Page 156 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

150 CULTURAL STUDIES

forms within Madonna’s oeuvre—the videos, the movie Truth or Dare (subject
of Chapters 7–9), the press and TV interviews, and the singles and albums
themselves, are treated as so many undifferentiated repositories of images and
discourses whose exceptional content implicitly explain her circulation.
Henderson discusses Justify My Love in relation to censorship debates around the
work of photographers Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe. She segues
smoothly from Madonna’s interview on TV’s Nightline to the images of the
video, to the lyrics of the song. The distinctions between the effects and meanings
of the productions and receptions of these media, the very things that make
Madonna the star and Forrest Sawyer the interviewer, are smoothed over.

Identity

The emphases on subcultural subversion and on static visions of representational
paradox come together in the feminist chapters at the book’s centre. A basic set
of propositions defines these chapters: those of Schwichtenberg, Kaplan, Pribram
and Morton (Roseann M.Mandziuk seems to concur with the interpretation of
Madonna as postmodern feminist while disagreeing with its efficacy as a political
strategy). It can be summarized in three steps. One, in the bourgeois culture of
the modern West, patriarchal relations find their justification in conceptions of
‘natural’, ‘unified’ individual identities which serve to determine gender roles. A
man is this, a woman is that. In Kaplan this is ‘the bourgeois illusion of “real”
individual gendered selves’ (p. 150), in Morton it is ‘the centrality and
naturalness of the masterful bourgeois subject’, a ‘belief in the individual as a
free, autonomous, unified subjectivity’ (p. 214–15), and so on. Two, these
conceptions find their justification in turn with recourse to the various
representationalist dichotomies: original and copy, real and artificial, depth and
surface, private and public. Three, Madonna, by ‘deconstructing’ these
oppositions, by ceaselessly ‘reinventing herself’, becomes the exemplar of a
feminist politics which exposes the illusion of representationalist dichotomies
and hence fixed gender identities.
This is a tall order, given that just about everything that gets said by or about
Madonna slots immediately into the most traditional individualism and
representationalism: ‘I do everything of my own volition. I’m in charge’ (p.
171), ‘she’s what she wants to be’ (p. 15), ‘I am my own painting’, ‘she’s her own
masterpiece’ (p. 167). How can pronouncements like these be interpreted as in
any way challenging to conventional conceptions of the self-making subject?
Because these theorists make the elementary mistake of confusing doubling with
deconstruction. In the postmodern feminist argument the fact that Madonna
continually makes, masks, mirrors, paints, is another self, becomes evidence of a
critical point she is supposedly making—that there is no identical self. But as the
articulated structure of the quotes above shows, the establishment of an identical
self always depends on precisely the same act of self-alienation. Identity is not
singular, the rhetorical establishment of an original unity as self-same requires