What exactly is she becoming? (Reading Response)

All in one posse, Butler, hooks and Bordo are an interesting extension of the masquerade and wearing womanliness discussion from a few weeks ago. bell hooks’ piece on Madonna seems a good dose of reality to Butler’s notions of gender performance and corporeal transgression, suggesting the frequent fate of transgressive performance in the hands of postmodern formations, with a special shout-out to post-feminism. As much as I think that Butler still offers a perhaps unsurpassable paradigm of gender construction and a most useful notion of performance, leaving slippery but nonetheless real spaces of potential contestation, it’s difficult to read the trio (Butler, hooks, and Bordo) today without some cynicism. In an attempt to be cured, I want to pose the question: What do we do with Butler in an era of sort-of-still-here third-wave feminism and the aggressive onslaught of post-feminism? Katy Perry narrates the soundtrack for commodity lesbianism (Kelly gestured toward this in an earlier post) and the Sex and the City movie is considered a legitimate articulation of feminist principles (not making this up – I have 3 undergrad papers to prove it). Transgression is everywhere and nowhere; it dances mostly in place, reproducing the same old binaries and power differentials, all under the protection of a postmodern everything-is-constructed and therefore everything-is-equally-legitimate ethos. I am admittedly conflating multiple transgressions under one faux umbrella, but I am wondering how (with Butler’s designation of the body as a surface of gender inscription and regulation and therefore also a place where potential ruptures can occur) we can shift the analytic to prevent its constant deployment of heavily gendered, unquestionably heteronormative, spectacular corporeality.
Madonna, who, as Bordo notes most often traffics as something of a postmodern, feminist icon, a woman who wears her transgression fearlessly (I’ll resist the “pit-bull with lipstick” connections here) is a perfect example. I tend to side with hooks here - her transgression is undoubtedly limited, superficial, and in many ways, reproductive of white male centrality. Most importantly, I would argue that its looming danger lies precisely in its claim to transgression, to what Butler would likely call “becoming.” Madonna of course, according to hooks, is hardly becoming, or transforming. Instead, she violently and aggressively co-opts blackness (as only a white woman can, but I’ll return to that) in order to taunt the white male gaze. The obvious implication here, and one that I don’t think hooks explores nearly far enough, is the latent fear of miscegenation she toys with and ultimately reaffirms. Interracial sex, and specifically between black men and white women, is always haunted by what Valerie Smith calls the specter of rape. It’s an interesting, but double-edged sword: she lays bear the performance of femininity, the careful masquerade (why, in Julie Burchill’s words, brunettes have made the best blondes), but does so at the expense of those her own presence “others.” Reading hooks analysis on Madonna, I kept fighting back a familiar Paul Mooney quote: “everybody wants to be black, but don’t nobody want to be black” (you may notice a word has been substituted for my own white liberal comfort).
A corollary notion I want to address is that when thinking about transgressive performance and both gender and racial passing, it’s imperative to acknowledge who is allowed mobility and passing – white women. Again, hooks glosses over this briefly, but I think it’s a significant impediment to the possibilities of transgressive performance.