Outlaw Culture

Resisting Representations

bell hooks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781136767906
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

According to the Washington Post, no one who cares about contemporary African-American cultures can ignore bell hooks' electrifying feminist explorations. Targeting cultural icons as diverse as Madonna and Spike Lee, Outlaw Culture presents a collection of essays that pulls no punches. As hooks herself notes, interrogations of popular culture can b

1
POWER TO THE PUSSY

We don’t wannabe dicks in drag

I believe in the power of Madonna, that she has the balls to be the patron saint of new feminism.

—Kate Tentler, The Village Voice

In my twenties, I made my first pilgrimage to Europe. Journeying there was a necessary initiation for any young artist in the United States destined to lead a Bohemian life of intensity, a life on the edge, full of adventure. Nothing about being black, female, working class, growing up in a racially segregated Southern town, where the closest I ever came to ecstasy was during Sunday morning church service, made me think that the doors of avant-garde radical cool would be closed to me. Con-fined and restrained by family, region, and religion, I was inwardly homeless, suffering, I believed, from a heartbreaking estrangement from a divine community of radical artistic visionaries whom I imagined were longing for me to join them. In much pain, I spent my childhood years dreaming of the moment when I would find my way home. In my imagination, home was a place of radical openness, of recognition and reconciliation, where one could create freely.

Europe was a necessary starting place for this search. I believed I would not find there the dehumanizing racism so pervasive here that it crippled black creativity. The Europe of my imagination was a place of artistic and cultural freedom, where there were no limits or boundaries. I had learned about this Europe in books, in the writings of black expatriates. Yet this was not the Europe I discovered. The Europe I journeyed to was a place where racism was ever present, only it took the form of a passion for the “primitive,” the “exotic.” When a friend and I arrived in Paris, a taxi driver took us to a hotel where pictures of nude black females adorned the walls. Everywhere, I encountered the acceptance and celebration of blackness as long as it remained within the confines of primitivism.

Ironically, white Europeans were constantly urging me to join them in their affirmation of Europe as a more free, less racist, more culturally open place than the United States. At some point I was told that Europeans, unlike white Americans, had no trouble worshipping a black Madonna; this was proof that their culture was able to move beyond race and racism. Indeed, European friends insisted that I make a pilgrimage to Montserrat to see for myself. At the shrine of the Black Madonna I saw long lines of adoring white worshippers offering homage. They were praying, crying, longing to caress and touch, to be blessed by this mysterious black woman saint. In their imaginations her presence was the perfect embodiment of the miraculous. To be with her was to be in the place of ecstasy. Indeed, momentarily in this sanctuary, race, class, gender, and nationality had fallen away. In their place was a vision of hope and possibility. Yet this moment in no way altered the politics of domination outside, in that space of the real. Only in the realm of the sacred imaginary was there the possibility of transcendence. None of us could remain there.

My journey ended. I did not return home to become a Bohemian artist. My creative work, painting and writing, was pushed to the background as I worked hard to succeed in the academy, to become something I had never wanted to be. To this day I feel as imprisoned in the academic world as I felt in the world of my growing up. And I still cling to the dream of a radical visionary artistic community that can sustain and nurture creativity.

I share these memories and reflections as a preface to talking about Madonna as a cultural icon, to contextualize what she has represented for me. Early on, I was enamored of her not so much because I was “into” her music—I was into her presence. Her image, like that of the Black Madonna, evoked a sense of promise and possibility, a vision of freedom; feminist in that she was daring to transgress sexist boundaries; Bohemian in that she was an adventurer, a risk taker; daring in that she presented a complex, non-static ever-changing subjectivity. She was intense, into pleasure, yet disciplined. For me and many other young “hip” feminist women confined in the academy, Madonna was a symbol of unrepressed female creativity and power—sexy, seductive, serious, and strong. She was the embodiment of that radical risk-taking part of my/our female self that had to be repressed daily for us to make it in the institutionalized world of the mainstream, in the academy. For a long while, her transgressive presence was a beacon, a guiding light, charting the journey of female “feminist” artists coming to power—coming to cultural fulfillment.

These days, watching Madonna publicly redefine her persona away from this early politicized image of transgressive female artistry necessarily engenders in diverse feminist admirers feelings of betrayal and loss. We longed to witness the material girl enter mature womanhood still embodying a subversive feminist spirit. We longed for this, in part, to see serious radical female cultural icons manifesting the feminist promise that sexism would not always limit, inform, and shape our cultural identities and destiny. Deep down, many feminist Madonna admirers, ourselves entering mature womanhood, fear that this transition will signal the end of all forms of radicalism—social, sexual, cultural. We have so needed her transgressions. Women struggling to maintain fierce commitment to radical feminist womanhood in the face of a culture that rewards betrayal want to have a feminist icon who stands against the patriarchy, who “fights the power.” For a long time, Madonna appeared to be that icon. Since feminist thinking and the feminist movement are currently undermined by intense backlash, we long for female icons who show everyone that we can triumph despite fierce antifeminism. Ultimately, we know that feminist transformation of culture and society is even more directly threatened when those who were once advocates, supporters of feminist demands for an end to sexism and sexist oppression, act as though this is no longer a necessary and crucial agenda. Hence, our collective lament when it appears that Madonna will not fulfill that earlier sense of feminist promise and power.

Currently, Madonna is redefining her public persona in a manner that negates and erases her earlier support for feminist issues. The first hint of this major about-face was made public in the October 1992 issue of Vanity Fair with its display of Madonna as little-girl sex kitten. A frightening gap separated the radical vision of active female sexuality Madonna projects in the Vanity Fair interview with Maureen Orth (evocatively titled “The Material Girl’s Sexual (R)Evolution”) and the boring, conventional kiddie-porn type photographs accompanying the text. The image of a grown, over thirty, Madonna recreating herself as a little-girl sex kitten, presumably for the thrill of gaining and holding onto the sustained mass patriarchal pornographic gaze for as long as she can keep the public’s attention, exposes the way female aging in a sexist society can undermine any woman’s allegiance to radical politics, to feminism. What is the “material girl” to do when she has fast become a grown woman in an economy of cultural images where so much of her mass appeal was deeply rooted in the romance of rebellious youth? The re-creation of herself as little girl comes across primarily as an opportunistic attempt to sustain the image that she can be forever young. Starting over again as little-girl-on-the-playground sex symbol, Madonna abandons and betrays her earlier radical questioning of sexist objectifications of female sexuality, announcing via these photos that she consents to being represented within a field of image production that is over-determined by patriarchy and the needs of a heterosexist pornographic gaze.

Gone is the “hot” Madonna who dares to challenge the status quo. There is nothing “fierce” or even interesting about the Vanity Fair photographs. And they do not evoke in me fierce response. Looking at them I just simply felt sad. After all her daring, her courageous challenging of sexist constructions of female sexuality, Madonna at the peak of her power has stopped pushing against the system. Her new image has no radical edge. The loss of that subversive style is all the more evident in Sex. Suddenly, nothing about Madonna’s image is politicized. Instead, with the publication of Sex, she assumes the role of high priestess of a cultural hedonism that seeks to substitute unlimited production and pursuit of sexual pleasure for a radical, liberating political practice, one that would free our minds and our bodies.

Sex pushes pervasive hedonism as an alternative to resistance. The shifting radical subjectivity that was the quintessential trademark of Madonna’s earlier opposition to conformist fixed identity was a daring to be different that was not expressive of shallow exhibitionism but of a will to confront, challenge, and change the status quo. I remember Madonna flaunting sexual assertiveness in early videos like “Material Girl,” telling Nightline that she drew the line at violence, humiliation, and degradation of women. It is this subject position that has disappeared. As Susan Bordo reminds us in her essay “Material Girl: The Effacements of Postmodern Culture,” that will to be different “is won through ongoing political struggle rather than through the act of creative interpretation.” Ironically, it is precisely at this cultural moment when Madonna allies herself with the status quo that she insists on identifying herself as radical, declaring, “I see myself as a revolutionary at this point.” She asserts her belief that Sex will function politically, that it will “open some people’s minds,” presumably that it will lead viewers to accept and condone various sexual practices. The irony is, of course, that for those viewers who have always consumed a range of patriarchal pornographic material and/or progressive erotica, Sex offers no new images. Every time I open Sex I am reminded of a high school yearbook. The layout and design appear amateurish. The constant changing of typeface and style evoke memories of meetings about my high school yearbook where we agreed that anything goes and to let everyone’s desires be represented. This casual effect seems highly intentional in Sex. Where the faces of graduating seniors and their classmates might be, Madonna gives us diverse sexual images, many of which look as though they have been appropriated from Players, Playboy, On Our Backs, and so on, with of course one special difference—they all feature Madonna.

While this in-your-face collection of porn and erotica may seduce a mass public (particularly an audience of teenaged consumers) that might never have gone seeking these images in the many other places where they could be found, it is doubtful that it will change anyone’s view about sexual practices. Despite Madonna’s hype that would have the public believe she is the radical visionary introducing transgressive subject matter to a mass audience, the reality is that advertisements, videos, movies, and television were already exploiting these images. Madonna is really only a link in the marketing chain that exploits representations of sexuality and the body for profit, a chain which focuses on images that were once deemed “taboo.” Not wanting to undermine her own hype, the material girl must argue that her images are different—original. The major difference, of course, is that the space she occupies as cultural entertainer and icon enables her to reach a much larger audience than traditional consumers of pornographic images or progressive erotica. Despite her hopes of radical intervention, the vast majority of readers seem to approach Sex like conventional consumers of pornography. The book is used to sexually excite, provoke, or stimulate voyeuristic masturbatory pleasure. Nothing radical about that.

The most radical aspect of Sex is its appropriation and use of homoerotic imagery. This use is not unique. Commenting on the way these acts of appropriation have become a new trend, Newsweek’s review of Sex asserted:

As gay-bashing has become one of the most common hate-crimes in America, gay iconography is bubbling up defiantly in mainstream media. Since Madonna first cast herself as Marilyn Monroe, she has played out the role of drag queen, using identity as a form of self-defense. In exchange for her genuine affection, she’s raided gay sub-culture’s closet for the best of her ideas … she isn’t just taking explicit sex mainstream; she is taking explicit homosex mainstream. In this she is a pioneer. Hard as it is to imagine a major celebrity of another era making a book as graphic as Sex, and surviving—it’s impossible to imagine anyone making one as gay.

In other words, within today’s cannibalistic market economy the willingness to consume homoerotic and/or homosexual images does not correspond to a cultural willingness to stand against homophobia or challenge heterosexism.

Patriarchal pornography has always appropriated and exploited homoeroticism. Within the larger context of pornographic sexual hedonism anything goes, and all taboos become part of the pleasure mix. This experience does not mean that the individuals consuming these images are not fiercely committed to maintaining heterosexism and perpetuating homophobia. Voyeuristic desire to look at, or experience through fantasy, sexual practices that in one’s everyday life might be perceived as taboo does not signal a rupture in the sexual status quo. That is why simply portraying these images, mass marketing them to a larger public, is in and of itself not a subversive intervention, though in some instances it may have a disruptive challenging impact.

Throughout Madonna’s career she has appropriated fascinating aspects of gay subcultures even as she has often framed gay experience in a stereotypically heterosexist and homophobic manner. (An example of this tendency is her insistence in the film Truth or Dare that her dancers, most of whom are gay and nonwhite, are “emotional cripples” who need her to “play mother,” guiding and disciplining them.) This kind of maternal/paternalism fits with a history of so-called sympathetic heterosexual framing of homosexual experience in popular culture which represents it as deviant, subversive, wild, a “horror” that is both fascinating and fun but always fundamentally a “horror.”

This unsubversive manner of representation jumps out from the pages of Sex. The initial pictures of Madonna with two lesbian sex radicals portrays them in scenarios that visually construct them as freaks. In various shots Madonna is positioned in relation to them in a manner that insists on the primacy of her image as the embodiment of a heterosexual norm, “the ideal feminine.” Visually placed in several photographs as voyeur and/or victim, she is at the center and the lesbian couple always marginalized. Homophobic constructions of gay sexual practice in mass media consistently reinforce the stereotypical notion that gay folks are predators, eager to feast upon the innocent. Madonna is the symbol of innocence; the two lesbian women represent experience. Unlike her, they do not have firm, hard bodies, or wear on their faces the freshly made-up, well-fed, all-American look. One of the most powerful nonerotic or pornographic images in this sequence shows Madonna at a distance from the two women, looking anguished, as though she does not belong, as though being in their presence hurts. A study in contrast, Madonna consistently appears in these images as though she is with them but not of them. Posed in this way, her presence invites status quo readers to imagine that they too can consume images of difference, participate in the sexual practices depicted, and yet remain untouched—unchanged.

Embodying the highest expression of capitalist patriarchal pornographic power, Madonna emerges in Sex as the penultimate sexual voyeur. She looks, then asks that we look at her looking. Since all the while the reader of her opening remarks knows that we are not really seeing documentary photos but a carefully constructed sexual stage, we can never forget that our gaze is directed, controlled. We have paid for our right to look, just as Madonna has paid the two women to appear with her. Our gaze must always and only be directed at what she wants us to see. And this means that what appears to be a portrait of homoeroticism/homosexuality is merely a reflection of her voyeuristic perspective. It is that overdetermining perspective that shapes and informs the image of gay sexual practice we are allowed to see.

Within the sphere of Madonna’s pornographic gaze, gayness is reinscribed as a trope within the cultural narrative of patriarchal pornographic sexual hedonism. The gayness presented throughout Sex does not call for a recognition and acceptance of difference. It is instead a demand that difference be appropriated in a manner that diffuses its power. Hence, the consuming voyeuristic pornographic gaze violates the gay body and being by suggesting, via the mode of appropriation, that the site of interrogation must always rest not with the homoerotic/homosexual presence but with a heterosexual center. Gayness then appears as merely an extension of heterosexual pleasure, part of that practice and not an alternative or fundamentally different expression of sexual desire.

Ultimately, images of homosexuality in Sex, though presented as never before to a mainstream audience, are not depicted in a manner that requires viewers to show any allegiance to, or understanding of, the context from which they emerge. Indeed, they are presented as though they come into being through the heterosexual imagination, thereby enabling heterosexual and/or homophobic audiences to share in Madonna’s voyeuristic relations, looking into and at “gayness,” without connecting that pleasure to any resistance struggle for gay rights, to any demand that they relinquish heterosexist power. As with the opening pages, the image of Madonna in a gay club surrounded by men evokes a will to violate—to enter a space that is at the very least symbolically, if not actually, closed—off limits. Even in the realm of male homoeroticism/homosexuality, Madonna’s image usurps, takes over, subordinates. Coded always in Sex as heterosexual, her image is the dominant expression of heterosexism. Mirroring the role of a plantation overseer in a slave-based economy, Madonna surveys the landscape of sexual hedonism, her “gay” freedom, her territory of the other, her jungle. No break with stereotypes here. And more importantly, no critical interrogation of the way in which these images perpetuate and maintain institutionalized homophobic domination. In the context of Sex, gay culture remains irrevocably linked to a system of patriarchal control framed by a heterosexist pornographic gaze.

Just as representations of gayness are not problematized in Sex neither is S/M. No longer an underground happening, S/M scenarios are among the sexual taboos exploited for profit. Such scenarios are now commonly enacted on prime time television shows and in movies. Yet none of what we see in mainstream media (Sex is no exception) shows images of sex radicals who are committed to a vision of sexual pleasure that rests on mutual consent. Consent comes through communication. Yet the S/M we see both in mainstream media and in Sex is not about consent. It is the subject-to-subject dimension of S/M that is lost when symbols of these sexual practices are appropriated to sho...