Schwichtenberg (1993) explores the issue of gay and lesbian representational politics around Madonna within the context of the broader theoretical debate around a postmodern feminism.11 As Schwichtenberg (1993:7) contends, ‘Madonna’s postmodern interventions prey open a space in the mainstream to provide sexual minorities with visibility and confirmation’. She notes that much of Madonna’s later work—Express […]

The intersection of postmodernism, popular culture and political economy can be seen to coalesce around the issue of consumer culture, where, as Schwichtenberg (1993:9) notes, ‘star packaging and targeted audiences are critical for profitability’. Susan Bordo’s essay ‘Material Girl: The Effacements of Postmodern Culture’ (1993b) considers those aspects of the materiality of ‘the postmodern body’ […]

Madonna’s high measure of success as ‘a postmodern phenomenon’ highlights the interplay between postmodernism and consumerism, and her transformative identity can be understood at the level of materiality and simulation. At a material level Madonna’s ability to market herself and to accommodate the ‘late capitalist marketplace’ (Schwichtenberg 1993:9) addresses the needs of ‘the media, beauty […]

The relationship between Madonna’s representational politics and feminist theory is a complicated one. A number of theorists have attempted to investigate the problem of representational politics by engaging with different dimensions of the ‘Madonna paradigm as an equivocal challenge to feminism as it is both lived and theorized within patriarchal culture’ (Schwichtenberg 1993:8). E. Ann […]

In recent years much has been written about what is seen by some writers as a ‘site of struggle’ within popular culture—the representation of Madonna as a postmodernist postfeminist cultural phenomenon. The following analysis considers some of the debates around Madonna positioned at the interface of postfeminism and popular culture. A collection of essays which […]

The location of popular culture at the intersection of debates around modernism and postmodernism can be seen to coalesce around a number of themes, including representational politics, (subcultural) identities and cultural theory. Centrally placed in many of these debates has been the popular cultural phenomenon of Madonna, which can act as a valuable case study […]

Race and ethnicity: black formations and representations Lawrence Grossberg (1993:23), in identifying ‘formations of cultural studies’, identifies ‘a specific [cultural] formation around the biographical figure of Stuart Hall and intellectual and political commitments of Marxism’. Hall’s role in the development of cultural studies can be seen in terms of Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectual’ or Foucault’s ‘specific […]

The distinctions between high/low culture and serious/popular culture within a modernist frame of reference have been increasingly broken down by the emergence of cultural studies. Sheridan (1995:89) describes cultural studies as a wide-ranging area of enquiry which includes media studies and popular culture, and which incorporates ‘everyday practices and cultural habits as well as texts […]

The intersection of postmodernism with popular culture, which some have dismissed as trivialising serious political debate, is profoundly political—if by ‘political’ it is meant an engagement with the ‘politics of everyday life’. The terrain of popular culture articulated in a range of cultural forms and expressed in a range of cultural styles is fundamentally about […]

A number of feminist theorists and writers have commented on Huyssen’s work. Probyn (1987:353) claims that Huyssen’s argument is framed around a range of binary oppositions such as high/low and masculine/feminine. Within this framework ‘Mass culture is conceived of solely as the denigrated as is the feminine reader in her affinity with the former.’ Probyn […]