Social Text

Go Gaga:
Anarchy, Chaos, and the Wild
Jack Halberstam

A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence,

or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it
is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that
could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The true criterion of
the practical, therefore, is not whether the latter can keep intact the wrong
or foolish; rather it is whether the scheme has vitality enough to leave the
stagnant waters of the old, and build, as well as sustain, new life. In the
light of this conception, Anarchism is indeed practical. More than any
other idea, it is helping to do away with the wrong and foolish; more than
any other idea, it is building and sustaining new life.
E mma Goldman, Anarchism: What It Really Stands For (1910)
Not to know but to schematizeto impose upon chaos only as much
regularity and form as our practical needs require . . .
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by
resonance. Something that is constituted here resonates with the shock
wave emitted by something constituted over there. . . . An insurrection
is not like a plague or a forest firea linear process which spreads from
place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of a music,
whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in
imposing the rhythms of their own vibrations, always taking on more
density.
T he Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

1979. A dark club in London. Its ska night and many bands, mostly male,
have entertained the young and energetic crowd with bouncy songs of
love and hope, multicultural songs of racial unity, songs about drugs,
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youth, pressure, politics, power. Theres a lull, a break in the action and
a ska girl-band takes the stage. At first, the party continues and the beat
goes on. But then, everything changes as the lead singer begins to speak
over a swirling beat with a melancholic bass line and a dark rhythm.
Rhoda Dakar, who was then with the Bodysnatchers, rapped over the
rhythm guitar and told an ordinary enough tale about going out shopping,
cruising, and spotting a good-looking guy. So far, so straight; so far, so
totally usual. Except that the song did not proceed in a straight line from
attraction to contact to exchange. Instead, Dakar talks of being left on the
shelf like an old boiler. Boiler, an unpleasant Britishism for a rejected
older woman, likens the discarded female to a dysfunctional machine, an
empty vessel. Fearful of this fate, Dakars character in the song allows the
guy to buy her clothes and accepts a date with him later. From there, the
song takes us into the dark night of date rape. The actual rape in the song
is elided by a long, drawn-out, and very dissonant scream. I remember
that scream wellit woke me up that night in the club and welcomed
me to the other side of punka no place populated by different kinds of
renegades: new immigrants, queers, women, and social misfits who are
not well captured by the various histories of punk, the neatly organized
genealogies that lead back to Malcolm McClaren, the Sex Pistols, the
Clash, and other punk boys. Those histories do not contain the punk
moments like Rhoda Dakars scream, sonic disturbances that are part of
what Fred Moten calls the black aesthetic and part of what I am now
calling shadow feminism or gaga feminism.
When asked about the song in an interview, Dakar identified The
Boiler as the only original song by the short-lived Bodysnatchers and
described its origins:
It came about because I was just talking over a riff in rehearsal. I didnt
know about writing songs, but I knew how to improviseI had originally
wanted to act and had worked in the theatre on leaving school. Performing
it live was acting, thats all. A friend had been raped a couple of years earlier
and I suppose I was thinking of her at the time. Recording it was a very long
and drawn out process. It was released a year after it was first recorded.1

The song, harrowing despite the jaunty beat, was given no playtime on
the radio and it soon faded away. The group broke up soon after the singles release and Dakar only performed the song live later a few times as
part of the reformed Specials, the Special AKA. Improvisation then lies at
the very heart of this songDakar improvised it in its original form and
she improvises the scream for every performance thereafter. A scream,
almost by definition, can have no set musical score; and while Dakar does
repeat certain sounds and sequences in various performances of the song,

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for the most part, she lets loose at the end of the song for upward of two
minutes in a traumatizing and devastating scream of pain.
This song and its improvised scream rarely makes it into accounts
of English punk nor does it appear in many of the accounts of the Two
Tone ska scene of the same era. While many Two Tone records had political content, and while some Two Tone bands like the Selector had female
lead singers, no other band produced this kind of song and few performers
could have brought off the live re-c reation of the song event. How do we
understand this song of violation over the jaunty beat of ska? What was
this song doing in the short repertoire of the Bodysnatchers, whose other
songs were simple cover versions: the Dandy Livingstones Do the Rock
Steady, for example, but also Winston Franciss Too Experienced? How
can we situate this banned song of rape in relation to themes of racism and
colonialism that made up the political backdrop to Two Tone records and
ska music in general? Finally, what do we make of this scream and how
can it be folded into the history of punk and the politics of anarchy that
form part of punks foundation?
The two frameworks I am using here to think about these questions
are Fred Motens understanding of the black aesthetic, articulated most
forcefully in his book In the Break, and what I call gaga feminism in my
book of the same name. 2 While Moten understands the black aesthetic to
come in the form of unintelligible gestures that are quickly assimilated by
a white supremacist logic into the proof of the irrationality of blackness, I
define gaga feminism as a form of activism that expresses itself as excess,
as noise, as breakdown, drama, spectacle, high femininity, low theory,
masochistic refusal, and moments of musical riot. I situate both of these
aesthetic frames in relation to a theory of anarchism that departs from the
usual accounts of it as a political philosophy and that instead culls a theory
of chaotic creativity from the unmoored, hyperkinetic, sonic traces left by
a series of unconventional, hard-to-classify punk divas.
In one of the quotes that I use to frame this essay, Emma Goldman,
responding to concerns that anarchism is impractical, that it advocates the
use of violence, and that it is dangerous, asks what we actually mean by
practicality and argues for an epistemological break with old ways of thinking. In her essay, which addresses what anarchism really stands for, she
builds on Oscar Wildes reminder that what counts as practical is simply
anything that can be carried out under already existing conditions. 3 What
is practical, in other words, is limited to what we can already imagine. This
opens up the realm of the impractical as a space of possibility and newness.
What is impractical, Goldman proposes, could become practical if existing
conditions shift and change. Above all, change should break with the stagnant, with what can already be imagined, in order to imagine new life.

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My book Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal has made
the claim that the existing conditions under which the building blocks of
human identity were imagined and cemented in the last centurywhat we
call gender, sex, race, and classhave changed so radically that new life
can be glimpsed ahead. Our task is not to shape this new life into identifiable and comforting forms, not to know this newness in advance, but
rather, as Nietzsche suggests, to impose upon the categorical chaos and
crisis that surrounds us only as much regularity and form as our practical needs require.4 In this essay, I build upon ideas from Gaga Feminism
and begin to develop a theory of queer anarchism from a new companion
project titled The Wild, in order to weave a story about emergent forms of
life through the glimpses we catch of it in popular culture and subcultural
production.
The wild as a concept has lost its meaning in our age of postcivilization development, postindustrial production, and postidentity being. As
a word, wild comes from Old or Middle English and refers to undomesticated modes of life, disorderly behavior, the lack of moral restraint, excess
in all kinds of forms, the erratic, the untamed, the savage. When referring
to nature, the wild tends to mean unaltered by human contact; in card
games, a wild card lacks an intrinsic value but will change according
to the game; wild also has meant barbaric, savage, or that which the
civilized opposes. It often refers to a so-called state of nature, whatever
that may be, and has recently been used to refer to the practice of going
off the grid or behaving in a chaotic or anarchic manner.
Wild, in a modern sense, has been used to signify that which lies
outside of civilization or modernity. It has a racialized valence and a sense
of anachronism. It is a tricky word to use but it is a concept that we cannot
live without if we are to combat the conventional modes of rule that have
synced social norms to economic practices and have created a world order
where every form of disturbance is quickly folded back into quiet, where
every ripple is quickly smoothed over, where every instance of eruption
has been tamped down and turned into new evidence of the rightness of
the status quo.
For my project, the wild is not a place, person, or practice; it is a
potential, in the sense that Jos E. Muoz describes the queerness of
potentiality: Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and
now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another
world.5 The wild is not what limns the present, what lies outside of the
bounded here and now, it is something that we already conjure from within
the here and nowwe constantly call it into being. Wildness does not
exist separate from our desire to break loose from a set of constraints or
a determined understanding of what is appropriate, good, and right. My
use of this word, a word laden with meaning, saturated with sense drawn
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from colonial and ecological contexts, represents an attempt to stretch our

critical vocabularies in different directionsaway, for example, from the
used-up languages of difference, alterity, subversion, and resistance, and
toward languages of unpredictability, breakdown, disorder, and shifting
forms of signification.
I argue for the wild as a set of alternatives that we are in the process of
making, imagining, and inhabitinga lternatives to political discourse, to
identity politics, to the set pieces of protest culture, and alternatives to how
we want to think about beingboth being together and being apart. I have
sometimes called this space of the wild gaga. In Gaga Feminism, I track
the action of going gaga as something that Lady Gaga channels but that
is not particular to her. Instead, I show how Lady Gagas global visibility
hides a much longer history of wild and often punk female performances.
The name Gaga, supposedly taken from the Queen song Radio Ga-G a,
signifies the creative mayhem that has spread through our sex/gender systems and Lady Gaga herself occupies several sites of radical ambivalence
and ambiguity and embodies these shifts in the meaning of desire. For
example, when rumors flew around the Internet about Lady Gaga being
intersexed, she refused to deny the rumors about her genital ambiguity in a
phobic way. Gaga has said, instead, in an interview with Barbara Walters:
I portray myself in a very androgynous way and I love androgyny.6 Like
David Bowie, Lady Gaga cruises on her appeal to male and female fans,
and like Grace Jones, she alters the meaning of feminine iconicity through
refusing to operate within the rules of popular consumption that would
freeze her through complex processes of fetishization.
The ambiguity that surrounds and even defines Lady Gagagenital,
musical, aesthetica llows her to both question and revel in spectacular
forms of femininity. In a postfeminist age in which young women both
benefit from and deny simultaneously leaps that have been engineered
by feminism, we should explore carefully the new idioms of glamour and
femininity as they appear within the performance-scape of stars like Lady
Gaga. Like Poly Styrene, Grace Jones, and Pauline Black before her, Lady
Gaga creates alter egos; she syncs pop and punk sounds and she mixes
dance stutters into sonic hiccups to create a spasmodic femininity that
lurches and jerks into action. She also confuses the boundaries between
internal and external, both highlighting the ways in which girls are forced
to see themselves always as image and contesting that image by reveling
in a radical, Warholesque superficiality. Going gaga is not simply being
Gaga; it is a journey to the edge of senseG race Jones goes gaga in her
cover version of Joy Divisions Shes Lost Control and Poly Styrene went
gaga on Oh Bondage Up Yours. While masculine versions of going gaga
take on heroic proportions in rock history (guitar smashing, stripping on
stage, crowd diving), feminine ecstatic performance is read quickly as
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sexual excess, wardrobe malfunction, or psychological breakdown. In Lady

Gaga, however, feminine performative excess finds a new performance
horizon and hovers between madness, mayhem, and the dark side.
Performative excess can also give us access to the term anarchy. And
here I do not simply mean anarchy in the sense of an antigovernmental
strand of political action. Rather, I refer to aesthetic or creative anarchy,
the exploitation of generic breakdown, and the performance of sonic forms
of chaos. These sonic forms have been associated with insurrection by the
Invisible Committee who remind us in their 2009 manifesto The Coming
Insurrection that the old language of revolutionary breaks and ruptures has
been replaced with a new language of resonance, rhythm, and dissonance.7
And these sonic forms have also been associated with wild new forms of
community in the work of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. In their essays
on the undercommons, Moten and Harney associate sonic disorder with
the hum of different kinds of knowledge production. In their forthcoming book of essays, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study,
they give the example of the noise in a classroom before the teacher enters
and calls the class to order as the noise of ongoing study. 8 For Moten and
Harney such spaces engage in quotidian forms of disordered knowledge
production and exist in a fugitive relation to knowledge. As the term
fugitivity implies, for Moten and Harney, these alternative spaces of knowledge production, of cultural production, and of anti-institutionalization
have much to do with Motens theories of the black aesthetic.
Since the black aesthetic, for Moten, emerges out of a radical break
with enlightenment notions of harmony and symmetry, we find its full
impact in the noisy dissonance of jazz and in improvised music and in sonic
traces that do not even present as music. In relation to this radical history
of black sounds then, we can locate the problem with building new forms
of feminism and gender politics around a figure like Lady Gaga whose
appeal, of course, inheres in her whiteness, her blondness, her position in
a long line of blond, white divas who raid the coffers of African American
music and then emerge as if self-made. But what if we place Lady Gaga
within a different genealogy of female performers, one that stretches back
to the undifferentiated spaces of punk rebellion from the 1970s, where
ska and reggae and hardcore punk sit comfortably alongside each other,
drawing on multiple musical histories and inventing new spaces of overlap
and conversation?
The history of punk has been all too often told as one of hetero white
male fury, but this hides another history that links gender and sexuality to
empire and racial politics and emerges as a kind of sonic chaos that links
screams, yelps, and hiccups to a history of violation. This history can be
tracked through the mixed-race female singers about whom Jayna Brown

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has written so eloquently: Annabella Lwin and Ari Up, as well as Rhoda
Dakar. Jayna Brown says of this other history of punk:
The sounds of Poly Styrene and Annabella Lwint heir shrill, shrieking,
synthesized voicesenact a kind of anger that challenges the masculinized
form of that emotion, as well as responding to gendered forms of oppression. Poly Styrenes voice carries with it an explicit critique of patriarchy
and capitalism, while the very quality of Annabella Lwins voice, as well as
her stage presence, speaks to the systems of exploitation and violence she
herself experienced.9

Brown orients our attention to the screaming, dissonant quality of

their singing voices and encourages us to pay attention to the sound of
anger in these songs.10 Sonic history, in other words, inheres in the noises
made by these female singers and the breakdowns that they performed live
and that they improvised as part of a feminist genealogy of punk sound.
By listening to history, Brown suggests that we will find our way to the
narratives capable of linking blackness to punk, feminism to rage, politics
to noise.11 And why are these other histories of punk so important? Because
without them, punk becomes a rebellion without a cause, a boys club of
heroic art-school dropouts, and another master narrative within which
white guys play all the partst he masters and the slaves, the businessmen and the slackers, the insiders and the outsiders. Rhoda Dakar of the
Bodysnatchers, and Pauline Black of the Selector were much more than
female lead singers: they were part of Englands colonial dreaming, which
comes back to haunt the metropole as traces of an otherwise unthinkable union of feminism, anticolonial struggle, antiracism, and queerness.
Poly Styrenes open-mouthed yell in Oh Bondage, Up Yours is part of
a call-a nd-response system of yelps, cries, and screams, a cacophonous
feminism that must be traced across this performance-scape. We hear the
same scream in Dakars rape song, The Boiler, in the collapsing voice
at the heart of Grace Joness version of Shes Lost Control, and in Ari
Ups yelps in Typical Girls.
In a poem in his 2010 collection B Jenkins, Fred Moten writes: The
right to love refusal is black music.12 As in much of his theoretical work
on the radical black aesthetic, Moten names here a strand of black cultural
production that emerges as noise, as dissonance, as a long, drawn-out
scream. This phrase, the right to love refusal is black music, brings
together the three main themes of Motens work. First, it articulates the
notion of a black aesthetic that clings to the darkness against which enlightenment logic has been deployed. Second, it identifies resistant identities as
those forms of being that emerge in opposition to normative and univocal modes and understandings of identity. Because resistant and fugitive

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identities counter normative understandings, they cannot be explained,

recognized, or even encountered using those disciplined and regulative
methods of appraisal. What normative modes of evaluation find unpleasing, chaotic, unbeautiful, and jarring has, of course, been produced as such
by those very systems themselves. And so Moten calls attention to a white
neopragmatism that demands that knowledge make itself known in the
immediate, in the surface, and that eschews what he calls ruptural depth
and darkness.13 Third, the phrase makes clear that a black aesthetic is
part of a force of fugitivity unleashed in the wake of slavery and thereafter
constrained, repressed, and incarcerated by the scrupulous regulation
of disorder.14
In other words, the racial logic of slavery lives on, not only as a set of
economic aftereffects or as a political imaginary, but as a dominant set of
aesthetic principles that continue to shove the noise of blackness to the curb
while claiming the high ground of moral order, aesthetic complexity, and
political rectitude. Finally, the black aesthetic erupts as what Moten calls
a kind of unruly music that moves in disruptive, improvisational excess.15
How does this disruption emerge? According to Moten: as songs disruption of speech, the crys disruption of song, gestures disruption of the
cry, the criminal animation or animalistic derangement of the human, the
movement of law into the interstitial space of theater or dramas irruption
into the subjects pure locale and cause and so on.16
And so on. Fred Motens understanding of the black aesthetic is
important here for its attempt to locate a black aesthetic not in the shoring
up of identity in the face of racialized violence, but rather as the breakdown
of orderliness itself, the confusion, madness, and anarchy of a radicalism
that must oppose the form as well as the content of racial hate. Moten
advocates for escape, fugitivity, a permanent state of being that runs from,
rather than to, and that refuses the refuge of home where home, freedom,
and liberation have already been defined in white supremacist terms and
in a dependent relationship with the notion of slavery.
What is the sound of fugitivity? What does it sound like when a voice
seeks to vacate rather than to occupy, to flee perpetually rather than seek
safety, to locate spaces of instability rather than to harmonize? The song
The Boiler with which I began this essay would be one such instance of
sonic instability and fugitivity. But there are many such songs in the archive
of queer punk. Take, for example, Grace Jones singing Shes Lost Control in 1979 or the songs by Poly Styrene or the Slits. Think of Diamanda
Galss scream operas. These are songs that form in the context of a process
I call going gaga that involves a wild form of singing that becomes an
ecstatic loss of control and that links queer, punk, and anarchist forms of
feminism to the fugitivity of blackness that Moten tracks so fiercely.
Like Rhoda Dakars The Boiler, Grace Joness performance in
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Shes Lost Control marries a form of vocal frenzy to a foundational

beat that attempts to answer the chaos of the vocals by offering a stable
and safe sonic foundation. Taking a song by Joy Division that is already
dark and industrial, intense and chaotic, and transforming the songs noise
into a beat, Jones also took Ian Curtiss vocal and ran into new depths of
disorder. If Dakars wail reminded us of the dense backdrop of racial and
sexual violence against which so much of punk unfolded, Joness uncharacteristic screeching in this song answers Dakars scream with the sound
of madnesst he scream of refusal in the rape song is echoed here with
manic screams of disturbance and mental instability, a kind of schizoid
response to the insanity of the rational world.
Grace Jones represents an avant-garde bridge between punk and
disco, ska and reggae, politics and dance. Joness early career was spent in
the New York club scene where she attracted the attention of Andy Warhol and produced a disco-t hemed album, Portfolio, in 1977. In the early
1980s, Jones produced an album that veered into new wave music, putting
some distance between herself and disco and reestablishing her reputation
as an edgy innovator of the urban avant-garde. Her 1980 album, Warm
Leatherette, contained a series of cover songs including Private Life by
the Pretenders, Breakdown by Tom Petty, and Warm Leatherette by
the Normal. This album was extremely successful. While she seemed like
a high-fashion, high-d rama diva, her music actually issued stark warnings
about what could happen if the disco diva danced off the dance floor and
into the dangerous and dark territory of chaos, breakdown, nightmare,
and madness.
But one cover version by Jones did not make it onto the 1980 album.
On her 1979 12-inch single of Private Life, a preview of the album to
come, Jones performed on the A-side a long, snarling cover of the Pretenders song, but on the B-side, she slipped a desperate and wild cover version
of Shes Lost Control by Joy Division. This heavy dub, eccentric version
of the song was omitted from Warm Leatherette and never appeared anywhere else in her opus. But it is in this song that Jones really goes gaga and
lets go of the smooth rhythms of reggae for the discordant and distorted
sounds of dub. The sneer in Private Life (your private life drama, baby,
leave me out . . . sentimental gestures only bore me to death) was replaced
with a raw scream in Shes Lost Control; contempt gave way to chaos,
disdain became rage, and the delivery veered between a lecture, an incantation, and the hysterics howl. Ian Curtiss version of Shes Lost Control
stayed firmly in the realm of reported speech: And she turned around
and took me by the hand / And said, Ive lost control again. / And how Ill
never know just why or understand / She said Ive lost control again. In
Grace Joness version, she inhabits the speech of the other woman, and
screams: Ive lost control. An innocuous line in the Joy Division version
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she turned around and took me by the handbecomes violent in Grace

Joness version: She turned around and stabbed him in the hand / And
said, Ive lost control. And once the lyrics are exhausted, Jones turns to
crazy laughter layered over distorted noise, tires screeching, a dissonant
soundscape of outrage.
Grace Jones is and was queer in every way and she offers a vector
between the drag femininities of disco and the perverse masculinities of
punk. Jones has been called an androgyne, but in a way, like Gaga and
perhaps like a performer such as Missy Elliott, she is a gender all her own.
While Grace Joness flirtations with sonic chaos are suggestive of the
incipient chaos that punk promised and represented, socially and politically, in the 1970s, in this performance by Grace Jones we find evidence
of all manner of subterranean archives. Jones brings punk to reggae, dub
to punk, and female hysteria to the spastic masculinity that motors punk
singers from Ian Curtis to Ian Dury. Ian Curtis is mostly remembered
now as a tragic figure from thishe suffered from epilepsy and so while
the song Shes Lost Control must refer in some way to his own struggle
to keep control of his spasmodic body and his roller-coaster emotional
states, he still cannot inhabit that position in the song about his experience. Instead he projects his own loss of control onto a female other who
loses control. Ian Dury, of Ian Dury and the Blockheads fame, was a
disabled punk performer who had contracted polio as a child in the 1940s
and who turned his disability into an asset, a mark of his antinormative
politics and his resistance to the politics of respectability. It is this history
of punka history that unites the nonnormative with antiracist and antihomophobic politicst hat speaks of anarchy. Indeed, Grace Jones reminds
us of a maverick strand of punk that twists in and out of the avant-garde,
that flirts with high fashion, low theory, hetero-and homo-sexualities,
androgyny, sexual and sonic dissidence. In the screaming chaos of Joness
performance of a gray industrial song, we find a gaga core of mayhem that
disrupts genres, genders, sense, and silence.
The spectacle of Grace Jones screaming over a swirling dub bass
line in a remade Joy Division song implies different musical lineages,
histories, and futures. What if we connect the screams of Rhoda Dakar,
Poly Styrene, and Grace Jones within what Jayna Brown calls brown girl
insurgency?17 Where does such insurgency lead? Which performers in
the present inherit the legacy of this insurgency and what do they do with
it? Janelle Mone is one answer to the question of where such insurgency
leads. She also channels Pauline Black, Rhoda Dakar, and Grace Jones all
at once. In her ArchAndroid extravaganza, Mone plays with Afro-f uturism
as well as Afro-punk and she builds on the speculative fictions of Octavia
Butler and Samuel Delany to gesture toward another world, an off world,
a new world where, to quote the Specials, the lunatics have taken over the
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asylum.18 Critics often try to peg Mone, as they did Grace Jones, and place
her in a lineage that stretches back to James Brown and Michael Jackson;
and, while she can be placed in this lineage, she must also be understood
within the history of punk and ska. Her feminism emerges from her ability
to conjure new worlds, imagine new sounds, and indict the old worlds that
deploy order, rationality, and sense to justify their violence.
In a song titled Come Alive, Mone also goes gaga and lets loose
a scream, a scream of the dead coming back to get the living, the living
who have benefited from the subjugation of other. The scream in this song
is the noise of the wretched of the earth, rising up from their graves and
coming for you!
As soon as Gaga Feminism came out, I had to defend it and myself
from various legitimate critiques of a feminism or popular theory of
gender based upon the star image of someone who performs songs like
Born This Way. My critics, reasonably, asked me to consider how such
an incredibly compromised and glitzy global star can mean much for a
project oriented toward alternative genders, new understandings of kinship, and subcultural histories of resistance. I absolutely understand this
sense of suspicion and I should add that I too lost interest in Lady Gaga
once she descended from G.O.A.T. with her Mother Manifesto in hand
and emerged from the primal slime of a large egg to tell us that we were
Born This Way! But the notion of gaga is not something that can be
possessed or stilled by any individual. Like dada, like punk, like all kinds
of situationist moments and movements, gaga cannot be owned; it can only
be occupied for a spell, inhabited for a temporary term and then opened
back up to the next incarnation of creative chaos.
By reaching back into punk, glam rock, and new wave archives,
Grace Jones, and Janelle Mone, but also Missy Elliott and Beyonc, like
the punk divas before them, make noise and go gaga not to make crude and
easy oppositional statements but rather in order to mess up the landscape
of pop and popular femininity by both living within it and destroying it
all at once. Lady Gaga and her little monster fans also accept that going
gaga means not only critiquing fame, paparazzi, and bad romances, but
also using every media platform that comes along to contest and change
the meaning of woman, pop, money, and sex. Lady Gaga may not be
the revolutionary we think we want, but she may be an extremely effective vector and symbol of change in a neoliberal world of lightning-fast
co-optation. Gaga feminism as embodied in certain eclectic performers
does not promote a new liberal version of femininity; rather it inhabits wild
terrains of sonic and political chaos in order to bring new forms of politics,
culture, and gender to life.

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Notes
1. Rhoda Dakar, interview with Marco on the Bass, Marco on the Bass (blog),
13 January 2009, marcoonthebass.blogspot.com/2009/01/exclusive-interview-w ith
-rhoda-dakar-of.html.
2. See Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Boston, MA: Beacon, 2012).
3. Emma Goldman, Anarchism: What It Really Stands For (New York: Mother
Earth Publishing Association, 1911).
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1968),
278.
5. Jos Muoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New
York: New York University Press, 2009), 1.
6. Lady Gaga, interview with Barbara Walters, Lady Gaga: I Love Androgyny, ABC News, 22 January 2010, abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/video/lady
-gaga-love-a ndrogyny-9640579.
7. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (New York: Semiotext(e),
2009).
8. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Stevphen Shukaitis, eds., intro. by Jack
Halberstam, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York:
Minor Compositions, 2013).
9. Jayna Brown, Brown Girl in the Ring, Journal of Popular Music Studies
23, no. 4 (2011): 456.
10. Ibid., 457.
11. For more on the connections between blackness and punk, see Tavia
Nyongo, Do You Want Queer Theory (or Do You Want the Truth)? Intersections
of Punk and Queer in the 1970s, Radical History Review 100 (2008): 10319.
12. Fred Moten, B Jenkins (Refiguring American Music) (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010), 48.
13. Fred Moten, Gestural Critique of Judgment, in The Power and Politics of
the Aesthetic in American Culture, ed. Ulla Haselstein and Klaus Benesch (Munich:
Publications of the Bavarian American Academy, 2007), 96.
14. Ibid., 102.
15. Ibid., 104.
16. Ibid.
17. Brown, Brown Girl in the Ring, 465.
18. For a brilliant read on the politics of Janelle Mones fantasy-scapes, see
Shana Redmond, This Safer Space: Janelle Mones Cold War, Journal of Popular
Music Studies 23, no. 4 (2011): 393411.

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Halberstam Anarchy, Chaos, and the Wild

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