Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) (3 page)

Gone is the “hot” Madonna who dares to challenge the status quo. There is nothing “fierce” or even interesting about the Vanity Fair photographs. And they do not evoke in me fierce response. Looking at them I just simply felt sad. After all her daring, her courageous challenging of sexist constructions of female sexuality, Madonna at the peak of her power has stopped pushing against the system. Her new image has no radical edge. The loss of that subversive style is all the more evident in Sex. Suddenly, nothing about Madonna’s image is politicized. Instead, with the publication of Sex, she assumes the role of high priestess of a cultural hedonism that seeks to substitute unlimited production and pursuit of sexual pleasure for a radical, liberating political practice, one that would free our minds and our bodies.

Sex pushes pervasive hedonism as an alternative to resistance. The shifting radical subjectivity that was the quintessential trademark of Madonna’s earlier opposition to conformist fixed identity was a daring to be different that was not expressive of shallow exhibitionism but of a will to confront, challenge, and change the status quo. I remember Madonna flaunting sexual assertiveness in early videos like “Material Girl,” telling Nightline
that she drew the line at violence, humiliation, and degradation of women. It is this subject position that has disappeared. As Susan Bordo reminds us in her essay “Material Girl: The Effacements of Postmodern Culture,” that will to be different “is won through ongoing political struggle rather than through the act of creative interpretation.” Ironically, it is precisely at this cultural moment when Madonna allies herself with the status quo that she insists on identifying herself as radical, declaring, “I see myself as a revolutionary at this point.” She asserts her belief that Sex will function politically, that it will “open some people’s minds,” presumably that it will lead viewers to accept and condone various sexual practices. The irony is, of course, that for those viewers who have always consumed a range of patriarchal pornographic material and/or progressive erotica, Sex offers no new images. Every time I open Sex I am reminded of a high school yearbook. The layout and design appear amateurish. The constant changing of typeface and style evoke memories of meetings about my high school yearbook where we agreed that anything goes and to let everyone’s desires be represented. This casual effect seems highly intentional in Sex. Where the faces of graduating seniors and their classmates might be, Madonna gives us diverse sexual images, many of which look as though they have been appropriated from Players, Playboy, On Our Backs, and so on, with of course one special difference—they all feature Madonna.

While this in-your-face collection of porn and erotica may seduce a mass public (particularly an audience of teenaged consumers) that might never have gone seeking these images in the many other places where they could be found, it is doubtful that it will change anyone’s view about sexual practices. Despite Madonna’s hype that would have the public believe she is the radical visionary introducing transgressive subject matter to a mass audience, the reality is that advertisements, videos, movies, and television were already exploiting these images. Madonna is
really only a link in the marketing chain that exploits representations of sexuality and the body for profit, a chain which focuses on images that were once deemed “taboo.” Not wanting to undermine her own hype, the material girl must argue that her images are different—original. The major difference, of course, is that the space she occupies as cultural entertainer and icon enables her to reach a much larger audience than traditional consumers of pornographic images or progressive erotica. Despite her hopes of radical intervention, the vast majority of readers seem to approach Sex like conventional consumers of pornography. The book is used to sexually excite, provoke, or stimulate voyeuristic masturbatory pleasure. Nothing radical about that.

The most radical aspect of Sex is its appropriation and use of homoerotic imagery. This use is not unique. Commenting on the way these acts of appropriation have become a new trend, Newsweek’s review of Sex asserted:

As gay-bashing has become one of the most common hate-crimes in America, gay iconography is bubbling up defiantly in mainstream media. Since Madonna first cast herself as Marilyn Monroe, she has played out the role of drag queen, using identity as a form of self-defense. In exchange for her genuine affection, she’s raided gay sub-culture’s closet for the best of her ideas … she isn’t just taking explicit sex mainstream; she is taking explicit homosex mainstream. In this she is a pioneer. Hard as it is to imagine a major celebrity of another era making a book as graphic as Sex, and surviving—it’s impossible to imagine anyone making one as gay.

In other words, within today’s cannibalistic market economy the willingness to consume homoerotic and/or homosexual images does not correspond to a cultural willingness to stand against homophobia or challenge heterosexism.

Patriarchal pornography has always appropriated and exploited homoeroticism. Within the larger context of pornographic sexual hedonism anything goes, and all taboos become part of the pleasure mix. This experience does not mean that the individuals consuming these images are not fiercely committed to maintaining heterosexism and perpetuating homophobia. Voyeuristic desire to look at, or experience through fantasy, sexual practices that in one’s everyday life might be perceived as taboo does not signal a rupture in the sexual status quo. That is why simply portraying these images, mass marketing them to a larger public, is in and of itself not a subversive intervention, though in some instances it may have a disruptive challenging impact.

Throughout Madonna’s career she has appropriated fascinating aspects of gay subcultures even as she has often framed gay experience in a stereotypically heterosexist and homophobic manner. (An example of this tendency is her insistence in the film Truth or Dare that her dancers, most of whom are gay and nonwhite, are “emotional cripples” who need her to “play mother,” guiding and disciplining them.) This kind of maternal/paternalism fits with a history of so-called sympathetic heterosexual framing of homosexual experience in popular culture which represents it as deviant, subversive, wild, a “horror” that is both fascinating and fun but always fundamentally a “horror.”

This unsubversive manner of representation jumps out from the pages of Sex. The initial pictures of Madonna with two lesbian sex radicals portrays them in scenarios that visually construct them as freaks. In various shots Madonna is positioned in relation to them in a manner that insists on the primacy of her image as the embodiment of a heterosexual norm, “the ideal feminine.” Visually placed in several photographs as voyeur and/or victim, she is at the center and the lesbian couple always marginalized. Homophobic constructions of gay sexual practice in mass media consistently reinforce the stereotypical notion that gay folks are predators, eager to feast upon the innocent.
Madonna is the symbol of innocence; the two lesbian women represent experience. Unlike her, they do not have firm, hard bodies, or wear on their faces the freshly made-up, well-fed, all-American look. One of the most powerful nonerotic or pornographic images in this sequence shows Madonna at a distance from the two women, looking anguished, as though she does not belong, as though being in their presence hurts. A study in contrast, Madonna consistently appears in these images as though she is with them but not of them. Posed in this way, her presence invites status quo readers to imagine that they too can consume images of difference, participate in the sexual practices depicted, and yet remain untouched—unchanged.

Embodying the highest expression of capitalist patriarchal pornographic power, Madonna emerges in Sex as the penultimate sexual voyeur. She looks, then asks that we look at her looking. Since all the while the reader of her opening remarks knows that we are not really seeing documentary photos but a carefully constructed sexual stage, we can never forget that our gaze is directed, controlled. We have paid for our right to look, just as Madonna has paid the two women to appear with her. Our gaze must always and only be directed at what she wants us to see. And this means that what appears to be a portrait of homoeroticism/homosexuality is merely a reflection of her voyeuristic perspective. It is that overdetermining perspective that shapes and informs the image of gay sexual practice we are allowed to see.

Within the sphere of Madonna’s pornographic gaze, gayness is reinscribed as a trope within the cultural narrative of patriarchal pornographic sexual hedonism. The gayness presented throughout Sex does not call for a recognition and acceptance of difference. It is instead a demand that difference be appropriated in a manner that diffuses its power. Hence, the consuming voyeuristic pornographic gaze violates the gay body and being by suggesting, via the mode of appropriation, that the site of
interrogation must always rest not with the homoerotic/homosexual presence but with a heterosexual center. Gayness then appears as merely an extension of heterosexual pleasure, part of that practice and not an alternative or fundamentally different expression of sexual desire.

Ultimately, images of homosexuality in Sex, though presented as never before to a mainstream audience, are not depicted in a manner that requires viewers to show any allegiance to, or understanding of, the context from which they emerge. Indeed, they are presented as though they come into being through the heterosexual imagination, thereby enabling heterosexual and/or homophobic audiences to share in Madonna’s voyeuristic relations, looking into and at “gayness,” without connecting that pleasure to any resistance struggle for gay rights, to any demand that they relinquish heterosexist power. As with the opening pages, the image of Madonna in a gay club surrounded by men evokes a will to violate—to enter a space that is at the very least symbolically, if not actually, closed—off limits. Even in the realm of male homoeroticism/homosexuality, Madonna’s image usurps, takes over, subordinates. Coded always in Sex as heterosexual, her image is the dominant expression of heterosexism. Mirroring the role of a plantation overseer in a slave-based economy, Madonna surveys the landscape of sexual hedonism, her “gay” freedom, her territory of the other, her jungle. No break with stereotypes here. And more importantly, no critical interrogation of the way in which these images perpetuate and maintain institutionalized homophobic domination. In the context of Sex, gay culture remains irrevocably linked to a system of patriarchal control framed by a heterosexist pornographic gaze.

Just as representations of gayness are not problematized in Sex neither is S/M. No longer an underground happening, S/M scenarios are among the sexual taboos exploited for profit. Such scenarios are now commonly enacted on prime time television
shows and in movies. Yet none of what we see in mainstream media (Sex is no exception) shows images of sex radicals who are committed to a vision of sexual pleasure that rests on mutual consent. Consent comes through communication. Yet the S/M we see both in mainstream media and in Sex is not about consent. It is the subject-to-subject dimension of S/M that is lost when symbols of these sexual practices are appropriated to shock or titillate. None of Madonna’s fictive S/M monologues foreground issues of agreement and consent. In both images and written text, S/M is represented solely as being about punishment. Narrow notions of sexual sadomasochism fail to characterize it as a sexual ritual that “works” issues of pain and power. Whatever the degree of punishment present, the point is ultimately pleasure.

In her all-knowing rap on S/M, Madonna assumes the role of teacher/authority, giving us truth learned from an authentic source: “I talked to a dominatrix once and she said the definition of S/M was that you let someone hurt you who you know would never hurt you. It’s always a mutual choice. You have an unstated agreement between you.” Yet in Madonna’s mind the choice is always to hurt or be hurt. It is this perversion of sex-radical practice that informs her assertion: “I don’t even think S/M is about sex. I think it’s about power, the struggle for power.” While S/M is about power, it’s about negotiation—the antithesis of competitive struggle.

By placing herself in the role of instructor and selling Sex as a how-to manual, Madonna dangerously usurps the progressive voices and bodies of diverse individuals engaged in S/M sexual practice. Her most reactionary take on S/M connotes heterosexual male violence against women with consensual sado-masochism. Prefacing her brief discussion of S/M, Madonna asserts:

I think for the most part if women are in an abusive relationship and they know it and they stay in it, they must be digging it. I
suppose some people might think that’s an irresponsible statement. I’m sure there are a lot of women in abusive relationships who don’t want to be, who are trapped economically; they have all these kids and they have to deal with it. But I have friends who have money and are educated and they stay in abusive relationships, so they must be getting something out of it.

Revealing that she is no expert on domestic violence, Madonna flaunts her ignorance with the same seductive arrogance of sexist men who have used the same faulty logic to condone, support, and perpetuate violence against women.

More than any visual image in Sex, these remarks signal Madonna’s break with feminist thinking. Reflecting a patriarchal standpoint, these statements are more than just irresponsible; they are dangerous. Madonna uses her position as cultural icon to sanction violence against women. And the tragedy of it all is that these statements are inserted in an utterly gratuitous manner. They are in no way connected to the visual images of heterosexual S/M. By making them, Madonna uses Sex as a platform to express right-wing antifeminist sentiments that, if uttered in another context, might have provoked public protest and outrage.

Concluding her declaration with the insistence that “the difference between abuse and S/M is the issue of responsibility,” Madonna neatly deflects attention away from the real issue of “choice.” To focus on choice rather than responsibility she would have had to acknowledge that within patriarchal culture, where male domination of women is promoted and male physical and sexual abuse of women is socially sanctioned, no open cultural climate exists to promote consensual heterosexual power play in any arena, including the sexual. Few women have the freedom to choose an S/M sexual practice in a heterosexual relationship. Contrary to Madonna’s assertions, female class
power rarely mediates male violence, even though it may offer a means of escape. No doubt Madonna knows this, but she is more concerned with courting and seducing an antifeminist public, a misogynist sexist audience that makes exactly the same pronouncements about women and abuse. A similar critique could be made of Madonna’s comments on pornography.