The reading from bell hooks offered a really necessary perspective on Madonna, especially as coupled with the Cvetkovich article. The fact that Madonna and her image have created real pain among black people, particularly black women, is essential to recognize, to not brush over in considering her image. Madonna has a long history of appropriating from black culture for her music and that constitutes a large part of her success, as hooks argues. Her gaining power from that appropriation is hugely problematic. She is certainly not the only person to do that, and hooks puts that appropriation into the context of her potential radicalism around sexuality and femininity in a valuable way, a point that works well with Cvetkovich's investigation into Madonna's access to power and what that means for women for generally. There is a lot happening here and as I think the hooks article does a good job of acknowledging, people can still gain positive things from Madonna's work around womanhood and sexuality and the liberatory implications of that work. And also people are very genuinely hurt by what Madonna does, because much of her success is rooted in both the privileges of her whiteness and in her own deliberate actions to appropriate from black culture.
I think some folks see that analysis of Madonna, or of any individual celebrity and respond with anger or frustration, upset by just how much is being pinned on a single person when the structures of inequality and power dynamics and etc. are arguably much, much larger than they are. And that's real, to some degree. But I would say we do really need to be able to individualize this conversation and critique, even as it's fair to say we should be careful about how we apply that specific focus (and this tension then gets even messier today, given the way that social media and so on gives people access to individuals--independent artists, for example--on a level that was previously reserved for celebrities, thus opening them up for a degree of critique that is suddenly applied in ways that are disproportionate to the person's power, status, insulation, etc., but that's truly a whole other and more complex conversation). We can't only talk in general terms, because then there is no way to reckon with the results of people's actions, images, etc., because those results are felt deeply and are felt individually. We have to be able to look at someone like Madonna and speak about how she, as a single specific person, is enabled and empowered by white supremacy and cultural appropriation. That doesn't mean we're setting all the blame on her shoulders, something that I think the Cvetkovich article also illuminated to some degree, as what I drew from that article was largely a reflection on that tension between making something out of femininity when femininity has always existed within deeply sexist and patriarchal culture, in a way that means we may never be able to pull those two things apart. People may be stuck within systems in a very real way; Madonna can't disentangle herself from the complexities of representing female sexuality any less than she can remove herself from that fact of her privilege as a white person, a white woman, etc.
It's important that we're able to talk about all of this, that we are able to narrow our focus to Madonna as an individual and consider her actions and their real impact. And also that we are able to talk about the systems within which those actions are taking place and what it means to consider how to confront those systems in ways that will require both individual and mass action across such a wide variety of forms. And generally, I think the hooks article did a very effective job of breaking down how such tensions around race and femininity, power and privilege, appropriation and empowerment, break down in the specific case of Madonna.
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