Core Response 3: The Power of Madonna

I’ve always been a Madonna fan and have perceived her as the unquestionable queen of pop but the screening of Truth or Dare and the articles for this week have somewhat altered my opinion of her. I had already seen Truth or Dare but watching it now was different as suddenly her diva-like behavior, which I had always loved, seemed too over-the-top, particularly towards her dancers. Madonna has always had the reputation of being overly controlling and shrewd (interesting terms to describe a woman who does what male stars do for their own images and careers) but the film highlights the extent of her control and authority. For example, as both bell hooks and Ann Cvetkovich note, Madonna’s back-up dancers are all either gay, minorities, or both, which is clearly no coincidence as Madonna is the one who picked all of them for the tour. But after seeing the often-times humiliating and condescending way she dealt with them, I couldn’t help but wonder if she would do the same with a straight, white, male dancer.

The film thus started raising some questions for me, many of which I think bell hooks tackles in her article yet even so, I found her argument somewhat problematic in its complete criticism of Madonna. I think hooks is accurate in identifying the ways in which Madonna exploits black culture and interestingly, black masculinity as a way to solidify and maintain her own power. But I don’t think that she sufficiently credits Madonna for what she has achieved in her reconfiguration of mainstream culture, which has paved the way for a majority of solo female artists/entertainers (Britney, Gwen Stefani, etc.) who have come after her.

I don’t think that Madonna is perfect by any means. Yes, I do love her but as Truth or Dare makes abundantly clear, she’s a diva, controlling, and quite honestly, a bitch most of the time. But I think that she’s done what she’s done by working within a system dictated by the power of the white male. She used what she could to get to the top and in doing so, at least started to open to door for other women as well. That’s not to justify her exploitation of black culture and in fact raises the question of what she may have sacrificed in terms of her own femininity and position as a woman to become so successful. But the point is that I don’t think it’s completely fair to condemn her for not changing the entire structure of our society in terms of race, gender and sexuality because in the end, no matter how powerful she might be, Madonna is a woman and thus subject to the demands of our white, patriarchal, capitalist society.

She is a white woman as hooks argues, which puts her at some advantage in her quest for power but she is in an exploited position nonetheless which makes the criticism of her more complex and perhaps less black and white than hooks argues. It’s clear that she does manipulate issues of race in order to better serve her own image and stardom, but I also think it’s worth considering the fact that Lourdes, her daughter, was born from a Hispanic father. Obviously black and Hispanic culture are two different entities but this does complicate her own use of and relation to whiteness that hooks criticizes in her examination of the structures and components behind Madonna's stardom.