Écriture féminine and the female language of Lady Gaga

Abstract

While Lady Gaga is often acknowledged for her outlandish visual style and elaborate performative identity, the lyricism of the popular singer-songwriter’s music represents a similarly controversial ideology in linguistic terms. Reinterpreting the French feminist concept of écriture féminine or ‘writing in the feminine’, this essay contextualises Gaga’s music as demonstrative of an anarchic, female language that challenges both the phallogocentric constraints of linguistic expression and wider patriarchal culture. Gaga’s utilisation of écriture féminine also expands the theoretical notion of revolutionary gendered language beyond the hypothetical constraints of literary theory and into public, popular discourse, granting a real-world viability and practicality to the term. This essay distinguishes itself as one of the first (if not the first) literary academic studies of Lady Gaga’s music, positioning her work within a feminist understanding of anarchic gender expression and cultural change through the use of chaotic linguistic forms.