Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 23
Like A Prayer: Female Desire
and Representation in the
Music and Image of Madonna
Following a decade of her popularity. Madonna's Blonde
Ambition tour, hotly contested video "Justify My Love," and the much
discussed concert film. Truth or Dare, continue to cast her in the
limelight, demonstrating that she remains a significant figure in the
music world, with the emphasis on "sign." From the beginning
Madonna's evocation of sexuality was intentional. She was quoted as
saying that "a lot of what I am about is just expressing sexual desire
and not really caring what people think about it" (Worrell, 81).
Following the dispute over "Justify My Love" with MTV, she
proclaim^, "These fantasies and thoughts exist in every person----- I
think the video is romantic and loving and has humor" (Holden,
Cl 3). Of course. Madonna's mimed laugh at the end of the video has
prompted a few critics to question whether the publicity-hungry star
is laughing at fans crazy enough to spend ten dollars to purchase a
video, banned by the only agency likely to air it. However, such
textual and contextual ambiguity has become a trademark of
Madonna's work, making her difficult to assess, and her antics nearly
impossible to pin down. Far from proposing any definitive analysis of
her work though, I want to identify her strategies of appropriation,
blurring, and saturation, which allow her to take a position as a
desiring subject vis-a-vis the culturally sexualized female body that
she uses, not only as her canvas—as western culture has always used
the female body—but also as her pen.
In This Sex Which Is Not One. Luce Irigaray characterizes
the condition of female pleasure within western culture as "what is
most strictly forbidden" (77), signifying "the greatest threat of all to
masculine discourse, representjing] its most irreducible 'exteriority,' or
exterritoriality'" (157).
Certainly, western philosophy and
psychoanalysis have usually portrayed female sexuality as a mirror
image of the male. Further, Teresa de Lauretis submits that this
identification as the reflection of male desire forces women to
function, in classical narrative, as the "topos" upon which the hero,
always identified as a male subject, inscribes himself. In this way.