This thesis examines the religious dimension of fandom in popular music, taking
as an object of reflection Lady Gaga and her fans. I combine fan studies with theories of
immanence as well as Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the process of becoming, and
provide a theoretical reading of the relationship between Lady Gaga and her most fervent
fans, the 'little monsters.' Both fandom and religion promise a stable sense of identity
and authentic community to devotees. Performing deconstructive discourse analysis on
three of Lady Gaga's music videos, I demonstrate how fandom, like organized religion,
can simultaneously be an emancipatory practice and a practice that seeks to deny
individual subjects their agency. This thesis provides a new theoretical framework for
understanding fandom, and illustrates how the purported benefits of both fandom and
religion can only be gained when the figureheads of each group are symbolically
destroyed by the members themselves.
