Jo Calderone: In Memoriam -- Lady Gaga and the Gender Binary

Lady Gaga has been roaring back into pop culture relevance, but has left a part of herself behind. That part? A mechanic from Sicily who goes by the name Jo Calderone. In Augustin Fuentes’ “The Creative Spark”, he tracks the progression of biological sex (male/female) allowing for the reproductive sex act, to the phenomenon of social sex, and how it brought about sexuality, and gender expression and identity. Someone who I think plays interestingly with the construct of gender, whether upholding or destroying it, is Lady Gaga. One of the most concrete examples of her multifaceted relationship with gender and gender expression is her drag alter-ego, Jo Calderone.  

With his debut appearance on the cover of Japanese Men’s Vogue, and first live appearance at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards performing “Yoü and I” (also featured in the “Yoü and I” music video), Jo was received with admiration and condemnation from fans and industry

professionals alike. Gaga elaborated on Jo’s creation and presentation, and said that he was a result of asking herself and her photographer: “how much can we get away with? How can we remodel the model? In a culture that attempts to quantify beauty with a visual paradigm and almost mathematical standard, how can we fuck with the malleable minds of onlookers and shift the world’s perspective on what’s beautiful?” Fuentes discusses the same ‘models’ of sex, gender, and gender roles, and comes to a conclusion that meshes quite well with what Gaga was after: “Gender matters because it’s a core part of the social fabric in which all humans develop the way they see and interpret the world.” (Fuentes 178)  

Gaga said recently that Jo Calderone has sadly passed on, but he succeeded in helping her subvert public opinion and perspective on her gender, and gender on a larger scale, as well as helping her change the way she views herself and the world around her. “Jo was an important character for me. It’s the way I explored what I was looking for in men, and also what I was maybe lacking in myself.”