8 February 2010: "UNCONFIRMED RUMOR: Lady Gaga gave birth to a child"

This post is about matriarchy. The first thing to realize is that the baby is a red herring. There is no baby. That is to say, there are only babies. Carles's point is that American recording artist Lady Gaga is in the process of "giving birth," so to speak, to a matriarchal order, or at least a Utopian vision of that order that at once transcends the limitations of strictly procreative sex and reasserts the female's control over the destiny of the species.

In her pathbreaking, seminal work The Dialectic of Sex, Jewish Canadian-born feminist Shulamith Firestone articulates the conditionality for a post-patriarchal society, one tenet of which is the elimination of eroticism as such. But this is not the same as attempting to abolish sex.

When we demand the elimination of eroticism, we mean not the elimination of sexual joy and excitement but its rediffusion over -- there's plenty to go around, it increases with use -- the spectrum of our lives.

Through her praxis, Lady Gaga explores the ramifications of this statement, particular in her endorsement of heretofore outre sexual practices. Not only is her very gender the subject of some ambiguity -- she has oft been rumored to have male genitalia -- but also, as Carles notes, "the complex duality of Lady Gaga’s existence" makes it difficult to conclude with any certainty the terms under which she may have consented to more directly enter the realm of cultural reproduction through biological means.

Carles notes speculatively of the baby captured in photographs that "we must assume" it "was formulated in her conceptual womb." That is to say, Lady Gaga has dissolved the boundary between the genesis and gestation of artistic interventions into the culture and the literal womb in which a fetus may be brought to term. Thus it is that women are able to re-enter history and affect it directly; the once-subordinate historigraphical mode of mothering fuses with a regained capacity for ideological interventions, lifting women from subservience and into a matriarchal destiny.

Hence the father of the child here takes on the mother's name, as Carles explains: "sources speculate that there is a ‘cool dad’ involved. We can assume that his last name is ‘Gaga.’ Sources say that his name is David Gaga." And also consider the presence of multiple potential male mates for Gaga -- in contradistinction to the classic expression of patriarchy, polygamy. Through the lens of Gaga's radical inversions, the existing social order is viewed as if in a convex fun-house mirror, with the potentialities of the future already established as if they had passed, and the grim realities of the patriarchal present cast off into an inscrutable vanishing point.

It's not hard to see why Carles was confused by the apparently missing "conceptual baby outfit." No layer of clothes could possibly carry the semiological weight that this infant must bear as it serves as the sign of the post-patriarchial synthesis.