gauntlet:
Gender identity has always been particularly fraught with binary notions of male vs. female embalmed in language that has made it almost impossible to escape categorisation on either side of the divide. Thus when Madonna and Annie Lennox wanted to subvert gender stereotypes in the 80s they wore shoulder pads and suits – male symbols of power – to do so. In the nineties, with the Spice Girls, you could wear tracksuits and trainers and be ‘sporty’ or pink dresses and pigtails and be ‘girly’, but in the end it always came down to the binary opposition of male vs. female – one or the other, without allowing for the very human greyscale inbetween.
In music this decade we have started to see the deconstruction of this binary opposition and, with it, the increasing use of clothes as a barrier between image and identity rather than a gateway between the two. When Lily Allen wore trainers with her dresses she wasn’t making a claim for anything sporty, girly or otherwise. She was saying “who cares?”
One of the most successful women to subvert traditional constructs of gender and identity this decade is Lady Gaga. Try typing Lady Gaga into Google. Five of the first ten autotype suggestions are related to gender. Is Lady Gaga a hermaphrodite? Does she have a willy? Stefani Germanotta has constructed an onstage persona so strong that people are at a loss to really say anything about the identity of the person behind the act, even to the extent of whether she is male or female. Those outlandish outfits, the confusion over her sexuality, the fascination with her gender – love her or hate her, Lady Gaga wasn’t ever just about the music. “I’m not going to allow you to portray me in a way that is your idea of what you think I am,” she said in a recent Times interview with Lynn Barber. And it’s difficult – beyond the obvious fact of her exhibitionism – to disagree with that.
These women, and others like Karen O and Beth Ditto, are taking traditional structures to task and atomising notions of gender and identity for the sake of it – because post-modernism declares that the language we have used for centuries to categorise sex is no longer adequate and often woefully restrictive, even derogatory. It’s a notion that men – Bowie, Prince, Boy George, Antony and the Johnson to name but a few – have been exploring for some time.
