Lady Gaga -- who just a couple of years ago was basically a big nobody -- is now one of the biggest and most influential pop stars in the world. No, make that pop artists. Her reach extends far beyond selling records (though seven out of seven top tens is nothing to shake a disco stick at) into the worlds of fashion, cinema, performance art, business and much more. But why? What's so great about this 24-year-old weirdo from New York anyway?

Enter Gaga Stigmata, a new blog that attempts to break down all things Gaga in the form of an online academic journal. Since its inception in March, the journal has analyzed every tiny frame of the Telephone video, looked in-depth at Gaga and Michael Jackson, studied scene-by-scene comparisons of Stanley Kubrick's influence, and much more. And look no further for the most compelling breakdown of Alejandro on the Internet.

QueerSighted chatted with the two insightful founders, Kate Durbin and Meghan Vicks, about the great Lady.

QueerSighted: First things first: Why Gaga? What's so special about her?

Meghan Vicks: I adore Gaga because she's so very loyal to her spectacle. She consciously carries the spectacle with her wherever she goes, thereby suggesting that the spectacle is an intricate part of "real" existence. Lady Gaga's performance demonstrates how fictions and the spectacle are part of our day-to-day world. This is why she matters.

Kate Durbin: All pop artists should be looked at critically. However, most other pop artists, particularly pop musicians or singers, are not disrupting their own images. Their images are static. Gaga talks about embodying the position she is critiquing -- this, perhaps more than anything else, is what makes her project particularly worthy of critical attention. She is a meta-pop star. And no one else has performed a project like this at such a scale, and so successfully, because the success of the project -- the fame -- is intrinsic to the scheme. Put another way, if Gaga's project were a science experiment, it would be the pioneering one of its kind. Shouldn't scientists study the most lucrative experimet before they study the semi-successful or failed ones?

MV: I also think there is a number of factors that make Gaga a captivating figure, and that encourage people to "read" Gaga and her performance. One of the most significant factors is that Gaga appropriates symbols from various ideologies and systems of meaning: Mickey Mouse, Star Wars, Americana, Freemasonry, Capitalism, Consumerism, Quentin Tarantino, Stanley Kubrick, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Christianity, Monarchy, and Kermit the Frog. Her performance constructs a constellation of ideologies and symbols that on the one hand create a picture of Gaga, and on the other hand contradict each other when taken piecemeal. These symbols also bait her audience into reading her performance. So there's that.

QS: Gaga is so strange because she's part pop machine, part subculture creative class icon. What's that about? How is she striking this balance?

KD: One of the qualities Gaga possesses that lends itself to critical analysis is how she performs fame -- this, I think, is what makes her both part of the pop system (celebrator) and a critic of the system (detractor). Gaga talks about how showbiz is dead because we see celebrities taking out their trash. She claims we don't really want to see this, and I think she is right. Gaga aims to bring back showbiz, to highlight the spectacle, as a way of transfiguring past the old narratives. There is no longer a sad celebrity isolated behind the shuttering camera lenses that we can get at and destroy. Instead, there is only the endless performance, the ever-flashing fashions. Her clothes bleed as she bleeds. It is all public, public, public. If she dies, she immediately resurrects as a monster. Flashbulbs cannot seize her ever-shifting image.

MV: Lady Gaga deconstructs the very pop culture that creates and worships her. Her performance explores and makes problematic the image of the pop icon while flourishing in the role itself. She reveals the monstrous underbelly of the pop icon in the same breath that she benefits from her pop-icon status. Much of her performance highlights how the construction of the pop star is simultaneously the construction of a monster (think, especially, her Grammy performance with Elton John in 2010). I think that's what makes her so unique among other pop stars; she embraces the sordidness of the pop icon and makes it part of her aesthetic.

QS: I feel like Gaga especially speaks to a new generation of young people because those of us who grew up in the 90s and 2000s had all pop machine all the time, whether it was Britney Spears or Spice Girls or what have you. Gaga is that, but also not. Thoughts?

KD: Obviously, there's an affinity between Gaga and those artists. However, I think it's important to take each artist in his or her cultural context, and Gaga's context is so different from those other artists. Gaga is very much an artist of 2010. There is, with Gaga, a running commentary on fame culture and the dark progression of celebrity -- something that is not present in any of the pop stars mentioned above, who were very much manufactured by the system. According to Gaga, once famous, one becomes monstrous. We could look at Britney Spears as a negative example, a victim of the system. Britney and her shaved head wielding an umbrella at the paparazzi became a "monster" -- but she was, it seems, a monster in a way that mostly was self-ravaging. Gaga's come after Britney, and turned this dark evolution into something full of positive potential. For Gaga, monstrosity can be a way to escape the confines of a restrictive pop system as well as narrow identity and sexual roles.

MV: Gaga herself has spoken many times of her teenage fascination (even obsession) with Britney Spears. What her performance does is reveal, celebrate, and problematize the machinery that makes a pop star such as Britney Spears. And part of that machinery is the fandom. The pop star becomes a conscious construction, and almost a slave to the machinery that creates her.

QS: What is it about Gaga that caused this explosion? Two years ago she was basically nothing.

MV: Her fire-shooting bra! I fell in love when I watched Gaga's "Paparazzi" video. It was the video's dance centerpiece that did it for me, the one where she makes elegantly paroxysmal use of broken limbs and crutches. I thought, "Gaga's working by not working."

KD: In some ways the museum space has become a tomb for art. Not that there haven't been tons of artists who have created work outside that space, but Gaga's platform isn't a public park or a street corner -- it's MTV. Her MTV Awards "Paparazzi" performance -- which she dubbed her first "original moment" -- could be seen in the tradition of a Vanessa Beecroft or Carolee Schneemann performance. Except that Gaga bled to death, made this brave feminist statement about our celebrity-sick culture, in front of millions of people. Her performance mimicked what I consider to be the greatest performance art act, the crucifixion.

QS: Where did the Gaga Stigmata idea come from?

KD: For months, I'd been posting links on my blog, Ornament and Excrement, to any critical writings on Lady Gaga that I could find. Two of those links were to essays Meghan Vicks had written on her blog, Only Words to Play With. One was the Lady Gaga as Trickster of American Pop Culture piece, and another was her breakdown of the "Telephone" video, which Gaga herself tweeted. I've believed since the beginning that what Gaga was doing was unparalleled in pop culture, and so profound and necessary, and yet she was not getting the critical attention she deserved. I also absolutely believed, and still believe, that in ten years she will be getting tons of critical attention for her work, because the critical world is often too sluggish to keep up with visionaries. Rarely do academics do work that interacts with the culture in an immediate way. I created Gaga Stigmata as soon as the idea came to me. Meghan Vicks came on board a couple of weeks after, and once she was a part of the project it felt total.

QS: When did you fall for her?

MV: My initial interest in Lady Gaga really took me by surprise, as I like pop music but am not normally drawn to think much about it. I not only really liked what Lady Gaga was doing, but I found her methods to be fascinating and often paradoxical: that is, hilarious from one angle, and horrifying from another; beautiful and ugly simultaneously; serious and whimsical at the same time. It was when I noticed that her performance incorporates these opposing ideas at once that I started to think about her as a trickster figure of contemporary pop culture.

QS: So what's your dream for Gaga Stigmata?

KD: To have artists, musicians, and fashion designers who love Gaga to create work for our book-people like Yoko Ono, Francesco Vezzoli, Rachael Barrett, and Marilyn Manson. The book will be a gorgeous hardbound volume. And of course, to have more great critics like Judith Jack Halberstam, who wrote an excellent piece about the "Telephone" video and the lesbian phallus, to submit to us.