Core Post 4 - Tucker Rayl

bell hooks gets close to pinpointing some of the trouble with Madonna, but ends up really missing the mark. Madonna certainly profits from her appropriation of blackness (house music, vogueing, the Black church in "Like a Prayer") as well as from her use of exoticized images of Japanese, Indian, and Latin American cultures. But hooks seems to get Hung Up on Madonna's display of sexuality, and tries to draw it in with her tendency to appropriate, which I think is a bit of a reach.

hooks writes "in her most recent appropriations of blackness, Madonna almost always imitates phallic black masculinity," (160). As evidence, hooks pulls the image of Madonna grabbing her crotch, which she points out is a reference to Michael Jackson, but more broadly insinuates that it is a gesture relating to Madonna's penis envy and a latent desire to be a black man. I think bell hooks gets a bit too Freudian here for this argument to work. While I definitely see Madonna referencing MJ with the crotch grab (and perhaps she does have an interest in casting herself in his image, which becomes tricky to navigate given Jackson's blackness), I think Madonna is obviously making the point that she is a sexually liberated woman, that she will control the exhibition and profit of her sexuality as she sees fit (even if this isn't totally the case).

What angers me most about bell hooks' essay is that she makes a few interesting points and draws on her own view of Madonna as an icon, but spends no time fleshing out these ideas. She begins the piece by writing about how most black women she knows want nothing to do with Madonna - I wanted bell hooks to dig in to this. She should have explored the "blonde ambition as white supremacy" point she was beginning to make. In all her iterations, Madonna so clearly codes herself as an outsider, but always keeps her blonde hair to point out the artifice of it all. But blonde hair, being such a symbol of Eurocentricity, maintains Madonna's whiteness and her freedom to continually transform herself. Madonna's aesthetic transformations have the set the standard for all pop divas since the 80's, so this could have been such an eye-opening point to make. If only.