Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga — these women have *won*. They are so crazy, so odd, that no one can sexualize them but themselves. “What are you wearing?” is always the female celebrity trap, and so Lady Gaga wears meat dresses and bubble dresses and makes the whole thing so insanely performative that there is no hope of making thing pseudonatural.
And drag: drag is so beautiful. It gender performance at its most pure form. What is everyone else ever doing, pretending we’re normal like it’s natural?
miley – more wielding than automatically fulfilling the wholesome girl persona, and yet she caricaturizes it. it’s ridiculous, and she seems to be playing a joke on the world
I think now about how Miley Chrus was the default character to make fun of for teachers in high school — and now, thinking back on it, it is so harmful. It perpetrates a form of misogyny. And yet at the time, it was so normalized, so obvious. And so I worry now about thinking about trying to condemn certain things; I don’t ever want to perpetuate something that may limit someone’s development. And so perhaps HB’s approach is correct: positive only, and mute on that which the individual may dislike.
Lady Gaga brought attention to performativity; Miley builds on that by performing those very ridiculous standards she and all women are subjected to: hyper-sexuality, then hyper-pure-ness. But of course, she must perform a caricature in her self-awareness.
This over performativity seems to me to be the only pure way of living, and yet — this seems a hopeless, disheartening path to trod.
Gaga empowers her fans to be what they want, because she understands that none of it truly exists anyway. But she empowers them on the level of personal happiness and not on that of self-awareness.
