Trans Space: Exploring Lady Gaga's Transgender G.U.Y.

"I'm in charge like a G.U.Y.

I'll lay down, face up this time"

Lady Gaga

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New and Exciting Positions

I first heard Lady Gaga's "G.U.Y." from her ArtPop album, while on a train from Prague to a nearby suburb in November 2013. The high concept of the album sets the listener on an allegorical space journey, encountering aliens and goddesses along the way who promise  sexual transformation through the exploration of "new and exciting positions." Experiencing the album while on a queer adventure of my own, the music gave a voice to many of the subtextual forces already at work around me, reorienting my body and denaturalizing my social relations. Being marked as a transgender woman and identifying as politically trans, at home in Washington DC I often find myself positioned in an indeterminate middle space between places that govern sexual identity. Where I am supposed to go to the bathroom, change in a locker room, buy my clothes, go to meet singles or go on dates are in a state of perpetual social questioning or uncertainty. It all depends on the context of a discourses on gender in that community. Music and music plays no small role in developing this imagined sensed of an ordered place or a space of queer wanderings. Given that force, I was attentive to the music of Prague as I negotiated my arrival into new cultural soundscapes.

In ideology of place, where identities and geographic features are established as relatively static structures, one expects to move about as a passive recipient to power. Neoliberal capitalism has helped develop this docility in our bodies through the deployment of "guides" that direct and order our movements. In the case of G.U.Y., our guide is none other than Eros himself, "God of sexual desire, son of Aphrodite." G.U.Y.'s opening plays on expectations for submission by bringing out their erotic undertones. "Lay back," recites the narrator, "and feast as this audio guides you through new and exciting positions." At this point the listener's attention may be roused. Passivity usually comes along with the promise of security. We follow the architecture of power so we can depend on its strength to keep us on safe routes. By bringing us into "new" paths, the familiar places will be left behind and we may find our bodies put in dangerous positions. Whether this is frightening or simply arousing, the prospect is exciting!

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Sub Space Travel

"Leading from below" is a political concept developed within certain strains of feminism that oppose the mere replacement of men with women within the positions of power, choosing to destabilize the structure of hierarchy on the grounds that women (along with many other marginalized communities) will continue to suffer violence so long as the apparatuses of governance are structured as such. This subversive theory of socio-sexual dynamics has since exploded within queer and kink communities, where the position of the penetrated, called "the bottom," maintains strategic power in the community.  "Touch me, touch me, don't be sweet," begs Gaga, asserting that it is the bottom sets the terms of the encounter, the limits and safe words, while bestowing on "the top" the means to act on their bodies. It is not simply that the top who gives and the bottom who receives, but the flow of force runs both ways. "Let me be the girl under you that makes you cry," insists Gaga. Instead of a passive reception of the apparatuses of pain, pleasure, and power the framework of bottoming transforms the tools that put bodies in a specific "place" into the dynamic and negotiated work of sharing intimate "space."

The transformation of social relations do not leave bodies and identities unchanged, but are integral in a critical trans politics that seeks to liberate the mechanisms through which the self is constructed and performed. By becoming the enactor of power, the girl becomes the guy in Gaga's sexual revolution. "I'm going to wear the tie," asserts Gaga, "want the power to leave you." The new and exciting positions we explore are not merely restricted to the bedroom but alter how we structure our body through the reclamation of clothes and liberties. Likewise, politics can never be merely personal but have social repercussions. "Know," warns Gaga, "you will wear my makeup well." After knowing the exchange of positions in a carnal mode, the act marks a body with a knowledge forbidden by normative sexual restrictions. Neither a man nor a woman enters into a position naturally nor can their place we so naturalized that they can explore new dimensions without it affecting their experience of lived space. The change gets embedded in the "makeup" of their body, whether or not it is accompanied by the markers of cosmetic makeup. In fact, the critical trans exchange of gender positions and compositions is an ongoing process that Gaga knows well.

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G.I.R.L. Underneath You

Lady Gaga has a history of trans identifying as a guy or G.U.Y. When she hit the music scene with Fame and Fame Monster, the media had begun circulating rumors that she was transgender. Specifically, the claim was that Lady Gaga, a female pop-singer, had a penis. These suspicions were fueled by the adaption of many drag performance traditions into Gaga's act as well as an open support for queer and L.G.B.T. politics. The singer responded to these allegations in the music video for "Telephone." At the opening of the video, Gaga is stripped naked and thrown into a jail cell. As the correction officers lock the door and walk off, Gaga jumps at the bars, spreading her legs open for the camera, revealing a censored but recognizable vulva (and no penis). In case viewers miss the message, one of the two butch correction officers comments to the others, "I told you she didn't have a dick" to which the other replies, "too bad."

By Lady Gaga's next album, Born This Way, Gaga's became committed to more overt pro-L.G.B.T. politics, stated explicitly in the album's title track. Despite claiming this agenda, most of the album's music still kept pretty normative in terms of representations of gender and sexual. The notable exception came through Gaga's new persona, "Jo Calderone," in "You and I" for the accompanying music video and its live performance at the Video Music Awards. In short-black hair, a white t-shirt, and black pants, Jo sneered at audiences of the VMAs and reminisced about a failed romance with Lady Gaga. Writer J. Jack Halberstam, while admitting to not be a particular fan of Lady Gaga's music, praised the disruptive effect of taking on the masculine persona in his book Gaga Feminism. Jo's presence so shook and delighted reviewers with such artificial authenticity, that they began again to question Gaga's gender and sexual identity. More than an identification as transgender or a drag king, Halberstam argues, the indeterminacy of gender and realness liberated conceptions of both.

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G.U.Y. I Romance & Love

Coming into ArtPop, Lady Gaga had been identified, unindentified, and then performatively re-appropriated her guyness. All of this history was brought to bear on listeners when G.U.Y. was released as the third single and second music video to be released from the album. In the lyrics, Gaga claims the title "Guy" for herself but transforms its meaning in the process. "I want to be the Girl underneath you," she sings, "I want to be your G.U.Y." By embedding the description of a submissive, traditionally feminine sexual position in the word guy, Gaga articulates her manhood as coincident with the position of women. In the first case, this continues an identification that Gaga has long established with the gay-male community. She likes to be a bottom, being penetrated, by men, like some gay men. Here identity is not an essential category of being but a common position. In the second case, the movement goes the other way. A guy can share the feminine (or gay) position adopting it as a critical politics. At once a girl within the term of Guys and a guy in a woman's position, G.U.Y. suggests that it is more important what (or who) you put between your legs, than what happens to be there from birth.

In particular, G.U.Y. explores new positions in sexual relation, by proposing new understandings of two terms of systematic gender, "guy" and "girl." While guy, a product of "bro-culture," has arisen to be a quintessential term for not only cisgender male bodies but masculinity writ large, Gaga breaks the word apart into constitutive letters to mean the "Girl Underneath You." By embedding this act of female sexual submission within the phrase "I want to be your guy," Gaga at once asserts an identification with women, transmen, and gay men. Likewise, she takes a common term of sexual condescension, "girl," and reworks it to mean the "Guy I Romance & Love." Here the objectification associated with the term "girl" and the male gaze is shattered by the female and queer look. This crossing of gender markers has further substantial affects on the proposed sexual positions being proposed. "I'm going to say the word," sings Gaga, "and own you, you'll be my G.I.R.L." Rather than taking the position of being "the girl underneath you" as a position of submission, Gaga demonstrates how you can lead from below. In the process, G.U.Y. puts forth a critical trans politics that is not interested in simply disturbing the architecture of identity and place, or in creating separate alternative cultural locations, but demonstrating how these structures are already being adapted to serve a more dynamic flow of space, the song works to open up "new and exciting" possibilities.

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Watch the ArtPop video to discover 

new and exciting positions

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Introduction to Transformation: Philosophy

"Are we human, or are we dancer?"

The Killers, Human

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In the middle there was nothing. Then we adjusted our perception of the (w)hole we found ourselves and in the empty darkness, stars began to arrive. Even in the dark, the dark was a thing. We can begin to feel wonder-fully queer with every-thing. It, like us, is at the same time alien, yet familiar; ever shifting, never resolving. It is with us, between us, in us, as us. "The universe sings your song" writes the Killers "and tonight I sing along." In it, the fire of the darkness speaks of many things, but all become riddles.

In what follows I put together a sampling of thought and thinkers that will be revisited later. In doing so I trace how from the history of "philosophic" discourses we discover a world-view of things from the position of the middle. In it they lend their collective voices to help articulate "The Holey Paradox of Transforming Things" and thus define ontological status in Queer Materialism.

The Holey Paradox of Transforming Things is... the metaphysical quality of being that functions as both a thing and the act of the thing as well as the thing and the act of the thing which simultaniously over-throws it as such. Things slip, bleed, coexist BETWEEN states and motions which are not only hybrids but taken to their extreme ontological paradoxes. While dialectics keeps such statuses apart, viewing that mediation and cohabitation is impossible, Queer Materiality proposes that all is mediation and coexistence.

The logic of dialectics leaves us with holes, in speech, in law, in our thought and in our bodies, and Queer Materialism affirms these holes but dispute their status as void. Holes are close to Chaos, but one which is the source of all Forms. Holes are the limit and death of all things, because they are the point in which the self utterly becomes other as it becomes utterly itself. Holes are our metaphysical paradox of being and they are queer because they defy expectation and ontology, including the deterministic and nihilistic views that should have the universe locked in stasis or forever lost in a "void." It may very well be, as Slavoj Zizek suggests, that such holes are the revelation of an transcendent material unconscious, but as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari interject, the unconscious is not empty but packed.

Things are not dead but queerly alive.

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I. The Luminescent Darkness:
Beyond the Strobe Light of Being

Zeno and Democritus: Key Concepts

• Paradox
• The Non-Existence of the Void

Zeno, famous for his riddles and paradoxes stated that motion was impossible because it requires a void, a nothingness, in order to move. As 'nothing' is impossible to imagine, Zeno suggests, it must not exist and motion must not be possible. Democritus, in developing his atomic theory of the universe, simply ignores and over-writes Zeno by observing that motion does in fact occur and thus there must be a void. Need Zeno's argument and Democritus' observation be contradictory however? Parmenides also argued that nothing is not possible as a void, because in such a case, nothing would be a something. Another paradox, which Democritus likewise ignores. What Democritus seems not to explore is that paradox may be the composition of existence. Nothing as something and things bound up in a kind of nothingness, or in this case, existence as motion. Things move but without existence ceasing to exist as a full entity. It grows, moves and transforms of an in itself. It itself provides acts as its own void, its own time and space. Time-space.

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II. Living Fire:
Bringing Things Together

Heraclitus: Key Concepts

• Fire is the Quintessential element
• All things come into being by rarefaction/condensation
• "All things come about through opposition"
• "Strife is Justice"
• "Everything flows"

If we accept that things defined by an initial paradox of being-nothingness, then we can begin to conceive that paradox may account for more of the metaphysical qualities of being. Positivism, as opposed to a primal nihilism and dualism, will require then an affirmation that opposites, as we define them, do not destroy each other but coexist and are present in degrees within each other. That is to say, justice (that which is and is necessarily so) is the strife-tension which the paradox sustains and why dialectics, in keeping them apart, moves towards a belief in an central nothingness to the (w)hole of existence.

Likewise then, singularity versus multiplicity can also be considered as a paradox. One element (substance) which is all together itself and across/between/trans-es different forms, trans-forms itself as the multiple. Substance and motion is then also inherent in it paradoxically. Matter and energy. Matter-energy.

Heraclitus speaks of "rarefaction" and "condensation" of fire into all the known elements, which can then be interpreted to mean that forms are an action of this substance, a becoming, which constantly shifts because it requires motion to exist as such, and motion means change. Even in the appearance of repetition or sustenance, we see the motion of becoming-self, becoming-thing through time. All things are different forms, "condensations," temperatures, speeds or "intensities" (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari).

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III. Queer Motions:
Beyond the Line Dance of Determinism

Epicurus and Lucretius: Key Concepts

• Atoms (being) and the Void (non-being)
• The Swerve

Before things seem to fall into place into a messy but deterministic materialism, we must save ourselves from missing out on an important queer swerve into the direction of...we don't know yet.

Contradicting Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius move the discourse of atomism away from the mechanistic model of things and suggest that just as if there was an initial "nothingness" or even unmoved "thingness" that there would be no difference/motion/transformation without an inherent disturbance in its track of being/becoming self:

"When atoms move straight down through the void by their own weight, they deflect a bit in space at a quite uncertain time and in uncertain places, just enough that you could say that their motion has changed. But if they were not in the habit of swerving, they would all fall straight down through the depths of the void, like drops of rain, and no collision would occur, nor would any blow be produced among the atoms. In that case, nature would never have produced anything" ~ Lucretius, On the Nature of Things.

If existence, non-existence, genesis or reproduction simply followed the straight line of replicating the constant same linear motion then we would have trouble accounting for the diversity and difference we observe in things. There then seems to be a queerness, a chaos, at play in the machine which brings it to life. The chain of events is broken by the miracle of change and suddenly not only is something NEW created, but far from being an irrelevant link in the monotonous line, this thing at this time and place becomes all important. It has erupted from the gears of fate to become present as itself, a self beyond the machine.

Lucretius uses this "swerve" or queerness to account for free will, but admits that it is not fully free, as it finds itself still falling and all the more now contingent on the swerving of other things. Thus while it may seem to provide a basis for the "soul" or "mind" or "will" in the human, it complicates it by giving the same trans-vitalistic power to all things in, of and beyond the body.

Breaking free from the straight line dance of determinism we begin break-dancing, but in a club filled with other things, it becomes a queer mosh-pit. Thus while becoming a "self," which comes into being by and as a part of the "other" be it the dance partners, the club, or the thing that was and contained the chaos.

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IV. Transcendence Dances:
On the Back of the Particular

Ovid: Key Concepts

• Chaos and the "Meta" Morpheus
• Linear/Hierarchical and Transcendent Temporality

Writing in a paradoxical style, Ovid weaves a narration in which one story and thing bleeds into another so that particularities become queered together. And yet Ovid begins with a creation story, one that more or less categorizes events into discernible, almost teleological stages?

It is the same paradox that meets us in his content as well. The genesis story in the Metamorphoses begins with a primal chaos in which a positivist and a nihilist may both be at a loss, because while there was a "thing" it so lacked "form" so as to be hard to consider as a thing and Ovid himself comes close to calling it a no-thing.

This queerness incarnate, as we might at first believe is then interrupted arbitrarily and spontaneously by a shaper, above all other gods, a "meta" thing, a Morpheus persona. From this the things and the transformations of the universe and the poem take shape and blur together.

Or rather that would be the case if we ourselves think of this Genesis sequentially and categorically. If we accept the invitation to imagine chaos (or that which is not defined by form) then it likewise exists outside the form of time and space. If it is the seed/substance of all things, we may as well consider it to be in all times and places equally (if all is one in it as Ovid writes). Thus what we have is not a Genesis in the past, but a Meta-Genesis which is eternal and ever present. The chaos, or queerness, is the common disruptive substance in all things particularly and which transcendently (not hierarchically ascending or descending, but rather BETWEEN stages) exists. Far from the removed/raised transcendent middle of deconstruction here transcendence is exactly the perspective of the middle and between things. If there is a "meta" language, as there must be for as Jacques Lacan criticized even saying "there is no meta-language" is a meta-statement par excellence, it is written, however illegibly in the free/queer play of things.

This "meta" Morpheus must also be, as its transcendent descriptors seem to imply, completely in the present as well as in a sense irreverent to time. As form, it itself has no form or place; beyond the forms it becomes through the particular and thus it exists itself as ultimately BETWEEN them.

So do we have Chaos/Substance on one hand and Form/Fate on the Other? If both seem to transcend the plot of the universe as a meta-plot throughout it then we could instead say that they are paradoxically the same thing and yet different motions. It/they are it/them-self the same/other to it/them-self and everything else. If there is a Transcendent God in Ovid, it is then a Queer one, a Trans-former of ontological substance-qua-action set against the eternal stasis of Platonic Forms.

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V. Mosh Ontology:
Between Packed Bodies

Michel Serres and Bruno Latour

• Quasi-Objects/Black-Boxes
• Parasites/Hybrids
• Transforming/Mediation

In the tradition of Ovid, Michel Serres theorizes a perspective of atomism and ecology which is generated from Chaos. Things are alive in Serres's world-view, given the power to queer/alter/act on their field and trajectory. He introduces the idea of Quasi-Objects as way to break past the polar divide of dialectical psychoanalysis's object/subject split. There is mediation, all things mediate and all is mediation. From the phenomenological level, the mind is not distinct from the body but is the body, both in its nuerology but also in its interconnections with other organic and inorganic matter which allow it to function. But as we explore further into the depths and outer limits of things we find how big and small things become themselves and have a vitality through an interwoven transforming power, a queerness, a chaos, a swerve that gives its personality. Each of these "things" or ontological ecologies can be taken as a whole and function like a block-box, or an atom (unbreakable thing) to serve as a block participant in other ecologies. But each black-box can be opened to find more and more such ecologies, which already bleed across into others. Its always already transformed.

Bruno Latour follows Michel Serres's trajectory but moves away from his more poetic and chaotic Ovidian tendencies. Latour is more concerned with networks and if he too follows in Ovid's foot-steps, he participates more in the line of the "meta" Morpheus, insofar as he focuses on (trans)formation as identity. Things bundled together and acting in sequence or interrupting the chain to provide moments of change and independence, a mutation, a queerness, are what brings the things we observe to life; by acting both as a trans-actor who delivers action from place to place but as a trans-former that changes what is being done. Like Serres's "parasites" a thing is formed only by and as an ecology; thus he also borrows the language of black-boxes and hybrids. From his meditation on hybrids he likewise considers how quasi-objects are the status of all things, as to consider things as either subject or object would be to problematically separate mutually extant qualities and to attempt to halt a network of mediation which brings things into themselves in order to be considered. As a result of which, if we are to address the identity of a thing/person, we must take into account both its subjective and objective qualities. We must address how it as an ontological thing is also alien to itself, thus undermining this ontology, so that a self-identification and othering-alienation is a status which is not simply based on perception, but is an action of the network. Becoming self (objectively) and performing selfhood (subjectively) are for quasi-object networks diverted ways of considering the same contingent events.

Here we see our Queer Materialism beginning to come back into the familiar language of Queer Theory. It does so by in some ways denying the denial of social-construction model of identity, but only after transforming the social into and together with the material and the psychological. Quasi-objects, writes Latour, are "far more social" than the subject and harder than the "hard stuff" of objective reality. Performativity, as it has been since Judith Butler said that "sex is already gender" is more than skin deep; it is the skin too. Like Latour's puppets, "we" as "subjects" exist as a performance of "objects" just as much, if not unequally more, than the reverse. That is, of course, if we could consider ourselves as a singular consciousness, which as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari explore, we cannot do.

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VI. Bending Both-Ways:
When Its Hard to Know Whose Hand is Whose

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

• Rhizomes/Becomings/ Intensities
• "One of Several Wolves?"/Molarity and Molecularity

In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari begin with two chapters which in many ways bring together much of the possibilities for the metaphysics of Queer Materiality, concerning the question of the Rhizome and One of Several Wolves? In the first we see the queer substance of being (or rather becoming) and in the later how this becoming manifests as trans-formation that is as the same time one and a multiplicity.

Rhizomes and not trees, Deleuze and Guattari, are the more useful model for life and generation. This is because rather than suggesting a linear hierarchy as trees do, rhizomes grow in a multitude of queer and simultaneous directions. The rhizome becomes more like a knot or a node and less of a command center, in which the life of the material throughout it governs its divergent actions. Every growth is in some way contingent on others but free as well to express moments of free drift. Rhizomes are a living model of the queer substance of metaphysics.

The question of "One or Several Wolves" is for us a action of trans-formation. Just like the ecologies/black-boxes/networks of Serres and Latour can act as one and simultaneously bleed into others and become subdivided, so to does the "wolf" in Deleuzian thought. Molarity (oneness) and Molecularity (plurality) is presented by Deleuze as not dialectic contradictions, but a paradoxical status of all things. The multiplicity is a thing for Deleuze as it signifies this hybrid numerical status. Things are queer because they act like a pack of wolves, wandering in directions together but with packs/wolves within the pack that conflict or are carried along passively with the others. Multi-sexuality, trans-sexuality, drag-sexuality are the status of things and as such constantly queer any desire or identity.

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VII. Becoming Queer:
On the Dance Floor

Manuel de Landa and Elizabeth Grosz: Key Concepts

• Matter-Energy Flow
• Genetic Flow/Evolution qua Mutation

Deleuze and Guattari look at materialism in a variety of scopes, and subsequently inspire Manuel de Lanada and Elizabeth Grotz to look at wide views of time-space to see how the field performs a queer ecological assemblage.

Within the realm of history, physics and some biology, Manuel de Landa's matter-energy in a Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, based on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of the matter-energy relationship via difference and intensity, enters into the discourse and move us towards an understanding materiality in a queer register. A universe (or universal being) which is full but ever increasing and forming (thus more accurately understood as a universal becoming). de Landa describes this convection as flow and argues fervently against the conception of events as a linear progression and instead models things as a both-and, a constant trans-formation of substance so that it does and is a multiplicity of things/acts at once, constantly overthrowing/disturbing its own ontological status.

Within the realm of biology, Darwin's theory of natural selection put forth in the Origin of Species describes how one life-form out survives others and thus allows for their genetic material to be replicated...but the difference which produced this other life-form (which its different and advantageous qualities) is based on the chaos of mutation*; or a queering of the genetic pattern and the life-forms identification with even its own progenitors.This reading of Darwin was explored extensively by Elizabeth Grosz in Chaos, Territory, Art, but halted at the point of sexual difference and not continued along into a theory of queer materialism.

Following this logic, even among life-forms that do not require intercourse (conventionally conceived) there is a moment towards the creation of difference and not total self-replication. This is to say that read allegorically (as it so often is) we experience not a stage-model of the lesser creature giving way to the superior, but a constant furnace, or womb, of creative difference which undermines itself ecstatically.

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