Gaga feminism

“In Gaga Feminism, instead of pitting bodies with vaginas against bodies with penises, I argue that we are living in a new world where the categories of male and female are rapidly being updated all around us,” writes Jack Halberstam is an essay in the  Los Angeles Review of Books. As Halberstam puts it, “Truth be told, gender and gender politics nowadays have little to do with simple genitality and are much more connected to new social arrangements, diverse households, and innovative classifications of identity, community, and desire …  In a world of sperm banks, in vitro fertilization, queer families, butch daddies, transgender men and women,  and heteroflexible women, pretending to be offended by the use of the word “vagina” in a public speech or making insupportable claims about rape and pregnancy are not just quaint and old-fashioned: they signal a deep ignorance about the world we live in and the enormous changes that have taken place within it in the last two decades. So rather than making the vagina talk back to the idiocy of Christian or Republican hypocrisy by giving it a biography or a monologue, it’s time to move on from simple, genital genders and start actually engaging the many forms of gendered embodiment moving us out of the age of normativity and into a new era of going gaga! In my book, “going gaga” means catapulting anachronistic formulations of men, women, and everyone else and recognizing that the current crises in gender relations, like the current crisis in the economy, should not push us back to the tried and true but should force us to try new ways of thinking”

One Reply to “Gaga feminism”

  1. Gender has frayed at the binary edges to the point where it is now unraveling. Hopefully the concept of gender will be made so meaningless it will be abandoned.

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