Working inside the genre of corporate music video and the logic of the glitch, performers like Madonna and Lady Gaga make visible their ambivalent relationships to patriarchal, heterocentric video culture through simulated freezes and drop outs in the streaming image. Some female performers recognized the potential of this electronic disruption to interrupt the male gaze and the traditional objectification of the female body. ![]() During the ascension and commodification of Web 2.0, online music videos became host to a new kind of glitch: the digital stutter of insufficient buffering in Adobe Flash Player and other streaming media software. This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. Framing discussions around the videos detailed above, this paper considers if the appeal of spectacle could be argued as significant for the powerful responses it engenders (attraction and repulsion – including moral disapproval) and the cultural anxieties and prejudices relating to gender and sexuality this response consequently brings to the fore. Conversely, reading into these videos primarily by means of objective analysis disregards the pointed layering of themes and stylistic devices that operate as both forceful rupturing and heightened of codes of allurement, power and female sexuality, and active re-configuration of normative states of being. Drawing the ire of some for what is perceived as vacuous and dangerous exhibitionism, these concerns echo in unfavorable critique. Lady Gaga's Bad Romance and Paparazzi, and Rihanna's Disturbia follow Madonna's Justify My Love and What it Feels Like for A Girl in their disturbing/captivating expression of aggressive sexuality and brutality through a series of fabricated personas. Whilst these powerfully entwined forces have been explored on many levels within the realm of moving image, it is perhaps within the genre of music video that we see this conjoined aesthetic so actively envisaged. Since the inception of film the thrilling potential of horror has featured prominently, almost always treading a fine line between the erotic and the macabre. As such, through analyzing the Lady Gaga genre as schematic frames and mediated publicness, I argue in the article that macro-analytic tools such as schematic framing are more useful than the semiotic unit analyses in unpacking the volatility of similar social texts, as well as their social ramifications in times of rapid digitization and convergence. It is hardly useful in this respect in examining social texts such as popular culture movements that have the propensity to become prototypes or genres, for other successive social texts. ![]() However, the typical genre approach which relies on identification of the stable linguistic (and semiotic) features a genre entails in respect of form, substance, functions, and relations is only applicable when a text is perceived as a sole composition of semiotic units such as syntax, textual and rhetoric structures, and lexical devices. It is known that genre analysis is a powerful tool for popular cultural studies. This article employs schematic framing as an analytic tool to examine the popular culture figure of Lady Gaga as a genre.
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