10/10 reading response

Many of my frustrated responses to the seemingly irresolvable contradictions I called attention to in the fashion article I posted a couple of hours ago make more sense in light of Bordo's assessment of the fashionable body. The breezy tone of the fashion article can be seen in a similar way as the defense "It's only fashion" functions for Bordo - as a simultaneous affirmation of the free play that fashion provides, and a defense mechanism from cultural critique by way of associating fashion with "women's eternally superficial values" (253). (For what it's worth, when I went to quote Bordo, all I could think of was Michael Kors sing-songily admonishing Santino Rice to "Lighten up, it's just fashion" in ProjRun season two.)

I also found her discussion of Madonna fascinating, especially when read in conjunction with bell hooks' interpretation of Madonna's videos. I think that considering Madonna's fandoms (which both hooks and Bordo do, Bordo with an eye for young women's views and hooks thinking about drag queens) reveals an interesting collision between Madonna, women's and gay men's bodies, race, gender play, and musical aesthetics that I want to briefly consider.

Bordo, in her final chapter, complicates Judith Butler's notion of the discursive body by arguing that the meaning of the body is contingent on its location and who is watching (i.e. "drag" as abstract concept versus a drag queen in a gay bar or on the Phil Donahue Show). I feel like this conflicts with her reading of "Open Your Heart," in which she dismisses an "abstract" consideration of the video as a "purely formal text" in favor of an assertion that "there is a dominant position in this video, despite the 'ambiguities' it formally contains" (273-4). I don't necessarily disagree with her diagnosis of objectification, but I do think that given her nuanced discussion of the relationship between viewers and bodies in the subsequent chapter, there is something to be said for not limiting the possible range of productive viewer responses - there are gray areas between unqualified celebration and unqualified critique of a cultural object. Here, I think Madonna's fandom comes into play, and Bordo's division of possible responses to the video between "desire for" and "desire to become" Madonna limitingly presumes which gender will make which choice. With regard to the presence of gay men in the fashion industry as well as in Madonna's fandom, I think it may be useful 1) to also consider a "desire to create" and 2) to think about how the "desire for" plays out differently when heterosexual men are underrepresented in Madonna's fandom (i.e. the "real world" viewers of the video). Is the video then still a simple enactment of the male, objectifying gaze? What do we make of the little boy's gender play outside of the theatre (unaddressed by Bordo)? What about the relationship between body policing in Madonna herself and in her gay male and female fandom? What about the correlations in self-critical body attitudes/body image between gay men and straight women, are those related to this discussion?



I'm not necessarily positing the reconsideration of Madonna's fans as a liberatory or "transgressive" option. As bell hooks argues with regard to drag queens of color, the labor to "become" Madonna, or to enact her brand of "Blonde Ambition," often resulted in an even more marginalized position that Madonna herself was quick to reinforce. But it's interesting to see the ways in which she has continued to modify her body and incorporate black culture into her musical aesthetic and music videos. Reading bell hooks and Bordo together, and then watching a latter-day Madonna video like "Hung Up," all of the strands of critique seem to come together, chillingly crystallizing in the collision of the blond-haired, blue-eyed ABBA sample with a futuristic disco beat (itself a genre which traces its origin to New York Black and Latino communities) which broadcasts in (colonizes?) the street corner, the subway, and (visually echoing Like a Prayer's climax) in a hip-hop dance club, where Madonna both co-opts the trendy moves of the street and teaches her own Jazzercise/Tae-bo-esque maneuvers.