This feminist blog which depends on your donations is not here to educate you!
Thanks to the anon at wank_report for the bulk of the writeup, with its singular virtues.

S.E. SMITH accuses Lady Gaga of appropriation:

It's been pointed out that she appropriates a lot of things from musical traditions created by people of colour and nonwhite people. That her work contains transmisogyny. That she appropriates the experiences of people with disabilities. These are all things that I don't think of as feminist acts—note that I am not saying that Lady Gaga is not feminist (because I don't think it's up to me to decide that), but rather that I am saying that her actions do not always mesh with the identity she has chosen to claim. The same could be said of many other people who identify as feminist, including myself, however. Let those in glass houses...

(bonus points for the excellent use of praeteritio here.)

A commenter asks for references and explanation. According to Snarky's Machine, late of the now-closed Shapely Prose, asking for sources is derailing and oppressive:

I can't be arsed to unpack and respond to your comment except to say you're trafficking in copious amounts of derailing for dummies. Your inability to "see" how Gaga misappropriates says everything about YOUR own privilege and inability to google "Grace Jones" and nothing else. If concepts are unfamiliar to you instead assuming the concepts themselves are wrong, you might want to hit up Professor Google. Because the argument, "you're wrong because I don't know what you're talking about." just does not cut it.

Comments defending that commenter get deleted (although some are reposted in the anon threads below). Mods claim to be "reviewing the situation" (i.e., pretending to do something about it). "Open thread" disappears after 20 minutes after irate commenters leave comments there. The current status is "please email the mods directly if you want to talk about comment policy", which couldn't possibly have a chilling effect--not at all.

Snarky's Machine has another reply to that initial commenter on Twitter:

Ha. I love how some weird ass creepy e-troll named whitney is stalking my feed and tattling cause I'm so mean. Who are these people.

People take refuge to complain in several threads in the sfd_anon community. (Which are now locked; possibly accessible if you're a member of the community.) Worth noting are the ones about how Bitch magazine aggressively solicits donations to support their journalism, which puts a special irony gloss on the "we're not here to educate you" rebuttal.

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skarrow
2010-09-18 06:27 pm UTC (link)

Jaysus.

You know, when I found out that Gwen Stefani was being creepy and fetishising/appropriating Japanese street fashion (Visual Kei, which she white!named Harajuku) I found out because an article told me about it.

It didn't have to explain to me about cultural appropriation or othering or fetishism, it just had to tell me 'she pays four japanese women to follow her around and pretend they don't speak English.' I figured the rest out myself! Of course, I didn't know about this before the article. Because I could give an entire rat's ass about Gwen Stefani.

So the fact that Snarky doesn't need to say, point to a picture of Lady G. wearing a bad parody of a Romany outfit or sporting a meat 'war bonnet' is disingenuous. I don't need to be educated in cultural studies-- but if you're going to go around calling her names, I want a crash course in Lady Gaga. Unless the one magazine cover I glanced at on Go Fug Yourself was THE DEFINING MOMENT OF HER CULTURAL APPROPRIATION that I just should have picked up on.

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lilitu93
2010-09-19 02:36 pm UTC (link)

I'm not denying what Gwen Stefani did wasn't creepy or appropriative, because it was, but she didn't make up the name Harajuku. Harajuku is an area of Tokyo where lots of different kinds of young people hang out in various different subcultures with their own kinds of street fashion. The one she ripped off wasn't really Visual Kei, though I'm not sure off the top of my head which subculture in particular she ripped off, or if she just took bits of what she liked from several of them.

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skarrow
2010-09-19 02:39 pm UTC (link)

I know she didn't make up the name-- but she applied a place name to the fashion she found there and took that 'Harajuku fashion' idea back to America. Learning all the names of all the fashions is HARRD, so she just called them 'Harajuku style.' White!Nomenclature.

I'd always heard that of the swathe of styles she ripped off, Visual Kei was the topmost, but I could certainly be wrong.

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	lilitu93 2010-09-19 03:28 pm UTC (link)
	Yeah, I don't think we're really disagreeing. If I remember correctly, the Harajuku Girls looked more Lolita or Gals than VK, but it's still pretty much the same idea. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	jupiterpluvius 2010-09-19 11:59 pm UTC (link)
	"Harajuku style" is what all avant-garde Japanese street fashion was called in US media in the 1980s--you can't blame Gwen Stefani for that, as she (and I) were still in high school when that nomenclature was coined. (Reply to this)(Parent)

gerorin
2010-09-26 05:02 pm UTC (link)

rather late: The topmost might be punk-lolita-ish, based on the few times I've seen her (and her 'entourage's) style. But it's definitely not Visual Kei.

The thing is if you're talking to a Japanese person and you said your kouhai dressed like the typical Harajuku kids, they would know what you're talking about (as in, they could imagine how old the person generally is, and what their style generally is. They won't mistakenly think she's elegant-looking like the crowd that walks around Ginza, for instance. It's a short-hand even for Japanese people, but mostly it refers to the general demographic of 'Harajuku kids').

Doesn't mean what Gwen Stefani's doing less creepy and disrespectful, of course. I 100% agree with you on that,

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chibikaijuu
2010-09-19 08:03 pm UTC (link)

I don't need a crash course in appropriation. I don't need to be hand-held and walked through everything someone is being accused of and why that's bad and wrong. I don't think the onus is on those calling someone out to educated everybody on the subject.

I do expect, though, that if you say "this person is doing some appropriative bullshit", "this person's work has elements of racism/misogyny/transphobia/etc", you will point me to example of them doing these things, instead of assuming that I am fully versed in their entire body of work. I expect to be shown examples, or at least be given names, of artists and styles they are appropriating from, because you also cannot assume that I am familiar with those works, either.

(The article did link to other articles about each of the individual topics, however the examples were somewhat limited. Particularly on the appropriation issue, which basically discusses how she has cribbed some of her persona and style from artists of color who are famous in their own right.)

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	skarrow 2010-09-19 09:29 pm UTC (link)
	That's pretty much exactly what I was saying, yes. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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