ABSTRACT
Inscrutability, in the context of Lady Gaga's song, is weaponized as a means of leveling the playing table, as it were. Lady Gaga's performance of inscrutability is, unexpectedly, in many ways reminiscent of Geoffrey Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls. This chapter offers the possibility of translingual practices as inscrutable. Inscrutability refers to the condition of evading the very possibility of being evaluated in the first place, whether as illegitimate or even as legitimate, insofar as illegitimacy and even legitimacy are evaluative parameters based on a normative epistemology that has hitherto been hostile or otherwise indifferent to 'difference'. The view of inscrutability as a problem is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the trope of the inscrutable Oriental. The fluidization of hierarchies between normative English and translingual practices cannot be achieved through the mere legitimization of translingual practices. Instead it may be achieved through a recognition of their inscrutability.
