November 18, 2021 • 55 mins
Joining us is Dr. Stephanie K. Wheeler for a conversation on her course Rhetorics and Pop Culture through a focus on Lady Gaga. We consider, why Gaga? Through what rhetorical lenses can we view this work? How does the study of pop culture lend itself to the study of rhetoric? #writingandrhetoric #rhetoric #rhetoricalstudy #ladygaga #mothermonster #studiesinpopculture
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(00:07):
Greetings and welcome to DWR Discussions on Writing and Rhetoric, a space for informal conversations around research and practice in the field.
At the university level, a place includes for curious novices, blossoming scholars and seasoned academics to consider and share their inquiries, experiences and passions surrounding writing and rhetoric.
(00:29):
We are your hosts, professors Meeghan Faulconer and Nikolas Gardiakos, with the University of Central Florida.
Thank you for joining us.
Now let's get this conversation started.
We are joined today by Stephanie K.
Wheeler, associate professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies.
(00:52):
Dr.
Wheeler's research interests include cultural rhetoric, disability studies, rhetoric of eugenics, and rhetoric of pop culture.
In spring of 2021, she taught an upperlevel undergraduate course, Rhetoric in Pop Culture, with the course built around the consideration of Mother Monster herself, Lady Gaga.
(01:13):
Thank you for joining us today.
Dr.
Wheeler thank you for having me.
We're excited to have a little conversation about Mother Monster.
That's right.
Lady Gaga herself.
Lady Gaga yes.
So for those who are unaware or maybe new to the conversation about rhetoric, rhetoric can seem like a highbrow and formal area of study.
(01:35):
It kind of calls to mind the ideas of arguments, either political or law.
So why is pop culture a practical tool for the application of rhetorical consideration? Well, I think because of both rhetoric and pop culture is ubiquity.
I think that it's an easy place to locate the way that things come together to mean something.
(02:04):
And so in particular with Lady Gaga, for instance, you have a lot of visual elements that you can see come together and create a larger whole, something bigger than the separate parts, the individual parts.
And to me, that's how I understand rhetoric.
(02:26):
It's a sort of coming together of a lot of disparate elements to create something that means something, something that people act in response to that sort of thing.
And so, yeah, rhetoric is generally tied to arguments and persuasion and that sort of thing, but it's also a mode of communication.
(02:57):
It's a way of making people understand something.
And I think that pop culture, that's its purpose is to communicate something, whether it be for laughs, for sharing cultural heritages, that sort of thing.
And so I think that it lends itself well because we all interact with it and it's all man made, it's touched by humans.
(03:27):
And anything that is touched by a human has rhetoric that is profound and of course, good for us as we work in Department of Writing and Rhetoric at UCF.
So the big question then being why Lady Gaga? Well, I have been a fan of hers for a while.
(03:50):
When I was in graduate school, I decided to go to see the Monster Ball on a whim.
And of course, the Monster Ball was the tour that she did for the Fame and the Fame Monster.
So this is like bad romance era.
And we got the cheap seats and I listened to the album to familiarize myself with the music, but we just want to have a good time.
(04:16):
And I was just so taken with the thoughtfulness that went into her performances and the ways in which I experienced the music differently because she was performing it.
That's not unique to her.
But what I felt was unique was this attention to the ways that music and performance and art and even down to things like colors or the kinds of materials she used for the stage set, how that all felt so intentional with the purpose of being inclusive.
(04:59):
And I know that sounds odd, but I'll give you an example.
There's a moment in the Monster Ball that she makes a phone call, and it's right before telephone, and she calls a fan in the audience.
And so the fan that she happened to call was in a wheelchair, and this person was way up high in the wheelchair section.
(05:28):
And so if you're familiar, if you've ever gone to an event with somebody who has any kind of mobility impairments, you know that you kind of get pushed to the back and in the corner.
And so the spotlight goes on the woman who is in the wheelchair, but you can't really see too well.
(05:51):
And so Gaga says, get out here.
I want to see her beautiful face.
And the woman said, I'm too afraid to bring my chair too forward because it's so high up and it's so steep.
I mean, this is in a basketball arena.
And Gaga said, no, not today.
(06:13):
No, she doesn't spoil in the beginning that she says, we may be called freaks outside of this arena, but tonight we're locking ourselves in.
And the people outside, they are the ones who are the freaks.
Tonight we are just going to celebrate everything about ourselves.
(06:36):
And so what she said in response to this was she told all of the people who were sitting in the front who didn't pay for their tickets.
So, you know, like the hoity toy, they know people kind of thing.
And she told them to get out.
And she brought the entire wheelchair section down on the floor.
(06:57):
And she says, I'm going to take care of you.
If you came here to see me, I'm not going to let something like, you know, a barrier keep you from seeing me.
And she didn't say it like that.
She said it in her Gaga way.
And I was just so struck with that kind of awareness of the different ways that spaces can be disabling.
(07:22):
That's not really common for people who haven't grown up with or have somebody in their lives with a disability.
And knowing that it wasn't just a matter of I think most people would have said, it's okay, you don't have to move your chair forward.
I can talk to you like this.
But for Gaga to recognize that it was impeding the experience, I think that's what it was.
(07:48):
That was unique is her attention to the experience of not just watching, but feeling like you're a part of it, and when you're a part of it, to feel like you belong.
The first words that came into my mind when I saw this, I was like, this is universal design.
(08:08):
I mean, it wasn't, but it was like a universal design for arguments, if that makes sense.
She was attentive to all of the things, and when she didn't understand or when she didn't recognize something that was being a barrier, serving as a barrier, she went at it.
(08:31):
And it was so emotional, like looking down and seeing all these wheelchair users on the floor, because again, I'm in the cheap seats looking down and you know what? The Monster Ball, if you're not familiar, it's a story.
And so the story is she's going from New York City and she's trying to get to the Monster Ball.
And it's like a Wizard of Oz kind of thing.
(08:56):
And she keeps saying throughout the night, the Monster Ball is a place where we can be free.
And at the very end, of course, she gets to the Monster Ball.
And I wish I could find video of this, but the set sort of transforms and I noticed there's ramps where there were stairs.
(09:19):
Like, who is thinking of that? Who isn't a part of the community? Or again, you live with somebody who has to always look for the ramp.
And I just thought it was so powerful.
And I've never heard her talk specifically about disability activism or justice.
And it just was such a really powerful example for me that you can be an ally, but you don't have to go to the protests and the marches and all of that.
(09:56):
Like, you can be an ally in small ways.
Like that transformed me.
That just that small attention to detail transformed me and you don't have to be.
I don't know, I'm trying to think of a Doris Huerta, like you don't have to do that to change somebody's life.
(10:18):
And just that intentional use and the intentional ways that she was thinking about an experience just struck me.
And I went back and I just saw her work with New Eyes, and I realized that these songs that I thought were silly about losing your shirt in a club, actually, no.
(10:43):
When you find the patterns of her work, there are patterns and they all point to the same thing.
And I just think that that's just remarkable that she can use so many.
It's like a multimodal.
I don't even know how to say it.
She's theorizing in a way that spoke to me.
(11:04):
And again, I don't mean to suggest that that's unique to Gaga.
I think most performers do do a bit of theorizing, but I think it's easier to see with Gaga.
Correct me if I'm wrong since you're the expert on Her Royal Highness Gaga.
(11:26):
She's so outwardly always a champion for those who seem to be in marginalized spaces, which I always equated, though, to her statements about LGBTQ plus communities.
(11:50):
these barriers like you talked about, that she had realized the physical barriers and incorporated that into her performance, that it just makes you more aware in general of the types of barriers that everyone who's marginalized in some way faces.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think another really interesting and useful point with Gaga, especially when you're teaching, like, rhetoric of pop culture, it's so easy to fall into these kind of parasocial relationships with pop culture superstars, and it's so easy to put them on a pedestal and turn them into an avatar and become blinded like anything they do is perfect.
(12:35):
And I think the thing that I really appreciate Gaga is that she's not always perfect.
Sometimes she's done some things that aren't cool, and it serves as a site to be like, you can admire somebody for the work that they do.
This is how you lovingly critique them.
And when you really admire somebody, you should be critiquing them.
(12:57):
And that is actually the example I use when I'm teaching Plato Sadris.
Like, Plato talks about how when you're out there doing the rhetoric, you need a mentor, but you need a mentor that you're not blinded by.
Like, everything they do is perfect.
You need to use your critical thinking skills when you're engaging in kind of arguments and ideas that you are really sort of, I don't know, besotted with.
(13:32):
You have to be able to critique and find those holes in the argument.
And I think Gaga anybody who gets me talking about Gaga knows how much I admire her and how much I just love talking about her.
But it is also important to remember that she's a person and people make mistakes.
(13:55):
And again, this isn't unique to her, but she's also really open to being told she made a mistake and really open about talking about, yeah, maybe that wasn't the best thing.
This is what I was trying to do.
But I recognize that this has hurt people, and I'm going to do better on that.
(14:16):
And yeah, I think that that's such a valuable and rare kind of thing, especially when you're in the position where you could just blow it off.
I remember when she said the R word, and it broke my heart.
But then she did an interview afterwards talking about, like, look, growing up where I did, that's what you said, and that doesn't mean that that's okay.
(14:41):
And I'm going to think about that.
And to my knowledge, she hasn't said that word publicly.
Again, I don't remember I was going with that.
But I think that it's a really useful place to really engage, especially in this world of information that we live in, where it's so much easier to just take the word of the person writing the headline and take it for truth and not read the rest of the article and interrogate it.
(15:15):
You know what I mean? And we all have our pop culture icons.
I think it's a good place, it's a smart place to begin thinking about how to do that constructively.
Yeah, well, cancel culture is so prevalent right now that there's little place for redemption.
(15:36):
It's one thing to be canceled, it's another thing to ever make it back.
And who decides? But I don't want to get too much off topic.
That's a whole other podcast, not even an episode.
Can you talk to us a little bit about what you mean by the rhetorical decisions she makes with her meat dress? Oh, the rhetorical decisions of her meat dress? Yes.
(16:02):
Well, one thing that my students and I talked about in this particular class, we were reading about the different ways that you have how do I say this? Different versions of reality, if that makes sense.
(16:26):
And so we had been talking about what it means to be real, what it means to be a human, right.
And so we had read a primer on the Cyborg manifesto, and then we read a critique of the Cyborg manifesto.
(16:59):
elements of a person's body gives them the right to be treated as a human right.
And so as we were talking about this, the meat dress, we did a whole day on the meat dress.
And there's a couple of things happening there.
(17:22):
First of all, Gaga always, especially early on, would wear these outfits that were just wild.
I don't have to explain that.
But I remember there was one particular instance, MTV asked her, why are you wearing this dress like it makes you look like you're shaped like a cupcake? And I remember she said, what if I am shaped like a cupcake? Does that mean then that you could laugh at me, but because, you know, it's fake, it's not funny.
(17:53):
Tell me more.
Why would you treat me differently if I was shaped differently? And so we were going to expect that she was going to wear something sort of outrageous.
And so she comes and she wears this meat dress.
It's straight up meat.
And there were a couple of arguments that she made with that.
(18:14):
I mean, like, literally the first one she says, well, why is it that people are on the red carpet wearing leather and nobody says anything? Like, you have set the conditions of what is normal.
And what is normal is wearing animals.
Like, there's further there's leather.
(18:38):
Why is meat? Why is flesh different? She didn't say, I couldn't do that.
I'm well within the boundaries of what you think is normal.
And so what she's doing is pointing to the fact that what we think is normal is so contextual.
And it's the rhetorical situation she gave us there.
Like, she followed all of the things that you would expect.
(19:00):
And then just one thing.
She didn't do the thing with or they didn't do the thing with Aristotle and define your terms.
They didn't define what animal meant.
And so she called them out on it.
But the other argument, and the one that most people associate with the meat dress is a critique of the don't ask, don't tell.
(19:21):
And so this goes back to the Cyborg stuff and what makes it human.
Her argument was you send people in the military to risk their lives, and you look at them like their numbers like they're just a piece of meat.
And you have people who have lived experiences, real experiences, that shape how they're going to act when they're in the military.
(19:48):
And this don't ask, don't tell is erasing that.
And when it comes down to it and I think she said this on Ellen, she's like, when it comes down to it, like, this is what we all look like underneath.
It's just flesh.
Like, why do we continue to judge based on the outward stuff? And so, yeah, so the fact that not only is she wearing meat, but I think it's interesting the kind of meat that she's wearing and the kind of cuts of meat that she's wearing.
(20:26):
I think the fact that she didn't walk on the red carpet with it, she changed after her performance and then went up and received an award and then called attention to it with Cher when she asked Cher to hold her purse.
And she's like, I never thought I'd be asking Cher to hold my meat purse.
She makes it in such a way that you can't look away and you can't ignore it.
(20:50):
And she wants that.
She wants you to feel so uncomfortable so that you can do the Foucault thing and do your enthusiasm and walk backwards and say, okay, what are the missing premises to this conclusion? Like, if you're allowed to wear meat or if you're allowed to wear animals, gaga is wearing meat.
(21:13):
Meat is an animal.
What's the missing premise here? And I think the fact that she did that intentionally with the purpose of having somebody act upon it, I think that's the big difference is that anybody can wear something outrageous.
But I think the rhetorical power of Gaga's outfits in particular is that she wants you.
(21:39):
It's a really good example of Kenneth Burke's Consubstantiality.
We identify together, we identify with Gaga that wearing meat is weird because she'll be the first person to tell you.
But that moment of identification, you have to act, you have to do something with it.
Now that we've identified with one another, do something with it.
(22:01):
And I think that that's the power of Gaga is that when you pay attention, she's asking you to do something with the weird feelings that you're feeling.
So I'm curious, how do you see some of your students wrestling with these questions? Because I think one of the great things about Lady Gaga as an artist is even if she doesn't have the answer, she's constantly asking the questions, like, constantly challenging audiences in terms of what they think about her, what they think about what art is, what they think about what messages are.
(22:38):
So I'm curious, using this in a class, are you sometimes surprised by the reads that students have or the reactions that they have? What's that like, using this as a basis for talking about rhetorical material in a class? Yeah, it's funny because when I first started using Gaga in class, this was like, 2010, and this was before I was able to open up conversations in class with, all right, everybody has an opinion about Lady Gaga, and it's one of two things.
(23:15):
You love her or you hate her.
Like, you think she's weird and you don't want to talk about it.
And honestly, teaching in College Station, Texas, most of it fell in the latter.
She's weird.
She's an incarnation of just everything that's wrong with the world.
And so that gave me a really generative place to start conversations, because then I would say, like, I would try to speak, you know what Gaga's outstanding performances were saying giving voice and saying, what makes you uncomfortable? And that was a really great exercise for, like, it could last an entire class.
(23:55):
Like, let's talk about and make a list of the things that make you uncomfortable.
Now let's understand why it makes you uncomfortable and early.
I would use it to teach enthymemes because the danger of enthymemes, I mean
Foucault made his whole career off of undoing enthymemes.
(24:17):
So to teach them to walk back and say, okay, what's your premise here? Why is this weird? And it made them uncomfortable because they realized that they were putting just arbitrary rules on her.
And I would tell them, it's okay that you're uncomfortable.
I'm not asking you to become a little monster.
I am asking you, though, to engage with the things that make you uncomfortable, because discomfort is where things happen.
(24:45):
Rhetoric can't happen if everybody agrees with everything.
And that's the cool thing about rhetoric, is that disagreements are the things that make meaning happen.
So that worked well then.
But then by the time I got to teach this class last spring, everybody was down with Gaga.
(25:06):
Everybody was like, okay, but they also were like, how are you going to get a whole class out of teaching her? That seems bizarre.
And I will say that I had a really great group of students who went into it with an open mind.
That's the only thing I asked.
And I made it clear that it's not necessarily a class about Gaga.
(25:29):
I think on my syllabus, I have a place where I talk about this.
This is a class where I'm trying to help you become better thinkers and better communicators and just critics.
Think about what comes on your phone screens and your computer screens, and before you blow somebody off, think about the different ways that we make meaning.
(25:54):
And I think one of the things that really struck a cord with them is the fact that I base so much of the class in disability rhetoric.
And disability rhetoric is one of those things that you bring it up and every student wants to tell a story about a person with disabilities they knew, which is great because it's the way that you get them talking about a conversation or talking within a conversation.
(26:21):
And so I will say that at the beginning I had a couple of students who were very I don't want to say opposed, but very much like, this is embarrassing.
I had one student in particular say that he had to do his work for my course outside of his dorm room because he didn't want his roommates to hear him listening to Lady Gaga.
(26:43):
But by the end, he came around to the point where he did a project where he said, I am a little monster.
Like, I don't understand how I missed this.
It's going to make me kind of go back and re examine everything that I thought that I liked and everything that I thought I knew about music and Gaga.
(27:05):
And he did this really great project.
He was a big David Bowie fan and he created this huge playlist where it was Bowie and Gaga talking to one another and it was so cool.
And another student who was definitely like, I do not like Gaga.
At the end, he was still like, I don't like her, but I appreciate her and I appreciate the ways that she's opening up spaces for us not to feel weird about critically analyzing pop music or fashion or anything like this, which, again, she's not the only one and certainly not the first one to do this.
(27:43):
But for them, it was the first time they encountered, and so the response has been great, and it's easy to get them to talk, and so that's half the battle.
I don't know about either of you, but for me that's the magic of teaching.
Anything to do with rhetorical analysis in class is getting students to have that first moment where they realize they can look at something that seems maybe inconsequential to them at first glance.
(28:11):
And when they start picking apart and pulling those layers back and seeing how much you can critique, not to be critical, but to look at the deeper meanings that is happening.
One of my favorite people to look at for that in terms of social media is Kim Kardashian, because she's so unabashedly about a certain thing that you can really when you start to look at every single Instagram post, it becomes overwhelmingly clear, like, okay, this is what's happening here.
(28:43):
And she's someone that I think a lot of people love to either love or hate, just like Lady Gaga.
I'm not saying that I love her or I hate her, but as one of those vehicles because she's so widely known and whatever their opinion is of her, if you say the name, they know who she is and they have an idea about her that you can jump right in and say, okay, so let's look at these things and see what's happening here.
(29:04):
But that's the magic.
I love that part.
And I think it's so interesting, too, especially with Lady Gaga context change, right from when you first introduced this as a subject matter in class.
You said 2010, is that right? Yeah.
(29:26):
And so all those ecologies are different, all those associations are different.
So I think it's fascinating to see what students pick up on now or what they connect it to.
Because all that stuff.
Even though she may not be.
At least for music more recently in the news or in the feeds or in the conversation.
(29:56):
I think when you go back and you kind of discover that.
Right.
I think those connections can still be made to conversations going on today.
Even though given the time that art was made or that statement was made, or that version of Lady Gaga was happening, I think that's really great, and I think she's just constantly trying to reinvent that.
(30:24):
But as time goes on, it's going to be really interesting to see, especially with students that are discovering her, thinking about the context of when that was, and then thinking about how that applies to now.
The thing that I find interesting, too, is that she's so consistent.
So she has reinvented herself, but she's consistent throughout.
(30:48):
So, for example, look at the eyewear that she wore during the Fame era when she first came out.
Her eyewear.
Her use of eyewear throughout her entire career is a commentary on how we see the world or how she sees us, how we see her.
(31:10):
Like it's a commentary about looking and staring.
And to me, that is the foundation of understanding Gaga's work.
She's always thinking about what it means to be looked at and what it means to look and where is agency fall in that? And so for consistency, you can trace the pattern that from The Fame through Chromatica or even she did her second album with Tony Bennett.
(31:44):
When she wears eyewear, the pattern is that she's making a commentary about how you see the world.
It's the Burkian what is it called? The terministic screens is what she's kind of showing us.
And that consistency is so intentional.
(32:04):
And I can always look back and I can always know that if she's talking about so, like in Just Dance, she says our blueprint is symphonic.
When she talks about things like blueprints or plans or schematics or anything like that, I always know no matter what era we're in, she's talking about our bodies.
(32:29):
So, yeah, I think that it's so cool to be able to look back and see the development over the years, not just our reaction to her, but her reaction to us as well.
Yeah, I mean, looking at the meat dress, honestly, for me, just revisiting it, I immediately assumed it was commentary on the idea of public personalities and being consumed.
(32:52):
That idea of consumption, especially women's bodies, that you're out there to put on something that makes you want to be consumed, you're on the red carpet.
You're promoting this idea of, like, a very primal consumption.
I think that's looking at it through 2021 eyes, as opposed to I don't remember what year she wore it originally.
(33:12):
Yeah.
Consumption is another theme throughout her work, so I love that read of it.
She has a song called Sour Candy on this latest album, and it's about like, I'm sour candy, consume me and see what happens.
But even to the fame, she positions herself as somebody to be consumed.
(33:38):
And again, those patterns, they're everywhere.
They are indeed.
So I'm curious, in the context of the class, I was looking at the website for your course, and it had some of those student posts in there.
(33:59):
Can you tell us a little bit about, like, how those and I read through a few of them and it was really interesting to see not only the students kind of negotiate with the ideas and the subjects, but I'm just curious how those are kind of framed within the class and how the students are kind of prompted to come up with those.
(34:23):
Yeah, so they function as an example of when you see something interesting, start engaging it, start thinking about it.
And so there aren't any due dates outside of, like, you just got to get all your stuff in by the end of this semester.
(34:46):
But they had an activity booklet.
And so what I did was create these prompts associated with points.
And so you have to get so many points to get an A, so many points to get a B.
It's up to you.
No judgment.
If you only want the C, get the C. So there were things
(35:10):
I'm looking at one, like, maybe a photo shoot that Gaga has done, and you're really interested in what she's doing there.
That could be worth two points.
I offered up, like, think about remixing.
What is the rhetorical context and how does it shift between an original song and a remix of the song, particularly when she performs the remix of the song or a different version of the song? I had Gaga poetics, and I asked students to look at three songs that they notice a pattern happening thematically, sonically, whatever, and then engage that pattern.
(36:03):
And it went down to her activism.
Do you notice something about her activism? I did a genius lyric analysis.
Maybe you want to do an in depth lyric analysis, and then there's a one on tracing.
(36:23):
And so track a concept term or.
Object across her catalog and sort of talk about that.
So the point was that if something interesting came up in class, that somebody was like, whoa, I didn't realize there was always a place in this activity booklet to engage that thought.
(36:45):
The point was essentially for me to get them to honor those sort of little light bulb, light bulb moments and get it down on paper as soon as it sort of came to sort of practice that, hey, there's always things happening, but when something like comes to light, get it down, let me know what you think.
(37:11):
And I tried to respond to as many of them as I could as they came up on the website.
And my mom, she followed it and she would read them all and she would call me and say, well, these kids are so smart. (laughter)
And I'd say they are.
(37:31):
I love the approach to that because so often, I mean, even putting myself back into being a position of student, it takes a little bit of wrestling with some ideas before you can start to really apply them with some meaning.
The idea that this is open ended, you have to do so many of them, but you have some time to really wait for something that is impactful to you.
(37:56):
So it's authentic, it's true inquiry, student inquiry at the purest sense, which, I mean, I think we can all agree make more meaning.
But just really quickly, to go back to the question initially about we mentioned the website for this particular course.
You opted to create a website for both your syllabus and the activity book.
(38:22):
I know a lot of work went into it.
Was there a particular reason, rationale behind that, just taking it from a regular paper syllabi to something more multimodal? Originally it was just because I wanted the blog post.
Like I wanted a place for the blog post to go.
And frankly, I don't know enough about canvas to know how to make a blog post thing happen.
(38:47):
It felt like it was just easier.
And as far as it sort of serving as a repository, I have wanted to teach this class since 2010.
I have been thinking about this class that long.
And to get the chance to do it, I had no intentions of making this website look anything other than just a blog.
(39:18):
And it was funny because that semester I was teaching four sections, which typically I teach three or two sections, and I was well past my limit, like overloaded.
And I just could not stop working on it because I found comfort in it.
And this sounds really cheesy, but I find comfort in her music, I find comfort in her work.
(39:42):
I am not a fan of pop music and I do not understand why it works with Gaga, but really nobody else.
I hate my Spotify recommendations because I'll listen to Gaga and they think I want to listen to Katy Perry.
Nothing wrong with Katy Perry.
It just doesn't work for me.
(40:03):
But anyway, I sort of found comfort in creating that and it just came through me and I wanted it to look good.
And this is a really stupid reason, but I'm going to say it like I sent it to her.
I was like, follow the schedule, Gaga.
I'll send you reminders.
I'll send you links if you want to join.
(40:26):
Never got to be blessed with her presence.
But I was like, if she's going to see this, it's going to be good.
And she's going to want to do an independent study, and I want to be prepared for that.
Yeah, I think it looks great.
(40:47):
And I think the other thing that makes it kind of work because I was going to mention with the blog post, the student posts, they're a good read.
I was just scrolling through them.
They weren't my students.
I wasn't scoring them or grading them or anything like that.
These are good read because the length is just about right.
They really kind of and it was interesting to see them.
(41:08):
Like, I'm sure they had some examples or they read each others or whatever, but there's this genre forming that's happening there on the post that I think is really interesting.
I'm like, wow, these are all pretty consistent, even though they're written posts by different authors and even tackling different subjects.
Or some are like close reads of lyrics and others are photo shoots or magazine covers or whatever.
(41:32):
They all seem really consistent to me.
I'm like, this is impressive.
This seems like a real thing.
And I think it's probably because, one, it looks so legit when you put it together.
And because of that context right.
It's not in web courses where just that sort of arena alone is very closed.
(41:54):
Right.
Sterile.
Almost sterile, sort of, yes.
I think sometimes when students post in there, it's like, well, this is just my teacher's going to read this.
And the obligatory two students that have to respond to and have to read it too.
But I think it changes when you create the site or create the blog.
(42:16):
And it and it looks the way that it does in it.
It looks like something that you would feel comfortable sending to Lady Gaga to say, hey, check this out.
Look what I did.
Right? Yeah, right? And then also they know I'm reading it, and they know that I'm a fan.
And so they know that it's not too silly to go so deep into it that they're like, oh, this is just I'm stretching it.
(42:40):
But they know that I'm going to be into that.
But then also I was very open with them and let them know my mom's reading this.
And how well you do depends on she's going to know what kind of teacher I am.
And so I really need you to show up for me and they would ask me, what did your mom think of this? And the other great thing about that is that my mom didn't go to college.
(43:04):
She barely finished high school.
My trick with academic writing has always been I send my mom a draft of something, and if she doesn't get it, then I need to go back and rewrite it because I want what I do to be accessible to everybody.
And they have that in their mind, too.
I'm writing to a general audience who's not doing rhetoric, who's not an academic, and who might not even be a Gaga fan, but is interested in interesting things.
(43:33):
And so I think that helped a lot, too.
Really empowering too, when something lives in the world and not just living in the house of 11:59, submit and pray, as I like to call it, the Church of we all pray there sometimes.
We've all been known to pray there.
Oh, yeah.
And giving them that first real glimpse into how conversations take place in the world in academic environments, but also in a lot of different arenas.
(44:02):
There is transfer of skill.
It's not just something we're doing obligatory to post reply, but that the global audience is real and it's something they're going to be facing sooner rather than later as they are in their upper level coursework, and it's easy for them to integrate the things that they want to do.
(44:25):
So I had a student who's a journalism major, and she did all of her posts on the Born This Way Foundation, and they read like, journalistic, like hot takes.
And she talked to me about that, and I said, do it.
I don't have any, use this space.
(44:46):
Space to hone your skills, but also use this space to try something and fail.
One thing that I would always remind my students, gaga says, honor your vomit.
And she takes that metaphor pretty far, which is fine, but like, the idea of honor the thing that you don't like about yourself.
(45:09):
Honor the thing that you think, oh, I'm just going to get this out because the paper is due.
I'm just going to do it.
Honor that.
Because that is important and that's essential.
And I think that kind of took some of the pressure off.
Yeah.
And I think, too, it's something that we talk about in all our classes in terms of the writing process, right? The process part of it.
(45:32):
And that's what I think.
Again, Gaga is really into that as well.
Like, not only the arguments, the statements, but also just the process of realizing one idea, then moving on, realizing the next idea.
And I think all the great artists kind of do that, right? They're able to sort of, when they're done, let it speak and let it be read and let it be argued about, and then they're moving on to the next question or thing they want to explore.
(46:06):
And that's really exciting.
And also revision is something that I find really valuable in the writing classroom.
And it's something that is so easy to find this theme in Gaga's work because so many of her demos are available online.
But a lot of the early, like Poker Face, for instance, it kind of started off as like a polka because she's trained at classical piano.
(46:37):
That is what she was most comfortable with.
That's how she wrote her songs.
And that's why her piano renderings of these songs are so beautiful, because that's how they were written.
They were not written to be pop songs.
And so thinking about genre, what's appropriate for this genre, she started off as a hip hop artist and not a very good one.
(47:00):
And she recognized that.
And she was like, this genre isn't speaking to me.
I'm going to take a step back.
And I love that so much that you can find these piano versions of her just playing around and all of a sudden you start to hear the melody of Bad Romance and it doesn't sound like anything you would ever think.
(47:24):
And on her Cheek to Cheek tour, she played the hits, but they were piano jazz standard versions.
And she can just go between them so easily and so effortlessly.
And I tell students, yes, it's because she's talented, but also because she studies the genre.
(47:45):
She knows that it's not going to translate to this particular audience.
And so she goes back and she studies the genre.
She's talked so much about how she is a student of pop and she can talk to you about Andy Warhol and David Bowie and explain like, this is what I'm picking up, this is what tends to work.
(48:06):
And I'm following in that genre.
And I think that that's so powerful that she can stay within a genre but change her approach.
Like who she was with the fame monster is not who she was with art Pop.
And Joanne just threw everybody off because suddenly she's like country or something.
(48:27):
But she's not.
It's still pop.
And I think that that's just the coolest thing.
She's definitely unabashedly herself regardless of what genre conventions.
And I think that's a slippery slope.
You feel beholden to those conventions and she has managed to take it where she can.
(48:48):
I don't want to say exploit them, but definitely utilize them to her advantage while still keeping that very uniquely individual voice.
Yeah.
And the one thing that I like to cite a lot when I say cultural theorist Stephanie Germanata asks us to think about what it means to be born this way, it doesn't mean you're born a certain person.
(49:10):
Like, nobody comes out who they are.
What she's saying is that we are always in a state of becoming.
We're always changing.
We're born to change.
And it's such a wonderful way of understanding that she's not the Joanne Gaga, she's not the Art Pop Gaga.
(49:32):
She's both, and.
She can be all of those things at once, and so can we.
We can be all of these complicated things at once.
It doesn't make us fake.
It doesn't make us anything but real, because we are made of all of these different things.
And whatever you decide to lean into is the persona you need for the chapter in your life.
(49:54):
Yeah, absolutely.
I know.
I have one more question, but do you have a question as well, Nick? No.
Okay.
I have one more question for you because I know that we've talked for a few minutes now, and it's been wonderful.
But just out of pure personal curiosity, what is your favorite? You can either do song or video due to rhetorical decisions that she makes.
(50:20):
I know.
It's like picking a favorite cat.
or a favorite child.
Oh, my gosh.
A favorite cat.
Oh, man.
You're right.
The cats of Gaga.
So I have a soft spot for Alejandro.
I wrote a chapter of my dissertation on Alejandro on the video.
And the thing that inspired me to make the little thing, the remix analysis came from there was a remix of Alejandro that came out, and somebody took the music video and made it fit the remix.
(50:54):
Oh, my gosh.
But my go to to teach is Bad Romance because my work looks at disability and eugenics and the ways that medicine creates what's normal and what's abnormal, and that's what she's doing in that video.
(51:15):
But there's so many I mean, I also want to give a shout out to You and I, where she talks, well she doesn't talk, but she's asking us to think about the things that we do to our bodies to fit in.
And not just fit in culturally, but to fit in like what the law says that we should be.
(51:37):
She's a mermaid who wants to marry a human.
But mermaid human marriage is illegal.
So she changes her body and she goes through, like, a shock therapy to try and change herself.
And all these versions of herself keep dying, and eventually she ends up just with prosthetics and the guy has left.
And so I think that ohh man...
(52:00):
But I will say, if you haven't listened to Chromatica, I'm going to ask you do so because it is so theoretically on point.
It is the art pop walked so that Chromatica could run.
Wow. Powerful words
Yeah.
I mean, I'm teaching GUI guy in my graduate course on Monday to teach them how to read Derrida.
(52:29):
It's just so theoretically dense and accessible.
I didn't answer your question because it gave you several, but I'm curious and because this will air after your class, so we're not going to do any spoilers.
Talk to me a little bit about what you mean about the Derrida application to that song.
Well, it begins with the level of semiotics, how the semiotics work.
(52:51):
You see the word GUY, but she's not saying guy.
The sound that comes out of her mouth.
What she's saying is GUY.
And so we're like, oh dude, no, she means it to mean girl underneath you.
(53:12):
So just at that level of like phonology, something's happening there.
But in the music video she takes the binary of real and fiction and interrogates it to the point where she has the real housewives of something something.
They're in there acting as like deities.
(53:35):
So she's commenting on like you guys are treating people and like Andy Cohen plays Zeus.
Oh yeah.
And so she's saying like, these are people of reality TV.
(53:58):
There's sets made of props, like food made of Lego.
And so she's asking, is this real? Well, you can't eat it, but it doesn't make it any less real again.
It goes back to undoing those binaries saying, what if it's both? And then that gets sense of the play of different, right? What are the plays that's happening? She's interrupting that.
(54:24):
She's showing us what it looks like.
It could mean all of these different things and whatever you decide it means works for you.
But just know if I say guy, it doesn't mean automatically what everybody else thinks it means.
Well, I know what I'm doing this weekend.
Watching some Gaga videos.
Well you know what, why don't you just stop in a class? There you go.
(54:47):
Join.
There you go, join.
Open invitation.
Yeah.
Well, it's so much fun always talking about sharing something that someone is passionate about, which you obviously are.
I'm going to go ahead and testify that just that syllabus alone and you can see the work that went into that website is a testimony to your passion and commitment.
(55:07):
So thank you so much for sharing that passion with us today.
Yeah, and thanks so much for being our first guest on the department podcast.
Are you going to bring me back for the 100th episode? Of course.
I'll pencil you in.
Yeah, pencil it in.
Our people will talk to your people.
It'll okay.
Yeah, I look forward to it.
(55:28):
Wonderful, wonderful.
Thanks again, thanks for listening.
Thank you.
Alright, thanks.
Bye.
Greetings and welcome to DWR Discussions on Writing and Rhetoric, a space for informal conversations around research and practice in the field.
At the university level, a place includes for curious novices, blossoming scholars and seasoned academics to consider and share their inquiries, experiences and passions surrounding writing and rhetoric.
(00:29):
We are your hosts, professors Meeghan Faulconer and Nikolas Gardiakos, with the University of Central Florida.
Thank you for joining us.
Now let's get this conversation started.
We are joined today by Stephanie K.
Wheeler, associate professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies.
(00:52):
Dr.
Wheeler's research interests include cultural rhetoric, disability studies, rhetoric of eugenics, and rhetoric of pop culture.
In spring of 2021, she taught an upperlevel undergraduate course, Rhetoric in Pop Culture, with the course built around the consideration of Mother Monster herself, Lady Gaga.
(01:13):
Thank you for joining us today.
Dr.
Wheeler thank you for having me.
We're excited to have a little conversation about Mother Monster.
That's right.
Lady Gaga herself.
Lady Gaga yes.
So for those who are unaware or maybe new to the conversation about rhetoric, rhetoric can seem like a highbrow and formal area of study.
(01:35):
It kind of calls to mind the ideas of arguments, either political or law.
So why is pop culture a practical tool for the application of rhetorical consideration? Well, I think because of both rhetoric and pop culture is ubiquity.
I think that it's an easy place to locate the way that things come together to mean something.
(02:04):
And so in particular with Lady Gaga, for instance, you have a lot of visual elements that you can see come together and create a larger whole, something bigger than the separate parts, the individual parts.
And to me, that's how I understand rhetoric.
(02:26):
It's a sort of coming together of a lot of disparate elements to create something that means something, something that people act in response to that sort of thing.
And so, yeah, rhetoric is generally tied to arguments and persuasion and that sort of thing, but it's also a mode of communication.
(02:57):
It's a way of making people understand something.
And I think that pop culture, that's its purpose is to communicate something, whether it be for laughs, for sharing cultural heritages, that sort of thing.
And so I think that it lends itself well because we all interact with it and it's all man made, it's touched by humans.
(03:27):
And anything that is touched by a human has rhetoric that is profound and of course, good for us as we work in Department of Writing and Rhetoric at UCF.
So the big question then being why Lady Gaga? Well, I have been a fan of hers for a while.
(03:50):
When I was in graduate school, I decided to go to see the Monster Ball on a whim.
And of course, the Monster Ball was the tour that she did for the Fame and the Fame Monster.
So this is like bad romance era.
And we got the cheap seats and I listened to the album to familiarize myself with the music, but we just want to have a good time.
(04:16):
And I was just so taken with the thoughtfulness that went into her performances and the ways in which I experienced the music differently because she was performing it.
That's not unique to her.
But what I felt was unique was this attention to the ways that music and performance and art and even down to things like colors or the kinds of materials she used for the stage set, how that all felt so intentional with the purpose of being inclusive.
(04:59):
And I know that sounds odd, but I'll give you an example.
There's a moment in the Monster Ball that she makes a phone call, and it's right before telephone, and she calls a fan in the audience.
And so the fan that she happened to call was in a wheelchair, and this person was way up high in the wheelchair section.
(05:28):
And so if you're familiar, if you've ever gone to an event with somebody who has any kind of mobility impairments, you know that you kind of get pushed to the back and in the corner.
And so the spotlight goes on the woman who is in the wheelchair, but you can't really see too well.
(05:51):
And so Gaga says, get out here.
I want to see her beautiful face.
And the woman said, I'm too afraid to bring my chair too forward because it's so high up and it's so steep.
I mean, this is in a basketball arena.
And Gaga said, no, not today.
(06:13):
No, she doesn't spoil in the beginning that she says, we may be called freaks outside of this arena, but tonight we're locking ourselves in.
And the people outside, they are the ones who are the freaks.
Tonight we are just going to celebrate everything about ourselves.
(06:36):
And so what she said in response to this was she told all of the people who were sitting in the front who didn't pay for their tickets.
So, you know, like the hoity toy, they know people kind of thing.
And she told them to get out.
And she brought the entire wheelchair section down on the floor.
(06:57):
And she says, I'm going to take care of you.
If you came here to see me, I'm not going to let something like, you know, a barrier keep you from seeing me.
And she didn't say it like that.
She said it in her Gaga way.
And I was just so struck with that kind of awareness of the different ways that spaces can be disabling.
(07:22):
That's not really common for people who haven't grown up with or have somebody in their lives with a disability.
And knowing that it wasn't just a matter of I think most people would have said, it's okay, you don't have to move your chair forward.
I can talk to you like this.
But for Gaga to recognize that it was impeding the experience, I think that's what it was.
(07:48):
That was unique is her attention to the experience of not just watching, but feeling like you're a part of it, and when you're a part of it, to feel like you belong.
The first words that came into my mind when I saw this, I was like, this is universal design.
(08:08):
I mean, it wasn't, but it was like a universal design for arguments, if that makes sense.
She was attentive to all of the things, and when she didn't understand or when she didn't recognize something that was being a barrier, serving as a barrier, she went at it.
(08:31):
And it was so emotional, like looking down and seeing all these wheelchair users on the floor, because again, I'm in the cheap seats looking down and you know what? The Monster Ball, if you're not familiar, it's a story.
And so the story is she's going from New York City and she's trying to get to the Monster Ball.
And it's like a Wizard of Oz kind of thing.
(08:56):
And she keeps saying throughout the night, the Monster Ball is a place where we can be free.
And at the very end, of course, she gets to the Monster Ball.
And I wish I could find video of this, but the set sort of transforms and I noticed there's ramps where there were stairs.
(09:19):
Like, who is thinking of that? Who isn't a part of the community? Or again, you live with somebody who has to always look for the ramp.
And I just thought it was so powerful.
And I've never heard her talk specifically about disability activism or justice.
And it just was such a really powerful example for me that you can be an ally, but you don't have to go to the protests and the marches and all of that.
(09:56):
Like, you can be an ally in small ways.
Like that transformed me.
That just that small attention to detail transformed me and you don't have to be.
I don't know, I'm trying to think of a Doris Huerta, like you don't have to do that to change somebody's life.
(10:18):
And just that intentional use and the intentional ways that she was thinking about an experience just struck me.
And I went back and I just saw her work with New Eyes, and I realized that these songs that I thought were silly about losing your shirt in a club, actually, no.
(10:43):
When you find the patterns of her work, there are patterns and they all point to the same thing.
And I just think that that's just remarkable that she can use so many.
It's like a multimodal.
I don't even know how to say it.
She's theorizing in a way that spoke to me.
(11:04):
And again, I don't mean to suggest that that's unique to Gaga.
I think most performers do do a bit of theorizing, but I think it's easier to see with Gaga.
Correct me if I'm wrong since you're the expert on Her Royal Highness Gaga.
(11:26):
She's so outwardly always a champion for those who seem to be in marginalized spaces, which I always equated, though, to her statements about LGBTQ plus communities.
(11:50):
these barriers like you talked about, that she had realized the physical barriers and incorporated that into her performance, that it just makes you more aware in general of the types of barriers that everyone who's marginalized in some way faces.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think another really interesting and useful point with Gaga, especially when you're teaching, like, rhetoric of pop culture, it's so easy to fall into these kind of parasocial relationships with pop culture superstars, and it's so easy to put them on a pedestal and turn them into an avatar and become blinded like anything they do is perfect.
(12:35):
And I think the thing that I really appreciate Gaga is that she's not always perfect.
Sometimes she's done some things that aren't cool, and it serves as a site to be like, you can admire somebody for the work that they do.
This is how you lovingly critique them.
And when you really admire somebody, you should be critiquing them.
(12:57):
And that is actually the example I use when I'm teaching Plato Sadris.
Like, Plato talks about how when you're out there doing the rhetoric, you need a mentor, but you need a mentor that you're not blinded by.
Like, everything they do is perfect.
You need to use your critical thinking skills when you're engaging in kind of arguments and ideas that you are really sort of, I don't know, besotted with.
(13:32):
You have to be able to critique and find those holes in the argument.
And I think Gaga anybody who gets me talking about Gaga knows how much I admire her and how much I just love talking about her.
But it is also important to remember that she's a person and people make mistakes.
(13:55):
And again, this isn't unique to her, but she's also really open to being told she made a mistake and really open about talking about, yeah, maybe that wasn't the best thing.
This is what I was trying to do.
But I recognize that this has hurt people, and I'm going to do better on that.
(14:16):
And yeah, I think that that's such a valuable and rare kind of thing, especially when you're in the position where you could just blow it off.
I remember when she said the R word, and it broke my heart.
But then she did an interview afterwards talking about, like, look, growing up where I did, that's what you said, and that doesn't mean that that's okay.
(14:41):
And I'm going to think about that.
And to my knowledge, she hasn't said that word publicly.
Again, I don't remember I was going with that.
But I think that it's a really useful place to really engage, especially in this world of information that we live in, where it's so much easier to just take the word of the person writing the headline and take it for truth and not read the rest of the article and interrogate it.
(15:15):
You know what I mean? And we all have our pop culture icons.
I think it's a good place, it's a smart place to begin thinking about how to do that constructively.
Yeah, well, cancel culture is so prevalent right now that there's little place for redemption.
(15:36):
It's one thing to be canceled, it's another thing to ever make it back.
And who decides? But I don't want to get too much off topic.
That's a whole other podcast, not even an episode.
Can you talk to us a little bit about what you mean by the rhetorical decisions she makes with her meat dress? Oh, the rhetorical decisions of her meat dress? Yes.
(16:02):
Well, one thing that my students and I talked about in this particular class, we were reading about the different ways that you have how do I say this? Different versions of reality, if that makes sense.
(16:26):
And so we had been talking about what it means to be real, what it means to be a human, right.
And so we had read a primer on the Cyborg manifesto, and then we read a critique of the Cyborg manifesto.
(16:59):
elements of a person's body gives them the right to be treated as a human right.
And so as we were talking about this, the meat dress, we did a whole day on the meat dress.
And there's a couple of things happening there.
(17:22):
First of all, Gaga always, especially early on, would wear these outfits that were just wild.
I don't have to explain that.
But I remember there was one particular instance, MTV asked her, why are you wearing this dress like it makes you look like you're shaped like a cupcake? And I remember she said, what if I am shaped like a cupcake? Does that mean then that you could laugh at me, but because, you know, it's fake, it's not funny.
(17:53):
Tell me more.
Why would you treat me differently if I was shaped differently? And so we were going to expect that she was going to wear something sort of outrageous.
And so she comes and she wears this meat dress.
It's straight up meat.
And there were a couple of arguments that she made with that.
(18:14):
I mean, like, literally the first one she says, well, why is it that people are on the red carpet wearing leather and nobody says anything? Like, you have set the conditions of what is normal.
And what is normal is wearing animals.
Like, there's further there's leather.
(18:38):
Why is meat? Why is flesh different? She didn't say, I couldn't do that.
I'm well within the boundaries of what you think is normal.
And so what she's doing is pointing to the fact that what we think is normal is so contextual.
And it's the rhetorical situation she gave us there.
Like, she followed all of the things that you would expect.
(19:00):
And then just one thing.
She didn't do the thing with or they didn't do the thing with Aristotle and define your terms.
They didn't define what animal meant.
And so she called them out on it.
But the other argument, and the one that most people associate with the meat dress is a critique of the don't ask, don't tell.
(19:21):
And so this goes back to the Cyborg stuff and what makes it human.
Her argument was you send people in the military to risk their lives, and you look at them like their numbers like they're just a piece of meat.
And you have people who have lived experiences, real experiences, that shape how they're going to act when they're in the military.
(19:48):
And this don't ask, don't tell is erasing that.
And when it comes down to it and I think she said this on Ellen, she's like, when it comes down to it, like, this is what we all look like underneath.
It's just flesh.
Like, why do we continue to judge based on the outward stuff? And so, yeah, so the fact that not only is she wearing meat, but I think it's interesting the kind of meat that she's wearing and the kind of cuts of meat that she's wearing.
(20:26):
I think the fact that she didn't walk on the red carpet with it, she changed after her performance and then went up and received an award and then called attention to it with Cher when she asked Cher to hold her purse.
And she's like, I never thought I'd be asking Cher to hold my meat purse.
She makes it in such a way that you can't look away and you can't ignore it.
(20:50):
And she wants that.
She wants you to feel so uncomfortable so that you can do the Foucault thing and do your enthusiasm and walk backwards and say, okay, what are the missing premises to this conclusion? Like, if you're allowed to wear meat or if you're allowed to wear animals, gaga is wearing meat.
(21:13):
Meat is an animal.
What's the missing premise here? And I think the fact that she did that intentionally with the purpose of having somebody act upon it, I think that's the big difference is that anybody can wear something outrageous.
But I think the rhetorical power of Gaga's outfits in particular is that she wants you.
(21:39):
It's a really good example of Kenneth Burke's Consubstantiality.
We identify together, we identify with Gaga that wearing meat is weird because she'll be the first person to tell you.
But that moment of identification, you have to act, you have to do something with it.
Now that we've identified with one another, do something with it.
(22:01):
And I think that that's the power of Gaga is that when you pay attention, she's asking you to do something with the weird feelings that you're feeling.
So I'm curious, how do you see some of your students wrestling with these questions? Because I think one of the great things about Lady Gaga as an artist is even if she doesn't have the answer, she's constantly asking the questions, like, constantly challenging audiences in terms of what they think about her, what they think about what art is, what they think about what messages are.
(22:38):
So I'm curious, using this in a class, are you sometimes surprised by the reads that students have or the reactions that they have? What's that like, using this as a basis for talking about rhetorical material in a class? Yeah, it's funny because when I first started using Gaga in class, this was like, 2010, and this was before I was able to open up conversations in class with, all right, everybody has an opinion about Lady Gaga, and it's one of two things.
(23:15):
You love her or you hate her.
Like, you think she's weird and you don't want to talk about it.
And honestly, teaching in College Station, Texas, most of it fell in the latter.
She's weird.
She's an incarnation of just everything that's wrong with the world.
And so that gave me a really generative place to start conversations, because then I would say, like, I would try to speak, you know what Gaga's outstanding performances were saying giving voice and saying, what makes you uncomfortable? And that was a really great exercise for, like, it could last an entire class.
(23:55):
Like, let's talk about and make a list of the things that make you uncomfortable.
Now let's understand why it makes you uncomfortable and early.
I would use it to teach enthymemes because the danger of enthymemes, I mean
Foucault made his whole career off of undoing enthymemes.
(24:17):
So to teach them to walk back and say, okay, what's your premise here? Why is this weird? And it made them uncomfortable because they realized that they were putting just arbitrary rules on her.
And I would tell them, it's okay that you're uncomfortable.
I'm not asking you to become a little monster.
I am asking you, though, to engage with the things that make you uncomfortable, because discomfort is where things happen.
(24:45):
Rhetoric can't happen if everybody agrees with everything.
And that's the cool thing about rhetoric, is that disagreements are the things that make meaning happen.
So that worked well then.
But then by the time I got to teach this class last spring, everybody was down with Gaga.
(25:06):
Everybody was like, okay, but they also were like, how are you going to get a whole class out of teaching her? That seems bizarre.
And I will say that I had a really great group of students who went into it with an open mind.
That's the only thing I asked.
And I made it clear that it's not necessarily a class about Gaga.
(25:29):
I think on my syllabus, I have a place where I talk about this.
This is a class where I'm trying to help you become better thinkers and better communicators and just critics.
Think about what comes on your phone screens and your computer screens, and before you blow somebody off, think about the different ways that we make meaning.
(25:54):
And I think one of the things that really struck a cord with them is the fact that I base so much of the class in disability rhetoric.
And disability rhetoric is one of those things that you bring it up and every student wants to tell a story about a person with disabilities they knew, which is great because it's the way that you get them talking about a conversation or talking within a conversation.
(26:21):
And so I will say that at the beginning I had a couple of students who were very I don't want to say opposed, but very much like, this is embarrassing.
I had one student in particular say that he had to do his work for my course outside of his dorm room because he didn't want his roommates to hear him listening to Lady Gaga.
(26:43):
But by the end, he came around to the point where he did a project where he said, I am a little monster.
Like, I don't understand how I missed this.
It's going to make me kind of go back and re examine everything that I thought that I liked and everything that I thought I knew about music and Gaga.
(27:05):
And he did this really great project.
He was a big David Bowie fan and he created this huge playlist where it was Bowie and Gaga talking to one another and it was so cool.
And another student who was definitely like, I do not like Gaga.
At the end, he was still like, I don't like her, but I appreciate her and I appreciate the ways that she's opening up spaces for us not to feel weird about critically analyzing pop music or fashion or anything like this, which, again, she's not the only one and certainly not the first one to do this.
(27:43):
But for them, it was the first time they encountered, and so the response has been great, and it's easy to get them to talk, and so that's half the battle.
I don't know about either of you, but for me that's the magic of teaching.
Anything to do with rhetorical analysis in class is getting students to have that first moment where they realize they can look at something that seems maybe inconsequential to them at first glance.
(28:11):
And when they start picking apart and pulling those layers back and seeing how much you can critique, not to be critical, but to look at the deeper meanings that is happening.
One of my favorite people to look at for that in terms of social media is Kim Kardashian, because she's so unabashedly about a certain thing that you can really when you start to look at every single Instagram post, it becomes overwhelmingly clear, like, okay, this is what's happening here.
(28:43):
And she's someone that I think a lot of people love to either love or hate, just like Lady Gaga.
I'm not saying that I love her or I hate her, but as one of those vehicles because she's so widely known and whatever their opinion is of her, if you say the name, they know who she is and they have an idea about her that you can jump right in and say, okay, so let's look at these things and see what's happening here.
(29:04):
But that's the magic.
I love that part.
And I think it's so interesting, too, especially with Lady Gaga context change, right from when you first introduced this as a subject matter in class.
You said 2010, is that right? Yeah.
(29:26):
And so all those ecologies are different, all those associations are different.
So I think it's fascinating to see what students pick up on now or what they connect it to.
Because all that stuff.
Even though she may not be.
At least for music more recently in the news or in the feeds or in the conversation.
(29:56):
I think when you go back and you kind of discover that.
Right.
I think those connections can still be made to conversations going on today.
Even though given the time that art was made or that statement was made, or that version of Lady Gaga was happening, I think that's really great, and I think she's just constantly trying to reinvent that.
(30:24):
But as time goes on, it's going to be really interesting to see, especially with students that are discovering her, thinking about the context of when that was, and then thinking about how that applies to now.
The thing that I find interesting, too, is that she's so consistent.
So she has reinvented herself, but she's consistent throughout.
(30:48):
So, for example, look at the eyewear that she wore during the Fame era when she first came out.
Her eyewear.
Her use of eyewear throughout her entire career is a commentary on how we see the world or how she sees us, how we see her.
(31:10):
Like it's a commentary about looking and staring.
And to me, that is the foundation of understanding Gaga's work.
She's always thinking about what it means to be looked at and what it means to look and where is agency fall in that? And so for consistency, you can trace the pattern that from The Fame through Chromatica or even she did her second album with Tony Bennett.
(31:44):
When she wears eyewear, the pattern is that she's making a commentary about how you see the world.
It's the Burkian what is it called? The terministic screens is what she's kind of showing us.
And that consistency is so intentional.
(32:04):
And I can always look back and I can always know that if she's talking about so, like in Just Dance, she says our blueprint is symphonic.
When she talks about things like blueprints or plans or schematics or anything like that, I always know no matter what era we're in, she's talking about our bodies.
(32:29):
So, yeah, I think that it's so cool to be able to look back and see the development over the years, not just our reaction to her, but her reaction to us as well.
Yeah, I mean, looking at the meat dress, honestly, for me, just revisiting it, I immediately assumed it was commentary on the idea of public personalities and being consumed.
(32:52):
That idea of consumption, especially women's bodies, that you're out there to put on something that makes you want to be consumed, you're on the red carpet.
You're promoting this idea of, like, a very primal consumption.
I think that's looking at it through 2021 eyes, as opposed to I don't remember what year she wore it originally.
(33:12):
Yeah.
Consumption is another theme throughout her work, so I love that read of it.
She has a song called Sour Candy on this latest album, and it's about like, I'm sour candy, consume me and see what happens.
But even to the fame, she positions herself as somebody to be consumed.
(33:38):
And again, those patterns, they're everywhere.
They are indeed.
So I'm curious, in the context of the class, I was looking at the website for your course, and it had some of those student posts in there.
(33:59):
Can you tell us a little bit about, like, how those and I read through a few of them and it was really interesting to see not only the students kind of negotiate with the ideas and the subjects, but I'm just curious how those are kind of framed within the class and how the students are kind of prompted to come up with those.
(34:23):
Yeah, so they function as an example of when you see something interesting, start engaging it, start thinking about it.
And so there aren't any due dates outside of, like, you just got to get all your stuff in by the end of this semester.
(34:46):
But they had an activity booklet.
And so what I did was create these prompts associated with points.
And so you have to get so many points to get an A, so many points to get a B.
It's up to you.
No judgment.
If you only want the C, get the C. So there were things
(35:10):
I'm looking at one, like, maybe a photo shoot that Gaga has done, and you're really interested in what she's doing there.
That could be worth two points.
I offered up, like, think about remixing.
What is the rhetorical context and how does it shift between an original song and a remix of the song, particularly when she performs the remix of the song or a different version of the song? I had Gaga poetics, and I asked students to look at three songs that they notice a pattern happening thematically, sonically, whatever, and then engage that pattern.
(36:03):
And it went down to her activism.
Do you notice something about her activism? I did a genius lyric analysis.
Maybe you want to do an in depth lyric analysis, and then there's a one on tracing.
(36:23):
And so track a concept term or.
Object across her catalog and sort of talk about that.
So the point was that if something interesting came up in class, that somebody was like, whoa, I didn't realize there was always a place in this activity booklet to engage that thought.
(36:45):
The point was essentially for me to get them to honor those sort of little light bulb, light bulb moments and get it down on paper as soon as it sort of came to sort of practice that, hey, there's always things happening, but when something like comes to light, get it down, let me know what you think.
(37:11):
And I tried to respond to as many of them as I could as they came up on the website.
And my mom, she followed it and she would read them all and she would call me and say, well, these kids are so smart. (laughter)
And I'd say they are.
(37:31):
I love the approach to that because so often, I mean, even putting myself back into being a position of student, it takes a little bit of wrestling with some ideas before you can start to really apply them with some meaning.
The idea that this is open ended, you have to do so many of them, but you have some time to really wait for something that is impactful to you.
(37:56):
So it's authentic, it's true inquiry, student inquiry at the purest sense, which, I mean, I think we can all agree make more meaning.
But just really quickly, to go back to the question initially about we mentioned the website for this particular course.
You opted to create a website for both your syllabus and the activity book.
(38:22):
I know a lot of work went into it.
Was there a particular reason, rationale behind that, just taking it from a regular paper syllabi to something more multimodal? Originally it was just because I wanted the blog post.
Like I wanted a place for the blog post to go.
And frankly, I don't know enough about canvas to know how to make a blog post thing happen.
(38:47):
It felt like it was just easier.
And as far as it sort of serving as a repository, I have wanted to teach this class since 2010.
I have been thinking about this class that long.
And to get the chance to do it, I had no intentions of making this website look anything other than just a blog.
(39:18):
And it was funny because that semester I was teaching four sections, which typically I teach three or two sections, and I was well past my limit, like overloaded.
And I just could not stop working on it because I found comfort in it.
And this sounds really cheesy, but I find comfort in her music, I find comfort in her work.
(39:42):
I am not a fan of pop music and I do not understand why it works with Gaga, but really nobody else.
I hate my Spotify recommendations because I'll listen to Gaga and they think I want to listen to Katy Perry.
Nothing wrong with Katy Perry.
It just doesn't work for me.
(40:03):
But anyway, I sort of found comfort in creating that and it just came through me and I wanted it to look good.
And this is a really stupid reason, but I'm going to say it like I sent it to her.
I was like, follow the schedule, Gaga.
I'll send you reminders.
I'll send you links if you want to join.
(40:26):
Never got to be blessed with her presence.
But I was like, if she's going to see this, it's going to be good.
And she's going to want to do an independent study, and I want to be prepared for that.
Yeah, I think it looks great.
(40:47):
And I think the other thing that makes it kind of work because I was going to mention with the blog post, the student posts, they're a good read.
I was just scrolling through them.
They weren't my students.
I wasn't scoring them or grading them or anything like that.
These are good read because the length is just about right.
They really kind of and it was interesting to see them.
(41:08):
Like, I'm sure they had some examples or they read each others or whatever, but there's this genre forming that's happening there on the post that I think is really interesting.
I'm like, wow, these are all pretty consistent, even though they're written posts by different authors and even tackling different subjects.
Or some are like close reads of lyrics and others are photo shoots or magazine covers or whatever.
(41:32):
They all seem really consistent to me.
I'm like, this is impressive.
This seems like a real thing.
And I think it's probably because, one, it looks so legit when you put it together.
And because of that context right.
It's not in web courses where just that sort of arena alone is very closed.
(41:54):
Right.
Sterile.
Almost sterile, sort of, yes.
I think sometimes when students post in there, it's like, well, this is just my teacher's going to read this.
And the obligatory two students that have to respond to and have to read it too.
But I think it changes when you create the site or create the blog.
(42:16):
And it and it looks the way that it does in it.
It looks like something that you would feel comfortable sending to Lady Gaga to say, hey, check this out.
Look what I did.
Right? Yeah, right? And then also they know I'm reading it, and they know that I'm a fan.
And so they know that it's not too silly to go so deep into it that they're like, oh, this is just I'm stretching it.
(42:40):
But they know that I'm going to be into that.
But then also I was very open with them and let them know my mom's reading this.
And how well you do depends on she's going to know what kind of teacher I am.
And so I really need you to show up for me and they would ask me, what did your mom think of this? And the other great thing about that is that my mom didn't go to college.
(43:04):
She barely finished high school.
My trick with academic writing has always been I send my mom a draft of something, and if she doesn't get it, then I need to go back and rewrite it because I want what I do to be accessible to everybody.
And they have that in their mind, too.
I'm writing to a general audience who's not doing rhetoric, who's not an academic, and who might not even be a Gaga fan, but is interested in interesting things.
(43:33):
And so I think that helped a lot, too.
Really empowering too, when something lives in the world and not just living in the house of 11:59, submit and pray, as I like to call it, the Church of we all pray there sometimes.
We've all been known to pray there.
Oh, yeah.
And giving them that first real glimpse into how conversations take place in the world in academic environments, but also in a lot of different arenas.
(44:02):
There is transfer of skill.
It's not just something we're doing obligatory to post reply, but that the global audience is real and it's something they're going to be facing sooner rather than later as they are in their upper level coursework, and it's easy for them to integrate the things that they want to do.
(44:25):
So I had a student who's a journalism major, and she did all of her posts on the Born This Way Foundation, and they read like, journalistic, like hot takes.
And she talked to me about that, and I said, do it.
I don't have any, use this space.
(44:46):
Space to hone your skills, but also use this space to try something and fail.
One thing that I would always remind my students, gaga says, honor your vomit.
And she takes that metaphor pretty far, which is fine, but like, the idea of honor the thing that you don't like about yourself.
(45:09):
Honor the thing that you think, oh, I'm just going to get this out because the paper is due.
I'm just going to do it.
Honor that.
Because that is important and that's essential.
And I think that kind of took some of the pressure off.
Yeah.
And I think, too, it's something that we talk about in all our classes in terms of the writing process, right? The process part of it.
(45:32):
And that's what I think.
Again, Gaga is really into that as well.
Like, not only the arguments, the statements, but also just the process of realizing one idea, then moving on, realizing the next idea.
And I think all the great artists kind of do that, right? They're able to sort of, when they're done, let it speak and let it be read and let it be argued about, and then they're moving on to the next question or thing they want to explore.
(46:06):
And that's really exciting.
And also revision is something that I find really valuable in the writing classroom.
And it's something that is so easy to find this theme in Gaga's work because so many of her demos are available online.
But a lot of the early, like Poker Face, for instance, it kind of started off as like a polka because she's trained at classical piano.
(46:37):
That is what she was most comfortable with.
That's how she wrote her songs.
And that's why her piano renderings of these songs are so beautiful, because that's how they were written.
They were not written to be pop songs.
And so thinking about genre, what's appropriate for this genre, she started off as a hip hop artist and not a very good one.
(47:00):
And she recognized that.
And she was like, this genre isn't speaking to me.
I'm going to take a step back.
And I love that so much that you can find these piano versions of her just playing around and all of a sudden you start to hear the melody of Bad Romance and it doesn't sound like anything you would ever think.
(47:24):
And on her Cheek to Cheek tour, she played the hits, but they were piano jazz standard versions.
And she can just go between them so easily and so effortlessly.
And I tell students, yes, it's because she's talented, but also because she studies the genre.
(47:45):
She knows that it's not going to translate to this particular audience.
And so she goes back and she studies the genre.
She's talked so much about how she is a student of pop and she can talk to you about Andy Warhol and David Bowie and explain like, this is what I'm picking up, this is what tends to work.
(48:06):
And I'm following in that genre.
And I think that that's so powerful that she can stay within a genre but change her approach.
Like who she was with the fame monster is not who she was with art Pop.
And Joanne just threw everybody off because suddenly she's like country or something.
(48:27):
But she's not.
It's still pop.
And I think that that's just the coolest thing.
She's definitely unabashedly herself regardless of what genre conventions.
And I think that's a slippery slope.
You feel beholden to those conventions and she has managed to take it where she can.
(48:48):
I don't want to say exploit them, but definitely utilize them to her advantage while still keeping that very uniquely individual voice.
Yeah.
And the one thing that I like to cite a lot when I say cultural theorist Stephanie Germanata asks us to think about what it means to be born this way, it doesn't mean you're born a certain person.
(49:10):
Like, nobody comes out who they are.
What she's saying is that we are always in a state of becoming.
We're always changing.
We're born to change.
And it's such a wonderful way of understanding that she's not the Joanne Gaga, she's not the Art Pop Gaga.
(49:32):
She's both, and.
She can be all of those things at once, and so can we.
We can be all of these complicated things at once.
It doesn't make us fake.
It doesn't make us anything but real, because we are made of all of these different things.
And whatever you decide to lean into is the persona you need for the chapter in your life.
(49:54):
Yeah, absolutely.
I know.
I have one more question, but do you have a question as well, Nick? No.
Okay.
I have one more question for you because I know that we've talked for a few minutes now, and it's been wonderful.
But just out of pure personal curiosity, what is your favorite? You can either do song or video due to rhetorical decisions that she makes.
(50:20):
I know.
It's like picking a favorite cat.
or a favorite child.
Oh, my gosh.
A favorite cat.
Oh, man.
You're right.
The cats of Gaga.
So I have a soft spot for Alejandro.
I wrote a chapter of my dissertation on Alejandro on the video.
And the thing that inspired me to make the little thing, the remix analysis came from there was a remix of Alejandro that came out, and somebody took the music video and made it fit the remix.
(50:54):
Oh, my gosh.
But my go to to teach is Bad Romance because my work looks at disability and eugenics and the ways that medicine creates what's normal and what's abnormal, and that's what she's doing in that video.
(51:15):
But there's so many I mean, I also want to give a shout out to You and I, where she talks, well she doesn't talk, but she's asking us to think about the things that we do to our bodies to fit in.
And not just fit in culturally, but to fit in like what the law says that we should be.
(51:37):
She's a mermaid who wants to marry a human.
But mermaid human marriage is illegal.
So she changes her body and she goes through, like, a shock therapy to try and change herself.
And all these versions of herself keep dying, and eventually she ends up just with prosthetics and the guy has left.
And so I think that ohh man...
(52:00):
But I will say, if you haven't listened to Chromatica, I'm going to ask you do so because it is so theoretically on point.
It is the art pop walked so that Chromatica could run.
Wow. Powerful words
Yeah.
I mean, I'm teaching GUI guy in my graduate course on Monday to teach them how to read Derrida.
(52:29):
It's just so theoretically dense and accessible.
I didn't answer your question because it gave you several, but I'm curious and because this will air after your class, so we're not going to do any spoilers.
Talk to me a little bit about what you mean about the Derrida application to that song.
Well, it begins with the level of semiotics, how the semiotics work.
(52:51):
You see the word GUY, but she's not saying guy.
The sound that comes out of her mouth.
What she's saying is GUY.
And so we're like, oh dude, no, she means it to mean girl underneath you.
(53:12):
So just at that level of like phonology, something's happening there.
But in the music video she takes the binary of real and fiction and interrogates it to the point where she has the real housewives of something something.
They're in there acting as like deities.
(53:35):
So she's commenting on like you guys are treating people and like Andy Cohen plays Zeus.
Oh yeah.
And so she's saying like, these are people of reality TV.
(53:58):
There's sets made of props, like food made of Lego.
And so she's asking, is this real? Well, you can't eat it, but it doesn't make it any less real again.
It goes back to undoing those binaries saying, what if it's both? And then that gets sense of the play of different, right? What are the plays that's happening? She's interrupting that.
(54:24):
She's showing us what it looks like.
It could mean all of these different things and whatever you decide it means works for you.
But just know if I say guy, it doesn't mean automatically what everybody else thinks it means.
Well, I know what I'm doing this weekend.
Watching some Gaga videos.
Well you know what, why don't you just stop in a class? There you go.
(54:47):
Join.
There you go, join.
Open invitation.
Yeah.
Well, it's so much fun always talking about sharing something that someone is passionate about, which you obviously are.
I'm going to go ahead and testify that just that syllabus alone and you can see the work that went into that website is a testimony to your passion and commitment.
(55:07):
So thank you so much for sharing that passion with us today.
Yeah, and thanks so much for being our first guest on the department podcast.
Are you going to bring me back for the 100th episode? Of course.
I'll pencil you in.
Yeah, pencil it in.
Our people will talk to your people.
It'll okay.
Yeah, I look forward to it.
(55:28):
Wonderful, wonderful.
Thanks again, thanks for listening.
Thank you.
Alright, thanks.
Bye.
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