ABSTRACT
When Lady Gaga recently declared, ‘I’m a gypsy . . . I can’t plan my life out like that so much,’1 she called attention to the freedom and spontaneity linked to the label ‘Gypsy’ in popular culture. Gypsies, both real and imagined, are appearing everywhere now-in spring 2011 fashion houses, on reality television shows in England, the US, and Hungary, and in music venues on several continents. As both the romantic stereotype and the criminal stereotype come into play in these stagings, I suggest we examine how non-Romani producers and performers market Gypsy culture as the ‘new exotica’.
