Everywhere you look, pop has gone Gaga. Lady Gaga’s fingerprints are all over the revised images of Christina Aguilera, Rihanna, Katy Perry and Beyonce; and on new artists like Kesha, Janelle Monae and Nicki Minaj. These performers might not cite Lady Gaga as a direct influence, but her work has nudged loose conventional boundaries. The space for women in pop to try out new aesthetic identities hasn’t been this vast in some time.

And it’s freeing, this expansion of musical liberation into spaces visual as well as sonic, instinctual as well as intellectual, performed as well as lived. In many ways, Lady Gaga’s is a bastardization of the Madonna model. From the start of her career Madonna was a savvy pop trickster, using outrageous imagery as a distraction while smuggling ideas about religion and social politics into her music.

Most of the Gaga generation, however, is interested in distraction as an end in itself. The age of Gaga actually began a decade ago, with the arrival of Britney Spears and Ms. Aguilera. Purists complained that they were fabricated ? a dull gripe. More important was that they helped restore a sense of theater to pop . Lady Gaga has taken that movement to its logical end, almost removing the music altogether.

She’s an often great singer; that she hides that so well is one of her many tricks. And her songs are perfectly blank, mere skeletons to drape herself around. Furthermore, the thing that most separates Lady Gaga from the bubblegum sirens of a decade ago is that her capacity for seduction has been recontextualized.

Near the end of her recent New York show she emerged onstage with sparklerlike contraptions on her chest and crotch, spitting out tiny, smoldering bits. “You tell them I burned the place!” she shouted. It was a straightforward repudiation of hypersexualized imagery.

There was nowhere to touch without getting hurt. In this Lady Gaga has an unlikely analogue in Katy Perry. “California Gurls” is the first single from her new album, “Teenage Dream.” Its video finds Ms. Perry frolicking in a candy fantasyland, pinup-girl style. But toward the end she’s shown dancing with cupcakes on her breasts, quickly followed by a scene in which she attaches a pair of whipped cream dispensers to her bra and fires away.

What it means is anyone’s guess, but the license to create such absurdist, post-sexual theater feels particularly Gagaesque. Ultimately, though, Ms. Perry is too perky to achieve Lady Gaga’s heightened state of absence from her own art. Ms. Aguilera is better equipped for that task. Like Lady Gaga, Ms. Aguilera is willing to be molded ? although, in the case of her wildly uneven fourth album, “Bionic,” she may have found her limits. Part of the problem may have been that beneath her distressed mask is a vocal talent that she has a difficult time suppressing.

Kesha, though, has no such obstacle. Like Lady Gaga she expresses herself wholly through her exterior. But if the very abrupt rise of Kesha has proved anything, it’s that performance doesn’t always equate with art. In her most adventurous moments Kesha has looked as if she were dressed for an absurdist parody of Lady Gaga. Perhaps the most Lady Gagalike of all contemporary artists is the rapper Nicki Minaj.

Unlike Lady Gaga, she doesn’t shy away from sweat in her lyrics. Her image, though, is another thing, endlessly pliable, a site for bizarre experimentation. Rarely has a woman in pop ? and certainly in rap ? been so aggressive about constantly revamping her appearance. What’s more, she repeatedly alters her vocal delivery, understanding that while the words that come out of her mouth have meaning, they’re also sounds to be played with.

If Lady Gaga has had direct impact on anyone, it’s been, most surprisingly, on Beyonce . In the last year, in the wake of a pair of collaborations with Lady Gaga, she appears to have come alive. But has Lady Gaga been giving too much style away? “Alejandro,” her new single, initially appears to be one of her least ambitious.

At times the singer, almost never seen without an outfit that suggests the creation of a mad inventor, appears only in flesh-tone bra and panties. “It’s just me, and people will see that what’s underneath everything is still me,” she told Rolling Stone magazine. This nakedness, this new assuredness is a real step toward feeling. Or maybe the skin’s just another costume.

JON CARAMEANICA/ESSAY