Political and Social Contestation through Gender Performance - Essay Example

February 4, Madonna Phenomenon: Political and Social Contestation through Gender Performance Madonna is arguably the most successful and enduring female pop icon of modern times. Her prominence as a cultural and representational icon is shown in numerous articles and books written that analyze and emphasize her various roles in shaping American society and global pop culture (Gauntlett in 2004 and 2005; Penaloza). Georges-Claude Guilbert explores Madonna as a post-modern myth, while Christoph Lindner and Robert Miklitsc study Madonna’s position in the commodification of celebrities. The Madonna Phenomenon is not limited to Madonna’s popularity, but includes the postmodern analysis of her various effects on society. The Madonna phenomenon demonstrates popular culture’s ability to enable political and social contestation through Madonna as its central popular symbol where the Madonna phenomenon explores gender as performance, intersects political and cultural representation, challenges and reinscribes feminine gender categories, and inspires other women to pursue their dreams. Judith Butler asserts that gender is performed as it relates socially-produced subjects in a specific context, where Madonna literally and figuratively performs gender to connect to her primary audience. Butler explains that gender is not an attribute but a performance. Gender is part of human identity, and identity is not static or homogenous (Butler 5 qtd. in Gauntlett 106). Gender is what people do (i.e. their behaviours) and not what they truly are, according to Butler (Gauntlett 107). Madonna’s performances are performances of her identity and for her gender. Different scholars assert that Madonna performs femininity as a masquerade. E. Ann Kaplan explains the meaning of Madonna’s image to her and her audience: “[Madonnas] image usefully adopts one mask after another to expose the fact that there is no ‘essential’ self and therefore no essential feminine but only cultural constructions” (160). Indeed, Madonna’s different images show cultural constructions as present in “Material Girl.” In this song, she shows how materialism in modern society shapes femininity and masculinity. In the chorus, Madonna sings: “You know that we are living in a material world/And I am a material girl.” She is suggesting that because she lives in a material world, she has become a material girl. She talks about herself and women who have become materialistic because of the American Dream that underlines materialistic indicators of happiness and success. Guilbert notes that Madonna challenges “the consumerist form of the American Dream” in her film, Dangerous Game (154). Madonna acts as Sarah Jennings, the stereotyped “blonde Hollywood bitch,” where Guilbert asserts that her character and the movie question the patriarchal aesthetic stereotype that drives the media industry (154). Through her songs and films, Madonna connects to her audience by showing them what world is to her and how it shapes people’s values and behaviours. Her works and characterisation can be argued as representing images that relate to modern audiences’ identities and experiences. In emphasising the materialism of society, furthermore, Madonna poses questions to women and society that can motivate personal change and transformation. It is argued that she challenges women’s materialism per se and society’s materialism in general. Guilbert is convinced that, contrary to Madonnaphobes, Madonna represents feminist power (185). The role of “looking” in the construction of gender and identity, as Betterton explores, can be applied on Madonna’s works. On the one hand, Madonna’s projected sexuality can be seen as anti-feminist because it sells the female body as a sexual commodity. On the other hand, her sexuality signifies rebellion for personal changes, where Madonna does not want to be the kind of woman that society wants, but the kind of woman she wants for herself. Moreover, in connection to personal changes, though not all scholars agree that the Madonna phenomenon shapes social changes in how gender is performed and redefined, other scholars believe that Madonna has socially transformative effects. Cathy Schwichtenberg sees Madonna as an active postmodern icon: Through strategies of simulation, she transforms the ‘truth’ of gender into drag, a dialectical fragmentation between two terms, and then fissures this destabilized sex identity further by means of splitting and displacement to advance a sexual plurality. In more general terms, her disingenuous figuration says much about the political promise of postmodern strategies. (qtd. in Chancer 93). Schwichtenberg is right because Madonna’s use of opposing images (i.e. virgin/temptress) argues that no one can control gender. Madonna’s performances create a fissure in gender identity and invites people to reconstruct it with her. Anne Brooks agrees with Schwichtenberg that Madonna has positive social effects. Brooks notes that Madonna’s “girl culture” resists patriarchal gender codes (150). These scholars confirm that Madonna has post-modernist effects of destabilising gender’s social order. With these conceptions, Madonna persuades women and others to pursue personal and/or social changes. The Madonna phenomenon further demonstrates that pop culture can also tackle and heighten political and cultural contestation through her political and social representations. Miklitsc places the study of the Madonna phenomenon in its socio-economic and political context. He emphasises that media scholars must also examine the “conditions under which the multiplicity of discourses on Madonna, and contradictory readings and evaluations, are produced” (Miklitsc 137). He is connecting the consumption of Madonna as a commodity to the political and economic circumstances of her production. In other words, to know the world that produced her is to understand her identity and the identity of those who consume her as a celebrity and cultural commodity. Madonna as a commodity invites scholars to study her production and consumption. Furthermore, Madonna creates a phenomenon where people are aggressively analysing her ambiguous representation. Kaplan argues that Madonna uses her different characterisations as masks, where she shows that gender is arbitrary, dynamic, and autonomous (160). David Gauntlett, in his book, Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction, agrees that Madonna uses the feminine image to assert her independence and freedom. He specifies the use of feminine tricks to access power and free will in society. He mentions the work of Beverley Skeggs in 199 on working-class women. She learned that her participants had an intricate affiliation with “femininity” because they valued its “respectability,” but not its passivity (Gauntlett 13). Skeggs states that these women “‘did’ femininity when they thought it was necessary” (116 qtd. in Gauntlett 13). Madonna is also using her femininity according to her independent desires and goals as an artist and as a woman. Her exploration of gender power within and outside the patriarchal system generates interest on political and cultural contestation. Madonna intersects political and cultural representation, moreover, through her music that castigates racial and gender, as well as other social, stereotypes. In the official music video of “Like a Prayer,” Madonna explores racial, gender, and religious stereotypes. It shows a black man who is accused as a criminal, when he is only trying to save a white woman from her white attackers. One can see the racial subversion of the black criminal. The video also questions the often-interconnected religious and gender roles. Catholicism and other religions insist on preserving women’s virginity, and yet Madonna is seen in a sensual act with a black-saint-statue-turned-real-human. The impact is rebellion against these strict gender codes that control and hinder women’s sexuality. Another reading of the video performance is that Madonna shows that she has political power that can reshape cultural representations of women and black people. Butler suggests that gender can be challenged and undermined through presenting alternative gender performances (Gauntlett 108). Madonna does these subversions that Kaplan calls as sites of resistance or subversion (Brooks 150). John Fiske asserts that while some scholars see Madonna as the typical gender stereotype that promote fetishism consumption, her audience of young girls may actually see her as an empowering role model (Miklitsc 101). Fiske says that Madonna is an exemplary popular text because she is so full of contradictions – she contains the patriarchal meanings of feminine sexuality, and the resisting ones that her sexuality is hers to use as she wishes in ways that do not require masculine approval … Far from being an adequate text in herself, she is a provoker of meanings whose cultural effects can be studied only in her multiple and often contradictory circulations. (124 qtd. in Gauntlett 23). Madonna stirs tsocial imagination through conflicting meanings, and for that alone, she is considered as a feminist. Madonna provides a powerful icon of a woman who seems to have it all because of her fame and fortune, but more than that, she is categorised as someone who has achieved the American Dream by negating gender and social conventions. Indeed, Madonna challenges and reinscribes feminine gender categories. Gauntlett asserts that Madonna fits the “challenging stereotypes role model” because of her confidence and popularity. He states: “Madonna was famously a confident and assertive sexual icon in the late 1980s and 1990s, challenging traditional assumptions about female sexuality” (Gauntlett 162). Sex sells, but Madonna does only sell sex, but also questions the underlying social norms behind it. She defies looks-ism, where male voyeurism controls the female body through their controlling gaze, by controlling what she shows or not shows to her audience. Fundamentally, Madonna controls the gaze and its contents. Linder talks about Madonna as the central site of cultural politics. He says that “Madonna has positioned herself centrally and controversially at the cultural intersection between sexual politics and consumerism,” specifically “[at an intersection that] represents a strategic site for feminism’s ongoing intervention into the arena of cultural politics” (65). Lisa Peñaloza argues that Madonna has the ability to contest social conventions and gender hierarchy (180). One only has to watch Madonna and her use of crosses and sexuality that captures public attention to demonstrate the political effects of her challenge to feminine gender categories. Madonna does not want to be the woman her society wants her to be, as she makes and remakes the woman she wants to be for her own ideals and interests. Finally, Madonna inspires other women to pursue their dreams, an empowering and inspiring effect on her audience. Geri of Spice Girls asserts in her autobiography, If Only, that she wondered in 1994 if a girl band like theirs would succeed. Her DJ friend said that “Girl bands dont work,” but she disagreed for the “music scene needed young, positive female recording artists. At twelve years old I had Madonna to look up to. The teenagers today needed someone like that” (Halliwell 221 qtd. in Gauntlett 162). Gauntlett describes “Madonna’s Daughters,” who are women she inspired to be pop icons too. They are her daughters because they grew up listening to her and idolising her, up to the point that they want to be exactly like her (Gauntlett 161). Britney Spears already expressed her admiration for Madonna, and noted that she wants to be as successful as she is (Gauntlett 161). These are examples of women who look up to Madonna for her impact on the music scene and society, for challenging gender and social norms. They see success for women as being on their own terms, where they can create their own empowered personalities. Madonna phenomenon is about Madonna and her impact on the music industry and society. She represents women in a fissured gender identity state, changing and developing. She questions social and gender norms and negotiates political power for women and minorities. She influences people to re-imagine gender and other social categories, so that these boxes can be deconstructed and destroyed. Madonna is a mere sex symbol for some, but she is also a powerful cultural social icon that has influenced successive female stars and audiences. The Madonna Phenomenon is the phenomenon of contestations that continue to shape media celebrities and the identities they promote in modern society. Works Cited Betterton, Rosemary. Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media. New York: Pandora Press, 1987. Print. Brooks, Ann. Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms. New York, NY: Routledge, 1997. Print. Chancer, Lynn S. Reconcilable Differences: Confronting Beauty, Pornography, and the Future of Feminism. Los Angeles, CA: U of California P, 1998. Print. Gauntlett, David. “Madonna’s Daughters: Girl Power and the Empowered Girl-Pop Breakthrough.” Madonnas Drowned Worlds: New Approaches to Her Cultural Transformations 1983-2003. Eds. Fouz-Hernández Santiago and Freya Jarman-Ivens. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. 176-192. Print. _____________. Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction. Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. Web. 1 Feb. 2014. Retrieved from http://coleshillmediasite.weebly.com/uploads/4/6/0/1/4601434/media_gender_and_identity.pdf Guilbert, Georges-Claude. Madonna as Postmodern Myth: How One Stars Self-Construction Rewrites Sex, Gender, Hollywood, and the American Dream. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002. Print. Kaplan, E. Ann. “Madonna Politics: Perversion, Repression, or Subversion? Or Masks And/As Master-Y.” The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory. Ed. Cathy Schwichtenberg. Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1993. Print. Lindner, Christoph. Fictions of Commodity Culture: From the Victorian to the Postmodern. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. Print. Madonna. “Madonna - Like a Prayer [Official Music Video].” YouTube. Web. 1 Feb. 2014. _______. “Madonna - Material Girl [Official Music Video].” YouTube. Web. 1 Feb. 2014. Miklitsc, Robert. From Hegel to Madonna: Towards a General Economy of "Commodity Fetishism.” Albany, NY: State U of NY P, 1998. Print. Peñaloza, Lisa. “Consuming Madonna Then and Now: An Examination of the Dynamics and Structuring of Celebrity Consumption.” Madonnas Drowned Worlds: New Approaches to Her Cultural Transformations 1983-2003. Eds. Fouz-Hernández Santiago and Freya Jarman-Ivens. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. 161-176. Print. Read More