Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal

(Paperback)

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Gaga Feminism provides a roadmap to sex and gender for the twenty-first century, using Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new kind of feminism. Judith "Jack" Halberstam, a well known academic in queer theory, gender, and cultural studies, makes sense of the tectonic cultural shifts that have transformed gender and sexual politics in the last few decades. This colorful landscape is populated by symbols and phenomena as varied as pregnant men, late life lesbians, Spongebob Squarepants and queer families.

Reviews

Jack Halberstamthe king of feminismhas managed to make sense of pregnant men, Lady Gaga, gay marriage, and the advent of the bromance in this provocative and pleasurable romp through contemporary gender politics. Gaga Feminism is as fun as it is illuminating.
Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs and staff writer at the New Yorker

Like the remixed and mashed cultures that produced her, Lady Gaga defies simple logics and explanations. Perhaps no scholar is better equipped to go there with Gaga than J. Jack Halberstam, whose work, like Gaga, resists categorization. If Gaga Feminism is a politics of free form and improvisation, Halberstam bravely lets loose the reins.
Mark Anthony Neal, co-editor Thats the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader

In this important and spirited manifesto, Jack Halberstams signature wit, depth, and wide-ranging cultural appetites are on full display. Amid Halberstams stories about the many-gendered world we live in, this book gives us hope that we might move toward ever more liberated modes of living.
Sara Marcus, author of Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution

Jack Halberstams wild, playful intelligence wreaks dazzling havoc on pop culture and feminism and genderfrom butch fish to deadbeat dudes, marriage, hetero(in)flexibilty, rom-coms, global capitalism, and, of course, Lady Gaga. Halberstam is the crier for and contributor to a gleeful anarchism that begins in the streets or the universities or maybe the television, and comes raging into our most intimate spheres.
Michelle Tea, author of Valencia

Author Bio

J. Jack Halberstam is the author of four books, including Female Masculinity and The Queer Art of Failure. Currently a professor of American studies and of ethnicity and gender studies at the University of Southern California, Halberstam regularly speaks and writes on queer culture and gender issues and blogs at BullyBloggers.