MADONNARAMA: Essays On Sex and Popular Culture

edited by Lisa Frank and Paul Smith (Cleis Press)

Madonnarama is about Sex - Madonna's Sex, the mylar-wrapped book published alongside her Erotica album in 1992. Though prepublication hype (censorship/boycott threats, etc. etc.) and a limited press run conspired to make it hard to come by, Sex was everywhere. Fans and non-fans alike were talking and reading about the pictures of the "Gone Platinum Blond" indulging her naughty fantasies. Dismissed critically as a bore (a "virtual non-event"), Sex sold a half million copies within weeks of its release and disappeared from the public sphere the morning after.

To wit: "The project of Madonnarama is, quite simply, to put some of those dismissed-as-boring issues back on the table." Editors Lisa Frank and Paul Smith are quite pointed in re-creating Sex with a mission, in using the publishing event to bring to light ways mass media orchestrate "public" disapproval. They expose the empty rhetoric behind media-styled defenses of the the First Amendment and call for "free-speech on the topics of sex, power and capital, all pronounced a bit more loudly than is polite and a bit longer than is 'interesting.'"

Once you get beyond the irony of focusing on Madonna as a subject due attention, Madonnarama is about media access for those who don't get it. It's not about Madonna, but what she does (or does not) represent. Exactly what that means changes not only between the 16 essays, but within each. Most poignant in this regard is John Champagne, who lists ten possible readings of Madonna's photo with Big Daddy Kane and Naomi Campbell. Regarding Big Daddy's male member, he observes:

1) The photograph is progressive in that it refuses to reveal Kane's penis, and thus refuses to "reduce" the figure to the black man and his penis.

2) The photograph is reactionary in that it refuses to reveal Kane's penis, and thus maintains the lie of the equation "penis = phallus." . . .

3) The photograph is reactionary in that it refuses to reveal Kane's penis, and thus denies a certain genital sexuality to the figure of the black male.

. . . and so on. Other than its healthy, sex-positive, lesbigay slant, these essays run the critical spectrum. Madonna's stance is feminist, anti-feminist, too gay, not-gay-enough, arousing, and, yes, sometimes dull. Of the several themes, the most provoking involve the junction between race and sex. Here, Madonna's appropriation of gay iconography is much like her use of "blackness." As Michael Warner describes, "The gay men in the book seem to be there more as suppliers of sexual glamour than as actual sexual partners . . . It's more about their exotic appeal for a spectator than it is about gay sex." The same could be said of Big Daddy Kane.

Yet, as several writers point out, Sex offers gay and lesbian (like African American and other "minority") communities something they want - representation. As Warner states, people like Sex not because it's a turn-on. They think the book brings queers public visibility. But, as bell hooks' points out, "the willingness to consume homoerotic and/or homosexual images does not correspond to a cultural willingness to stand against homophobia or challenge heterosexism." i.e. You can listen to hiphop and still be a racist. Throughout Madonnaramma, Sex is repeatedly paralleled to Ice-T's "Cop Killer," a controversy that, unlike Madonna's, led to his "voluntary" departure from Time-Warner. So when Douglas Crimp writes that Madonna "can be as queer as she wants to, but only because we know she's not," it becomes apparent why Ice-T can't be as violent.

Madonnarama is enough to convince me that if

more academics spent time relating critical theory to popular culture, the world would be a better place (and so would its libraries). Excellent, user-friendly writing across the board. The intro alone convinced me; I read the book in one night and that doesn't happen often. (Carrie McLaren)

Go to Stay Free! #6 Table of Contents.