"I'm Your Biggest Fan, I'll Follow You ... " Lady Gaga, Little Monsters and the Religious Dimension of Fandom in Pop Music

This thesis examines the religious dimension of fandom in popular music, taking as an object of reflection Lady Gaga and her fans. I combine fan studies with theories of immanence as well as Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the process of becoming, and provide a theoretical reading of the relationship between Lady Gaga and her most fervent fans, the 'little monsters.' Both fandom and religion promise a stable sense of identity and authentic community to devotees. Performing deconstructive discourse analysis on three of Lady Gaga's music videos, I demonstrate how fandom, like organized religion, can simultaneously be an emancipatory practice and a practice that seeks to deny individual subjects their agency. This thesis provides a new theoretical framework for understanding fandom, and illustrates how the purported benefits of both fandom and religion can only be gained when the figureheads of each group are symbolically destroyed by the members themselves.

Monstrum : the vampire in the detective story /

My approach to the vampire detective highlights its connections to the private detective's story and reveals the monstrous investigators' debt to early feminist forms of detection -specifically in their reformation of the' other' and of traditional forms of power and authority. Seen in this light the movement of horror's imaginary 'other' into the rational world of detection can be seen as not an abrupt breach of detection's realist conventions, but an almost seamless transition into symbolic spaces that point to the detective's primary function -- to make sense of the senseless. It is in this light that I explore the monster that is a detective as a symbol that is also a sense-maker, and a quintessential postmodern figure. I argue that the distinctions between monsters and 'others', and between popular narratives and postmodern religion have faded, culminating in a character that can not only model 'otherness' as an exemplary condition, but also provide strategies for modeling the form of active postmodern subjectivity that postmodern theorist Jim Collins' (1989) conceives of as heretical activity.