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Lady Gaga: American Horror Story , Fashion, Monstrosity and the Grotesque

2017; Routledge; Volume: 21; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1362704x.2017.1359947

1751-7419

Adam Geczy, Vicki Karaminas,

Cinema and Media Studies

Stefani Germanotta, better known as Lady Gaga, is known as much for her personae and extreme and outrageous styling as she is for her performances and music. What makes Gaga so interesting is that she crosses a diversity of media forms including fashion, music and television to define her celebrity status. She also incorporates digital media artifacts such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and uses her website Monsters.com to mobilize her fans. In many ways, Gaga (or The Haus of Gaga) employs the use of multimedia formats to propel and saturate her image as a self-stylized fashion icon across a global range of fashionscapes. This article explores Lady Gaga as a cipher for new forms of gender politics and the effects of digital fashion imagery on consumers via the convergence of new technologies. By examining “Hotel,” season five (2015–2016) of the television series American Horror Story (FX, 2011–present), as well as Gaga’s music videos and styled performances off and on stage, we argue that these politics are made manifest through the deployment of fashion as a conduit in exploding not only gender binaries in the construction of language, but the discourse of gender itself.