卡卡女性主義

Gaga Feminism

Published in Feb 2019
ISBN 978-988-14233-6-8

Book Design

The Design: ‘Concealing’ and ‘Exposing’

A book jacket is usually used to wrap up and cover the book fully. On the contrary, in this design we try to expose part of the book by employing a semi-transparent paper on the jacket, and cover it partially with the scratch-off materials. When you scratch off the gold paint, it opens up another readings between the book jacket and the book.

This relation of ‘concealing’ and ‘exposing’ is created, in a sense that it could echo the public impression of Lady Gaga. To shape her image in the mass media, Lady Gaga often exposes and conceal her female body in a rather ‘bizarre’ way. In one of her music video, ‘Telephone’, Lady Gaga wore a semi-transparent dress made by milky-white plastic materials, exposing the nude underneath the cloth, and some rubber tapes which cover only her nipples.

The childish and rough brushstrokes on the book jacket are printed with scratch off paint, they cover some crucial and serious wordings of the title underneath the jacket. Readers could find out the words, ‘Sex’, ‘Gender’ and ‘the End of Normal’, when scratching off the paints.

Intro: Using Lady Gaga as a Symbol for a New Kind of Feminism

In Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal, J. Jack Halberstam attempts to make sense of the tectonic cultural shifts that have transformed gender and sexual politics in the last few decades. This colorful landscape is populated by symbols and phenomena as varied as pregnant men, late-life lesbians, SpongeBob SquarePants, and queer families. So how do we understand the dissonance between these real lived experiences and the heteronormative narratives that dominate popular media? We can embrace the chaos! With equal parts edge and wit, Halberstam reveals how these symbolic ruptures open a critical space to embrace new ways of conceptualizing sex, love, and marriage.

Using Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new era, Halberstam deftly unpacks what the pop superstar symbolizes, to whom and why. The result is a provocative manifesto of creative mayhem, a roadmap to sex and gender for the twenty-first century, that holds Lady Gaga as an exemplar of a new kind of feminism that privileges gender and sexual fluidity.