex and gender as important or as inconsequential as questions about animals, vegetables, and minerals. The training of children is as much about teaching them where to place the emphasis as it is about giving them information. But the training of children would proceed much more smoothly if there were more exchange and if adults were willing, in the process, to be retrained themselves. The whole notion of a generational exchange as a one-way process informs our way of parenting, and it keeps us stuck in profoundly limited and conservative models of the family and childrearing.
Incidentally, this passage nicely sums up the Stephen King vision of childhood that I was trying to articulate in Tuesday’s post.
Gaga feminism, as Halberstam acknowledges, has echoes of surrealism, Dadaism, and postmodernist deconstruction. Its aim is to playfully put what we regard as certainties into play. Here are some “what if” questions that a gaga feminist might ask:
What if we gendered people according to their behavior? What if gender shifted over the course of a lifetime–what if someone began life as a boy but became a boy/girl and then a boy/man? What if some males are ladies, some ladies are butch, some butches are women, some women are gay, some gays are feminine, some femmes are straight, and some straight people don’t know what the hell is going on? What if we live in a world where things happen so fast that the life span, and progress through it, looks very different than it did only two decades ago? What if you begin life as a queer mix of desires and impulses and then are trained to be heterosexual but might relapse into queerness once the training wears off? What if the very different sexual training that boys and girls receive makes them less and less compatible? What if girls stopped wearing pink, boys started wearing skirts, women stopped competing with other women, and men stopped grabbing their crotches in public?
Twelfth Night seems to have been written very much in this “what if” spirit. I’ve written in the past about its fluidity. One finds a man who wishes he had the sensibilities of a woman (Orsino) and a woman who dresses up like a man (Viola). Olivia is attracted to Viola, Antonio is attracted to Sebastian, and Orsino wants Viola to stay dressed as a man as long as she can. In my post I talk also about how there are many ways into the play and how you can make of it “what you will” (the play’s subtitle). Meanwhile language itself refuses to stay steady, so that Malvolio can see in the letters M.O.A.I. a confirmation of his deepest desire and words can slip their leash and mean something other than what their speaker intends:
Viola: They that dally nicely with words may quickly make them wanton.
Feste: I would therefore my sister had no name, sir.
Viola: Why, man?
Feste: Why, sir, her name’s a word, and to dally with that word might make my sister wanton. But, indeed, words are very rascals since bonds disgraced them.
Viola: Thy reason, man?
Feste: Troth, sir, I can yield you none without words, and words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them.
Applying Halberstam’s framework, Shakespeare’s play is an imaginative exercise designed to jolt us out of our rigid tracks. The fact that he does so in an improbable comedy seems very much in the spirit of gaga feminism, which is serious exploration masquerading as gaga:
“Gaga,” a term newly popularized by the American singer born Stefani Germanotta, is a child word, a word that stands in for whatever the child cannot pronounce. It is also a word associated with nonsense, madness (going gaga), surrealism (Dada), the avant-garde, pop, SpongeBob; it means foolish or naïve enthusiasm, going crazy, being dotty; it sounds like babbling or idle chatter. With this constellation of meanings and in its most current incarnation in the person of Lady Gaga, the term may hold some promise as a form of feminism. Gaga feminism, I will demonstrate, is a form of political expression that masquerades as naïve nonsense but that actually participates in big and meaningful forms of critique. It finds inspiration in the silly and the marginal, the childish and the outlandish. Gaga feminism grapples with what cannot yet be pronounced and what still takes the form of gibberish, as we wait for new social forms to give our gaga babbling meaning.
I believe that Shakespeare dearly would have loved new forms that would have allowed him to express his many selves more fully, but he certainly couldn’t express such social alternatives in 1602. So he wrote his cross-dressing comedies, which aren’t taken as seriously as his tragedies but which grapple nonetheless with serious questions of identity.
So yes, I’m willing to describe the bard as going gaga.