Abstract
J Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal, Beacon Press: Boston, MA, 2012; xxv + 157 pp.: ISBN 0807010987, 9780807010983 (hbk)
J Jack Halberstam, who is best known for efforts to theorize female masculinities, drawing upon popular and literary texts, began her career as Judith. Halberstam now goes by J Jack, refusing the demand to adhere to one gender or another (and in this review, I will identify her/him in similar non-binary fashion by alternating the pronouns). Gaga Feminism pushes many of the ideas of Female Masculinity, the 1998 book, beyond the rarified humanities classrooms of elite universities where it has been most influential. This short, readable volume – queer theory primer, and polemic for a queer-inflected feminism – is admirably free of theoretical jargon, and seeks to connect with the everyday concerns of college students (and others). Rather than focus on queer/gay/lesbian experience, Halberstam interrogates “normal” heterosexuality and gender roles, and finds that they are coming unhinged.
Evidence for the “end of normal” is everywhere, he tells us: the decline of monogamous marriage, the rise of divorce, the growing affirmation of transgender and gay lesbian relationships, and the multiplication of varied family forms. Hollywood films, including such superficial fare as The Break-Up, Wedding Crashers, and Knocked Up, filled with nebbishy guys and relationships gone awry are further proof of the ways “the normal” – and its close cousin, “the natural” – are on the rocks. These capsule cultural analyses are, in my opinion, the most compelling parts of the book. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in Halberstam's undergraduate gender studies classes, which mine scenes from shows such as Desperate Housewives, The Sopranos, and The Bachelor in order to make the familiar strange. Discussing contemporary romantic comedies, she shows how they produce obstacles which seek to “make love seem hard won, worthwhile, and, well romantic” but instead reveal the emergence of a “parasitical masculinity” distinguished by its dependence upon women – and the failed sex/gender system upon which it is founded.
Rather than locate the seeds of a more egalitarian world in the aspirations of feminist activists, sensitive men, or domesticated gays and lesbians, Halberstam looks elsewhere – to cartoon characters like Nemo and SpongeBob SquarePants, her step-children's flexible gender attitudes, and the “excess, ecstatic embrace of loss of control, and maverick sense of bodily identity” of the performer Lady Gaga – although he is more enamored of Gaga's style than her politics. While the adult world tries furiously to place the author in gender boxes, the children in her life, she tells us, happily describe the author as a “boygirl.” Why? Because children are playful, they elude categorization, they embrace nonsense, and are organic gender warriors – they are gaga. In a way, it all harkens back to Freud's notion of children's unfettered polymorphous, nonreproductive, pleasure seeking, and compulsive sexuality. (Or as the title of Jeanette Winterson's recent memoir asks: Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal?)
Because Halberstam believes we can learn more from our kids than from our mothers, he is more interested in dethroning feminist idols than worshipping them. A glaring exception is the radical feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone, whose tragic, lonely recent death, belied her enormous influence, and who Halberstam praises for her imaginative, anarchistic analyses (see the 1970 book, The Dialectic of Sex). While I'm not certain Firestone herself would have joined the Gaga bandwagon, Halberstam finds a kindred spirit in early second-wave feminist visionaries such as Firestone (whose writings seem poised for revival by a new generation of theorists) who believed that they could undo gender, and who had little patience for incremental change – or working within the system.
Whereas radical feminists seemed, at least on the surface, deadly serious about the movement they were creating, gaga feminism, as Halberstam envisions it, “masquerades as naive nonsense but actually participates in big and important forms of critique.” It embraces artifice, excess, loss of control, anarchy, pastiche, and even consumer capitalism, and loathes sentimentalism, mushy authenticity, reform feminism, and the politics of inclusion and rights. It is radically anti-teleological, and would rather “hint at a future rather than prescribe one.” It was conceived as the Occupy movement brought thousands of young (and not so young) people into the streets of American cities to protest against inequality and corporate greed. Like many of us, Halberstam admired these young activists, and was inspired by them. Gaga Feminism is a manifesto for the Occupy generation, a call to arms, an anarchistic salvo without a game plan, which embraces a politics of refusal that, like the early Euro-American New Left, urged young people to throw off the old, tired clichés of their parents' authoritarian, pleasure-denying culture.
The New Left took root in the soil of Marxism; gaga feminism, in contrast, is cultural politics that is seemingly unconcerned with material realities. And yet Occupy Wall Street's young protestors were driven to the streets by mountains of debt, diminished access to abortion, lack of health insurance, and the sense of a future in doubt. For a brief moment at least, they changed the terms through which Americans speak of inequality – popularizing the idea of the “one percent” versus the rest of us. The ease with which urban governments were able to quash it may speak to the limits of a movement for which hierarchy and structure is anathema – and prove that those in power will do whatever is necessary to preserve their control. Halberstam describes gaga feminism as a politics that is fit for a postcapitalist world, cautioning that it “will not save us from ourselves or from Wall St.” But until we figure out how to meld the politics of gender refusal with a radical economic program, it seems that visions of gaga will have to suffice.