Core Post - Sabrina Sonner

I appreciated the perspective that Hooks’ article provided on Madonna, since watching Truth or Dare in class I struggled with viewing Madonna’s images of either appropriating or deconstructing. It felt like it could go either way, and as a white woman I didn’t think I should be the person to make that judgment. Obviously, Hooks cannot speak for the experiences of every black woman, nor does she attempt to, but the way that she contextualized Madonna in the context of intersectional arguments about race and gender helped me to better understand Madonna’s image.

The basic idea that Hooks says that Madonna tries to deconstruct is one of the expectations of gender and sexuality. Hooks elaborates on Madonna’s use of black culture to do so. She comments on Madonna’s early desire to be black and experience black culture, writing that “it is a sign of white privilege to be able to ‘see’ blackness and black culture from a standpoint where only the rich culture of opposition black people have created in resistance marks and defines us.” (Hooks, 158). This reminded me of conversations we’ve had earlier in class about black bodies being used as background images for white stories. Hooks writes that this makes some of Madonna’s apparent images of resistance appearing empty, as Madonna does not understand the full context of that which she appropriates. Hooks also writes of the way that Madonna uses black men as the pinnacle of masculine sexuality against which Madonna fights: “She longs to assert phallic power, and like every other group in this white supremacist society, she clearly sees black men as embodying a quality of maleness that eludes white men” (Hooks, 163). In Madonna’s attempts to deconstruct gendered expectations of female sexuality, she inadvertently plays straight the white, racial expectations of black sexuality. Hooks entire discussion of Madonna in this manner also helped me understand why, when I watched Truth or Dare, I found the relationship between Madonna’s image and the Marilyn Monroe image we discussed earlier in the semester to be one of the former recreating the latter in a time period with different sexual expectations of women, rather than one of deconstruction.