NY Times: Lady Power
Lady Power
By NANCY BAUER
Nancy Bauer is Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Tufts University.
If you want to get a bead on the state of feminism these days, look no further than the ubiquitous pop star Lady Gaga. Last summer, after identifying herself as a representative for “sexual, strong women who speak their mind,” the 23-year-old Gaga seemed to embrace the old canard that a feminist is by definition a man-hater when she told a Norwegian journalist, “I’m not a feminist. I hail men! I love men!” But by December she was praising the journalist Ann Powers, in a profile in The Los Angeles Times, for being “a little bit of a feminist, like I am.” She continued, “When I say to you, there is nobody like me, and there never was, that is a statement I want every woman to feel and make about themselves.” Apparently, even though she loves men — she hails them! — she is a little bit of a feminist because she exemplifies what it looks like for a woman to say, and to believe, that there’s nobody like her.
June 22nd, 2010 at 11:09 pm
“Lady Gaga and her shotgun companions should not be seen as barreling down the road of bad faith. But neither are they living in a world in which their acts of self-expression or self-empowerment are distinguishable, even in theory, from acts of self-objectification. …”
It frightens me that even a ‘feminist’, “in theory”, can no longer tell the difference.
July 6th, 2010 at 12:53 am
I was going to leave a short comment, given Bauer’s recent response to this post’s reception, but it became too long. Here are my thoughts:
http://theaspidistras.blogspot.com/2010/07/pop-philosophy-watch-lady-power.html