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In some ways, Gaga's entire persona seems to question what's expected of women. It's there in the internal contradiction of her name: "Lady" with its suggestions of gentility, sweetness, high breeding; "Gaga" with its intimations of infantility, madness, antic spirit. She has often been compared with a drag queen and, in many ways, this seems apt. Part of the brilliance and beauty of drag, of course, is that it can potentially expose sex roles – most often femininity – as a performance. A drag queen in enormous false eyelashes, teetering heels, a tight dress, heavy makeup, a voluminous wig, talon-like nails, is mimicking a woman, while underlining that what's expected of women is in no way natural. With her increasingly bizarre getups, Gaga does the same.
In fact, she exposes femininity as a sham in all sorts of ways. If the typically feminine woman is supposed to be simpering, seductive, weak, manipulated – essentially submissive – Gaga kicks against all these qualities. There have been suggestions that her fame, prominence and phenomenal success is based on the power and talent of the people she works with, that she's just a puppet of a corporate machine. But this seems highly unlikely. She has spoken of her early fights with her record label over her aesthetic, saying that "the last thing a young woman needs is another picture of a sexy pop star, writhing in sand, covered in grease, touching herself". As Dodai Stewart, writer and editor for feminist blog Jezebel.com says, "record labels are obviously corporate, the music industry is obviously corporate. But, for instance, I don't think that her appearing with the soldiers on the red carpet is manufactured. I think that that's consistent with what she's been saying from the beginning."
One of the other qualities that is always considered central to being a woman is a desire for a partner, love, romance. Gaga has made some surprising pronouncements on this front before – on one occasion she said that she believes "in certain institutions: cooking, serving dinner, taking care of my family. So I consider myself quite the lady." As McEwan notes though, there have been rumours of boyfriends, but "unlike Madonna, who has always famously lived with some guy, and everyone knows her husband, her boyfriend's name, and what they're doing, Gaga is really an entity unto herself. She's not famously partnered, which I think is remarkable. I've read occasionally that she's dating somebody, but I've never really paid attention to it, and neither has the press. I suspect that's because she's allowed to be independently sexual in a way that other young women aren't." Where Jennifer Aniston's single status is constantly picked over, Gaga has carved out a space where she can stand alone, and that loneliness actually heightens, rather than diminishes, her power.