The Madonna scholar thread

[Guest CzarnaWisnia]

I'd like to create a good bibliography of references to scholarly works (books, chapters or articles) about Madonna (in any language). Please contribute if you know of anything that might be of interest. Here's what I have so far.

Maxime BLANCHARD (1996), « L’empire de Madonna: identification, fétichisme, subjectivité », dans Protée, vol. 24, no 2, p. 53-60.

Rosalind COWARD (1993), « Madonna et Marilyn : les sex-symbols ont-ils une date limite de vente ? », dans Ginette Vincendeau et Bérénice Reynaud [dir.], 20 ans de théories féministes sur le cinéma. Grande-Bretagne et États-Unis, Condé-sur-Noireau, CinémAction (no 67), 1993, p. 72-74.

Fran LLOYD (1994), Deconstructing Madonna, [city?], BT Batsford.

Karlene FAITH (1997), Madonna. Bawdy & Soul, Toronto, University of Toronto Press.

Santiago FOUZ-HERNANDEZ and Freya JARMAN-IVENS (dir.) (2004), Madonna's Drowned Worlds. New Approaches to her Cultural Transformations, Hants, Burlington, Ashgate Publishing.

Lisa FRANK and Paul SMITH (dir.) (1993), Madonnarama. Essays on Sex and Popular Culture, Pittsburg, San Francisco, Cleis Press.

Georges-Claude GUILBERT (2002), Madonna as Postmodern Myth, Jefferson, McFarland and Company.

Georges-Claude GUILBERT (2002), Le Mythe Madonna, [Paris?], Nouveau Monde.

Allan METZ and Carol BENSON (dir.) (1999), The Madonna Companion. Two Decades of Commentary, New York, Schirmer Books.

Judith A. PERAINO, Listening to the Sirens. Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Londres, University of California Press, 2006.

Pamela ROBERTSON (1996), Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna, Durham, London, Duke University Press.

Cathy SCHWICHTENBERG (1993), The Madonna Connection. Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory, Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford, Westview Press.

Olivier SÉCARDIN (2002), « L'autobiographie post-moderne, post-mortem : Madonna auto(bio)graphe », dans L'Esprit Créateur,
vol. 42, no 4 (hiver 2002),
p. 66-75. http://www.oliviersecardin.com/theorie/critique/2002/madonna-auto(bio)graphe.html

Olivier SÉCARDIN (2002), « Le fragment comme jouissance de l’Idiot ou pour une herméneutique de l’hybridité : Mallarmé, Madonna », L’Écriture fragmentaire : théories et pratiques, [city?], Presses universitaires de Perpignan, p. 341-359.

Olivier SÉCARDIN (2006), « Madonna disco Christ, performance et incarnation », dans Mouvement, l'indisciplinaire des arts vivants, no 41 (octobre-décembre), p. 62-67.

Adam SEXTON (dir.) (1993), Desperately Seeking Madonna, New York, Delta.

Jackie STACEY (1993), « Recherche différence, désespérément », dans Ginette Vincendeau et Bérénice Reynaud [dir.], 20 ans de théories féministes sur le cinéma. Grande-Bretagne et États-Unis, Condé-sur-Noireau, CinémAction (no 67), p. 34-38.

[Sloane]

I wanna read some of these books. Thanks for the list.

[Nikola]

Thank you CzarnaWisnia.

[Guest whatatramp]

Madonna -- Finally, a Real Feminist

By Camille Paglia; Camille Paglia, author of "Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson," teaches at the University of the Arts.

Published: December 14, 1990

Madonna, don't preach.

Defending her controversial new video "Justify My Love" on "Nightline" last week, Madonna stumbled, rambled and ended up seeming far less intelligent than she really is.

Madonna, 'fess up.

The video is pornographic. It's decadent. And it's fabulous. MTV was right to ban it, a corporate resolve long overdue. Parents cannot possibly control television, with its titanic omnipresence.

Prodded by correspondent Forrest Sawyer for evidence of her responsibility as an artist, Madonna hotly proclaimed her love of children, her social activism and her condom endorsements. Wrong answer. As Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde knew, neither art nor the artist has a moral responsibility to liberal social causes.

"Justify My Love" is truly avant-garde, at a time when that word has lost its meaning in the flabby art world. It represents a sophisticated European sexuality of a kind we have not seen since the great foreign films of the 1950's and 1960's. But it does not belong on a mainstream music channel watched around the clock by children.

On "Nightline," Madonna bizarrely called the video a "celebration of sex." She imagined happy educational scenes where curious children would ask their parents about the video. Oh, sure! Picture it: "Mommy, please tell me about the tired, tied-up man in the leather harness and the mean, bare-chested lady in the Nazi cap." O.K., dear, right after the milk and cookies.

Mr. Sawyer asked for Madonna's reaction to feminist charges that, in the neck manacle and floor-crawling of an earlier video, "Express Yourself," she condoned the "degradation" and "humiliation" of women. Madonna waffled: "But I chained myself! I'm in charge." Well, no. Madonna the producer may have chosen the chain, but Madonna the sexual persona in the video is alternately a cross-dressing dominatrix and a slave of male desire.

But who cares what the feminists say anyhow? They have been outrageously negative about Madonna from the start. In 1985, Ms. magazine pointedly feted quirky, cuddly singer Cyndi Lauper as its woman of the year. Great judgment: gimmicky Lauper went nowhere, while Madonna grew, flourished, metamorphosed and became an international star of staggering dimensions. She is also a shrewd business tycoon, a modern woman of all-around talent.

Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising total control over their lives. She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive and funny -- all at the same time.

American feminism has a man problem. The beaming Betty Crockers, hangdog dowdies and parochial prudes who call themselves feminists want men to be like women. They fear and despise the masculine. The academic feminists think their nerdy bookworm husbands are the ideal model of human manhood.

But Madonna loves real men. She sees the beauty of masculinity, in all its rough vigor and sweaty athletic perfection. She also admires the men who are actually like women: transsexuals and flamboyant drag queens, the heroes of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, which started the gay liberation movement.

"Justify My Love" is an eerie, sultry tableau of jaded androgynous creatures, trapped in a decadent sexual underground. Its hypnotic images are drawn from such sado-masochistic films as Lililana Cazani's"The Night Porter" and Luchino Visconti's "The Damned." It's the perverse and knowing world of the photographers Helmut Newton and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Contemporary American feminism, which began by rejecting Freud because of his alleged sexism, has shut itself off from his ideas of ambiguity, contradiction, conflict, ambivalence. Its simplistic psychology is illustrated by the new cliche of the date-rape furor:" 'No' always means 'no'. " Will we ever graduate from the Girl Scouts? "No" has always been, and always will be, part of the dangerous, alluring courtship ritual of sex and seduction, observable even in the animal kingdom.

Madonna has a far profounder vision of sex than do the feminists. She sees both the animality and the artifice. Changing her costume style and hair color virtually every month, Madonna embodies the eternal values of beauty and pleasure. Feminism says, "No more masks." Madonna says we are nothing but masks.

Through her enormous impact on young women around the world, Madonna is the future of feminism.