Rites of Passage in Pop and Faith: Lady Gaga and the Formation of Identities

‘Our life consists not only in being but also in becoming’: so runs a memorable line from the Marriage Liturgy currently authorised for use in the Scottish Episcopal Church.^[1] Such rites of passage provide opportunities for taking stock of who and how we are in the world, and for reflecting on the ways – great and small, obvious and inconspicuous, collective and individual – we emerge and evolve. Behind this lies an understanding of identity as something dynamic: a transformative journey in which we negotiate what is found (being) and what is fashioned (becoming).

Rites of passage is a term coined by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in a short study published in 1909, but not translated into English until the 1960s.^[2] He studied initiation rites among populations in Africa and Oceania, and identified three stages in the process undergone by candidates for initiation: separation; liminality; and reintegration. Those being initiated are thus removed from the community into a place of seclusion; they spend time in a state which is neither the past they have left nor the future they are entering – the liminal (threshold – from the Latin limen) state; and are then reintroduced into the community with a new identity.

Van Gennep’s work has been a model for much later anthropology, where the focus has been widened beyond the confines of initiation to other rites. Some of them are religious rites, like marriage, betrothal, baptism, and funerals, but the same initiatory pattern can be traced in secular settings, for example, graduation ceremonies, marking a retirement, a Debs’ ball, the first day at school, passing a driving test, or recording a new album.

I argue here that we need a nuanced take on identity as something both found and fashioned – two states not in strict opposition but in constant and messy exchange; for identity is something neither fully fixed nor entirely flexible. Rather, it glories in complexity – it involves a discovery of being (a negotiation with what already exists within us) and a process of becoming (an imagining of what we could be). Coupled with this, I argue that we need a more fluid, imaginative medium to illustrate and draw out the truths of this struggle for identity – that imaginative medium being the combination of art and pop which the iconic Lady Gaga is uniquely placed to offer.

But why is this exploration necessary? The history of approaches to identity is a complex one. The Christian part of this history is particularly fractious. No irenic or uncontentious conception of identity exists in Christian history. Yet an easily identifiable tension – a difficult dialectic between possibly opposing convictions – tends to dominate the relevant discourses: a pendulum that swings between being and becoming.

On the one hand, the found aspect of identity has been overemphasised and interpreted in ways that leave little or no room for individual volition or experience. Here, Hélène Cixous’s comments on the nature of subjectivity, our sense of self, are instructive: subjectivity – the unique experience of being a particular individual and all this entails – is to be untangled from individualism – the centring of the self in isolation from others; genuine subjectivity accounts for the influence and presence of others in our lives and interactions, even if only through opposition.^[3]

A narrative approach to identity, grounded in a pre-existing story and its being spoken over us in baptism, is now commonplace in theological ethics.^[4] But it is often unclear how the details of our own stories might fit into God’s story: Is baptism merely a call to relinquish control over our own stories, allowing our sense of identity to emerge in a covenantal relationship with God and the community of the baptised? Or are our individual stories held and, in some way, fulfilled by being graciously included in God’s story?

An affection for simplicity, I suggest, goes some way in accounting for the overemphasis on the found aspect of identity. Mark Oakley puts it this way: ‘We live in a Google world of facts on tap, quick information at the click of a mouse. There are some who argue that religious faith should equally give immediate and ready answers to every possible question and that religions have Scriptures to be used as text-books to find out what those answers are.’^[5]

Some relief is provided by academic disciplines where the full spectrum of embodied experience is centred and understood as a valuable source of knowledge: gender studies, performance studies, practical theology (of course), and many other areas in the humanities. Yet the academic sphere, and Protestant systematic theology in particular, often overlooks the importance of experience, particularly embodied experience.^[6] There is often a contrast assumed between what is termed ‘embodied’ theology and the kind of theology that is proposed as if it emerges from disembodied reflection; when the latter does pay attention to embodied experience, it typically privileges certain forms of reflection without acknowledging their limitations.^[7] There may also be some suspicion towards highly experiential, embodied approaches, which are viewed as lacking in critical rigour and privileging particular roles or identities – such as ‘motherhood’, ‘womanhood’, or ‘disability’, and so on – behind this trend.

On the other hand, an overemphasis on the fashioned aspect of identity risks lapsing into the kind of relativism that acknowledges little or no authority outside of the realm of felt experience. Byung-Chul Han warns against the loss of symbols and repeatable structures in time and memory as the self comes more and more to dominate our sense of who and how we are in the world.^[8] However, the hard and fast distinction between sacred and secular rituals is problematic, as it leads to the loss of something of the ordinariness of ritual. Perhaps we need to be much more committed to Catherine Bell’s preferred term of ‘ritualisation’.^[9]

A middle way, I suggest, comes from an unexpected source: Lady Gaga’s music video for ‘Disease’ – directed by Tanu Muino and choreographed by Parris Goebel. Here, identity emerges as an unstable negotiation – something both found and fashioned, and indeed continually re-found and re-fashioned – making imagination, paradox, and mystery central.^[10]

Attention now turns to the music video, which begins on a sunny day in a quiet suburb – one reminiscent of settings in Edward Scissorhands (1990) or Suburbicon (2017). At a stop sign, a darker version of Gaga is revealed to have run over a more innocent incarnation – the pink nail polish and floral dress are evocative of her Joanne era. Internal identity struggles occur in plain sight, as cars drive by, oblivious to the turmoil and without stopping to help the injured Gaga.

The darker Gaga’s bloodshot eye possibly references her ‘Bad Romance’ video, in which eye drops were controversially used to enlarge her pupils. Her talons evoke Gaga’s countess figure in American Horror Story: Hotel (2015-16) and the costume made famous by Scissorhands (1990). Her outfit resembles one featured in the Born This Way era (the ‘Yoü and I’ video). These symbols suggest the texture of a mysticism that is at once at home and uneasy with the grotesque, not unlike medieval art that embraced unsettling images to depict mysterious realities. Here we have a reclamation of the sacred in the profane and uncanny aspects of the self.

The Joanne Gaga confronts the darker Gaga, as the latter sings that she could be her antidote. As the darker version reaches out to console her, another incarnation – the ARTPOP era, in which Gaga wore a flannel shirt for a memorable live performance – suddenly emerges and pulls the more innocent version from the car bonnet. The two contrasting Gagas – highly criticised in their respective eras^[11] – begin to fight. ‘My biggest enemy is me,’ Gaga sings in one of the most well-received singles from the Chromatica era (‘911’).

In the chorus, the darker Gaga sings that she can heal the Joanne and ARTPOP incarnations, now chasing each other and moving away from the darker version. Both reject her appeals, and the scene shifts to a dark room where there are two other representations of Gaga’s past. The Fame Monster Gaga – her eyes are glazed over and her elbows are stitched in the fashion of Frankenstein’s monster – stands on the back of The Fame Gaga. (The Fame Monster was, after all, a reissue of The Fame.) Gaga receives multiple blows to her back and hips, possibly symbolising the injury that famously halted her tour or her battle with fibromyalgia. The darker Gaga observes this scene, but does not confront these personas; both were well-received by critics.

Suddenly, the song pauses. The darker Gaga is listening calmly to music in the car. Social media accounts have been electric with speculation: Might this be a teaser for the next single? Or can we hear ‘Frankensteined’, an AI-generated song that has recently resurfaced? The exhausted Joanne Gaga reappears after battling the ARTPOP incarnation. Upon seeing the darker version, she becomes frightened and runs away. In the following chorus, the darker Gaga insists that she wants to cure her, even exiting the car and bracing hurricane-like winds to plead with her. But the Joanne Gaga flees once more.

The darker Gaga then vomits out the Chromatica Gaga (her slicked-back hair is reminiscent of her look for that tour). Her cane is perhaps a nod to the crutches of the ‘Paparazzi’ video and subsequent performances (the performance at the 2009 VMAs is particularly memorable), while the dark bile she vomits is reminiscent of the birthing scenes associated with the Born This Way era. Self begets self.

The Chromatica Gaga takes the darker Gaga’s hand and they embrace. The darker Gaga reveals her true face. Horrified, the Chromatica Gaga screams and runs down a narrow path between houses, where she feels trapped and claustrophobic. The darker Gaga lurks in the background; the walls close in on her in unpredictable ways. Here we have the suffocating nature of being consumed by our inner darkness.

The video concludes with the Chromatica Gaga collapsing in exhaustion, while the darker Gaga walks triumphantly back to the car – perhaps an indication that her new project will be animated by such a darker spirit. The signs are hopeful for her seventh album, LG7.

Gaga shared via Instagram that the inspiration for the video stems from her confronting her ‘inner darkness’ and ‘demons’; it represents her confrontation with the unsettling parts of herself – the ways she has unsuccessfully tried to throw off and flee from different aspects of her identity.

The presence of various Gagas throughout the video suggests the self is not a singular, static entity that we must find, neither is it something that we have the freedom to fashion (Gaga violently struggles against herself), but rather a collection of diverse experiences. Each incarnation represents a different aspect of her journey that has brought her to another rite of passage: the beginning of a new era.

Repeated confrontations with past personas are almost ritual acts. Each encounter is a form of self-sacrament, a symbolic death, transformation, and resurrection of old selves. Gaga’s ritualised self-confrontations echo the rhythms of repentance and renewal. The tension in baptismal theology mirrors Gaga’s artistic exploration of identity: the balance between relinquishing control to larger narratives (societal or artistic expectations) and asserting individual agency. Her personas – Joanne, Chromatica, and the darker Gaga – suggest an ongoing negotiation of how personal stories are held within and shaped by broader frameworks.

Gaga guides us through such rites of self-understanding; her video invites us to participate in the ongoing transformation of identity, a continuous process of self-discovery, where meaning is derived from both reflection on past experiences and the active construction of the new self. Identity, then, is shaped both by the things we discover about ourselves (being) and by all that has impacted our growth (becoming).

Gaga’s video embodies the three stages of separation, liminality, and reintegration, reflecting the structure of rites of passage. Gaga’s confrontation with her past selves represents a state of liminality: a threshold moment where she is neither fully defined by her previous personas nor entirely settled into a new identity. This liminal space, marked by chaos, and conflict, and creativity, mirrors the in-between stage of rites of passage, where old certainties are dismantled to make room for transformation.

And here, we return to Cixous: we are constantly changing, growing, incorporating new experiences; there is no singular ‘I’ but we are really a combination of multiple selves that are shaped by our past, present, and imagined futures. The question we must ask ourselves, then, is not ‘Who am I?’ but ‘Who are I?’^[12] The SEC’s Marriage Liturgy (and Gaga’s ‘Disease’ video) share the same conclusion: our life consists not only in being but also in becoming, in finding and fashioning.

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^[1] Scottish Episcopal Church, Marriage Liturgy (Edinburgh: Grosvenor, 2007), 8.

^[2] See Arnold van Gennep and Monika Vizedom, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961) and Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New Jersey: Aldine Transaction, 1996).

^[3] Hélène Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader, trans. Susan Sellers (London: Routledge, 1994), xvii.

^[4] Key to the project of Christian ethics for the contributors to Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) is cultivating a theological imagination – one shaped by the Church’s liturgy, which allows Christians to see the world with fresh insight and respond in ways that are in the grain of the kingdom of God.

^[5] Mark Oakley, The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2016), xviii.

^[6] Hence the rationale behind Simeon Zahl’s project in The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

^[7] To put it bluntly, white, male, heterosexual perspectives.

^[8] Byung Chul-Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020).

^[9] Cf. Catherine Bell, RItual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

^[10] Malcolm Guite argues that acknowledgement of ‘the relations between imagination and reason as ways as knowing … is leading, in almost every field, to a renewed emphasis on imagination as essential for a fuller knowledge of the world and of ourselves’ in Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination (London: Routledge, 2012), 1.

^[11] To her critics, I say: Ego te absolvo!

^[12] Cf. Rachel Mann, ‘“The Performance of Queerness”: Trans Priesthood as Gesture Towards a Queered Liturgical Assembly,’ in Liturgy with a Difference: Beyond Inclusion in the Christian Assembly, ed. Stephen Burns and Bryan Cones (London: SCM Press, 2019), Ch. 3.

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© Christopher West, 2024

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: provided by the author.