The Department of Gender Studies will be hosting a public lecture entitled 'Remixing the US Military: Gaga, Beyoncé, YouTube and the Deployment of Soft Power in the War on Terror'. The speaker is Prof. Maria Pramaggiore – Maynooth University, Ireland.
date: Tuesday 1 November
time: 16:00 till 18:00
venue: Room 101, Dar Ġużeppi Zahra (DGZ101), University of Malta Msida Campus
A surprising masculine performance mode has emerged from the theatres of the war on terror: choreography-heavy remix videos depicting US soldiers dancing to the music of Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Katy Perry and others. In these popular videos—the best known of which may be 'Telephone: the Afghanistan Remake,' with 7 million views on YouTube—male soldier’s bodies, usually in uniform rather than drag, deploy mock femininity and cuteness. One video with a wide circulation records US Marines singing along with the anthem 'Let It Go' from Disney’s Frozen (2013). In this performance, the men parodically and yet proficiently match the original version word for word and inflection for inflection, enthusiastically projecting and mocking the effect of the film’s intended audience of young girls.
These videos appropriate the position of the female celebrity or fan while simultaneously reasserting masculine prerogatives. Yet they also foreground anxieties regarding the vulnerability of male bodies in combat in light of social and technological changes in the culture of warfare and directly link the soldier’s body to the policy debate regarding the US deployment of soft versus hard power in the war on terror.
The general public is cordially invited to attend this public lecture.
For enquiries, please feel free to contact Ms Samantha Grima by phone on +356 2340 3808 or by
email.
Prof. Maria Pramaggiore is professor and head of Media Studies at Maynooth University in Kildare, Ireland. She has authored or edited five books and published widely on Irish film and on gender and sexuality in film and television, including several recent articles on the Netflix series Orange is the New Black. Her most recent book is Making Time in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon: Art, History and Empire (Bloomsbury 2014) and she is currently co-editing a collection on the voice in documentary film.