Saint Gaga: Lady Gaga’s Nostalgic Yearning for Queer Mythology, Monsters, and Martyrs

Lady Gaga, one of the biggest popstars of the 2000s, produces a genuine queer nostalgia, an emergent collective memory with its own sensuous and sensational aesthetics. Her extravagant look, outfits, hairstyles, songs, and concerts, as much as her outrageous public statements, constitute an accumulated (counter)cultural phenomenon which integrates hyper-technological contemporariness with imaginary, legendary past-ness, and spectacular, almost prophetic retro-futurism. In her unique status as a young and classic pop star she combines innovativeness and iconicity, unruly womanhood and calculated marketing, global fandom and queer identification. Her multi temporalities are interwoven with her multicultural, intercultural, and countercultural identifications. In her queer way, she creates a fantastic, imaginary, and imaginative history, an invented history that transcends the limitations of reality, naturalness, daily routine, and traditional or conventional frameworks. She creates legendary landscapes, legendary spectacles, and legendary worlds. She is a legend.