Gaga Stigmata (2010-2014) was an online pop cultural criticism journal on blogspot.com, created by Kate Durbin, and co-edited with Dr. Meghan Vicks. Contributors to the journal included pop culture scholar Roland Betancourt, pop culture writer Meghan Blalock, queer theorist Jack Halberstam, and many others. Eschewing traditional notions of critical distance, the journal was equal parts fan forum, and a space for serious scholarship. Gaga Stigmata published critiques of Lady Gaga's pop cultural project in real time, or close to real time response, in order to actively participate in popular culture. Although hot takes are common now, at the time this near-immediate form of criticism was totally new.
The journal had a strong following by a diverse audience of academics, journalists and Lady Gaga fans, and was presented at academic conferences as a phenomenon in its own right, as a new way of doing academic criticism in the era of the Internet. Gaga Stigmata received global press attention from places as varied as Yale's American Scholar to NPR radio to The New York Times to French television to various news and tabloid papers, was followed and re-tweeted by members of Lady Gaga's team and collaborators, taught in classrooms around the world, and inspired a trend of online Gaga Studies journals and Gaga classes.
One of the most interesting aspects of Gaga Stigmata, and the most difficult to quantify, is the influence Gaga Stigmata's writers had in shaping Lady Gaga's project, during the first time in history where celebrities directly interacted with their fans through social media without media gatekeepers, in the early days of Twitter and other platforms. By helping to shift the public discourse around Gaga’s work to an art conversation, and by feeding ideas to Gaga and her team through projective criticism, Lady Gaga and Gaga Stigmata were involved in a symbiotic "chicken or egg" relationship, of which the ultimate cultural impact can only be speculated about.
Press for Gaga Stigmata:
The Huffington Post - May 2010