Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 28

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The Popular Culture Review

machismo as the female emotionalism gains renewed strength from
the lower musical register and its association with the male lover.
A key to the reversal here is the humor by which Madonha
suggests images in surprising and unexpected combinations. Irigaray
points out that the mimicry of the hysteric is a subversive strategy
useful to women in breaking away from the confines of language;
laughter is "the first form of liberation from secular oppression. Isn't
the phallic tantamount to the seriousness of meaning?" (163). And
according to Deleuze and Parnet, humor "constitutes a complete
bilingual system within the same language" (68-69) by allowing
signifiers to spill into one another, dislocating and re-locating
meaning.
One example of such an alternate language system occurs in
the rendering of the song "Like A Virgin." In her book about the
narrative strategies of women writers, Molly Hite explains that
Shug's pronouncement in The Color Purple that Celie is still a virgin
because she has not yet known sexual pleasure, redefines the notion of
virginity from its "patriarchal control of women's bodies . . . [by]
making the woman's own response the index of her experience" (117).
Similarly, in the hit song. Madonna pronounces that, despite past
sexual experience, she now feels "touched for the very first time"
(Like A Virgin). With characteristic blurring, however, she muddles
the powerful virgin-bride prescription by donning a Boy Toy belt and
basldng in sexual awareness. On the Blonde Ambition tour. Madonna
raised an even greater furor with this particular number. Two male
dancers, adorned with cone-shaped "breasts," flanked Madonna as
she lay across a bed, simulating nuisturbation and producing an even
more provocative complexion to the brazen lyrics where the act of
pleasure is entirely disconnected from the male or his organ, and the
"index" of the woman's experience is not only her response but her
power to create pleasure for herself. Here, both the notion of
virginity and that of pleasure are reconstructed.
Indeed, one of the many criticisms of Madonna seems to be her
inability to hold to a particular meaning for long. On the Who's That
Girl tour. Madonna declared, "I play a lot of characters . . . . And I'm
not like any of them. I'm all of them. I'm none of them" (Gilmore,
88). Further McClaiy remarks that "the strategies of Madonna's
songs are those of one who has radically conflicting subject positions"
(McClary 12). Along this same line, the album Like A Prayer pushes