Madonna Reading Response

Madonna is so contrived. Her costumes, her makeup, her performances, her star image. She has built a career on the exploitation of gender and racial power relations, using her body as the basis for repeated transformations. If I could give Madonna a last name, it would be 'ambiguous.'

On one hand, her hypersexual performances reflect an attempt to use the black male identity for power control. Madonna idealized black culture, thereby exploiting in throughout her shows—most famously by rubbing her crotch (which is apparently a blatant copy-cat of Michael Jackson?!). Interestingly enough, she manages to balance this overt black masculinity with the ‘innocent white girl’ image (another one of Dyer’s contradictions), effectively performing as an abstraction of both the brutish, flauntingly sexual representations of black males and the commercialism of the beautiful and for-some-reason-innocent white female.

Black women apparently hate Madonna, too. In her idolization of black culture, Madonna associates ‘blackness’ with cultural capital, but only in the way that a privileged white female can understand it. For her, the ‘otherness’ that black culture reflects is an exhibition of certain ‘freedoms’—including (but not limited to) sexual liberation. She overlooks, according to Bell Hooks, the struggles that Blacks must suffer in order to have these so-called freedoms.

I am not surprised that Madonna would idolize the underdog-its only another way that she tries to represent herself as the ‘outsider.’ The most interesting aspect of Madonna’s celebrity is her chameleon-like ability to transform herself. Her ridiculously ambiguous identity comes from her constant state of performance. She is never herself, she is always in the limelight.

The notion that Madonna is essentially an abstraction of various ideologies, fantasies and identities seems to give her an astonishing amount of credit for the manufacturing of her star identity. She was crafted like the stars in the studio system without the crutch of an omnipotent studio executive. That is what makes Madonna so interesting.