So, I won't post the Telephone video here because you can watch it here or here. But I will point out in this edition of Googling Gaga, also known as Google Gaga, that the Lady is drawing fire from both sides. In a controversy of Madonna-esque proportions, the Telephone video is getting all sorts of people up in arms. First, the right-wing conservatives who think it's disgusting and poisonous that Lady Gaga and Beyoncé are portrayed as lesbian lovers.
I love Fox News (ironically). And I think when anchor Meghan Kelley is asking those contrived, well-rounded journalistic questions about censorship, she raises the right points. People obviously don't have to watch this if it offends them. In regard to the mass murder that Beyoncé and Gaga simulate in the video, I'm guessing the same people who don't like it aren't going to be purchasing the Quentin Tarantino box set any time soon. Yes, mass murder is "disturbing," but you gotta dig deeper, people, and think about what's being referenced.
Then, on the other side of the spectrum, Lady Gaga is drawing fire from the transgendered community, who are basically pissed off at the angle she's taken in playing up the accusations that she's actually a "hermaphrodite."
From gudbuy t'jane:
"I’ve made no bones before about my lack of awe for Lady Gaga. It’s not that I have anything against her specifically, but I find the aggrandizement of her as a radically different feminist artist as shallow: she’s able-bodied, cis, blonde, thin and conventionally attractive (I find the argument that she’s somehow shattering beauty norms really hard to swallow), and generally taking part in the privilege of attraction as western culture grants it.
As a trans woman, she mostly caught my attention due to the transphobic and intersex-phobic rumours about her being either trans or intersex. While these rumours were typically a product of living in a transphobic and transmisogynist culture, Lady Gaga’s response was one of gender and genital essentialism, stating that her vagina was offended by the claims.
It seems with her latest video she’s continuing this gender essentialism, slipping in a “no dick = not a tranny” joke at about a minute in, before the song even begins to play. The scene is set in a prison, and after being dragged to her cell and stripped by two women who appear to be trans, Lady Gaga climbs up against the bars in a shot clearly designed to dispel any rumours. At that point one of the trans women guards says to the other, “I told you she didn’t have a dick,” and they walk away.
When the original rumours about Lady Gaga’s genitals were circulating, I stayed away from the story for the most part, out of respect for her. Her offended vagina comment quickly lost my support, however. That she’s using trans women and drag queens to exoticize her videos doesn’t defer from the cissupremacist stance that women = vagina, and trans women are therefore not real women. Her anxiety at being seen as trans is clear, and her response is typical of cis privilege and trans marginalization: we’re supposed to wipe our brows and sigh with relief that she’s actually a real woman. This is transmisogyny."
