Cultural and media study of Madonna
Madonna studies (also called Madonna scholarship, Madonna-ology or Madonna phenomenon) refers to the study of the work and life of American singer-songwriter Madonna using an interdisciplinary approach incorporating cultural studies and media studies. In a general sense, it could refer to any academic studies devoted to her. After Madonna's debut in 1983, the discipline did not take long to start up and the field appeared in the mid-1980s, achieving its peak in the next decade. By this time, educator David Buckingham deemed her presence in academic circles as "a meteoric rise to academic canonisation". The rhetoric academic view of that time, majority in the sense of postmodernism, generally considered her as "the most significant artist of the late twentieth century" according to "The Nation", thus she was understood variously and as a vehicle to open up issues. Into the 21st century, Madonna continued to receive academic attention. At the height of its developments, authors of these academic writings were sometimes called "Madonna scholars" or "Madonnologists", and both E. Ann Kaplan and John Fiske were classified as precursors.
These studies analyzed several topics, but mostly Madonna studies involved in the study of gender, feminism, race, multiculturalism, sexuality, and the mass media. The wide-ranging resources used included her films, songs, live performances, books, interviews or her videos. National Geographic Society retrospectively called the field a "controversial" area in 2018; both Madonna studies and its authors received a variety of criticisms from academy and media outlets. Their proponents defended the field in almost equal measure. The Madonna studies played a major role for the direction of the American cultural studies, and brought pop artists to the foreground of scholarly attention.
Terminology.
The field is commonly called Madonna studies, and that phrase popped up in the late-1980s according to writer Maura Johnston. Although numerous academics like David Gauntlett used that term, scholars such as Janice Radway and Suzanna Danuta Walters to journalists like Maureen Orth have referred to them also as the Madonna-ology, or Madonnalogy. Another group of academics like E. Ann Kaplan called them the "Madonna Phenomenon" (MP), while others used the term Madonna scholarship.
The academic literature about Madonna, and its "own industry", was called as "the Madonna industry", "Madonna business" or the "Madonna boom" by a variety of scholars such as Simon Frith and Michael Bérubé or journalists like Jon Pareles. Critics like Robert Christgau called the "Madonnathinking" (Madonnathink) to commentaries about the singer, including the academic vein.
Origins and development.
Background.
Literary scholar Luis Cárcamo-Huechante from Harvard University puts the origins of the Madonna studies in the camp sensibility with the concept proposed in the 1960s by Susan Sontag, alluding to the "fascination of artifice and exaggeration" and what Madonna produced and put into circulation on an "industrial" and "planetary scale". Associate professor Diane Pecknold in "American Icons" (2006) also mentioned the camp sensibility and added that for most of the twentieth century, American scholars subscribed to the idea of an objective and universal canon and academics "were applying to Madonna the same sophisticated textual readings".
Chilean literary critic set its background with the British cultural studies when the phenomenon of celebrities began to be analyzed from the 1970s. American historian Richard Wolin, observed that the cultural studies approach blossomed during the 1980s, further adding that under Foucault's growing influence as well as that Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School, popular culture was viewed as a site of "resistance" to power. It was in this vein that "Madonna studies" blossomed into an academic cottage industry, Wolin said.
In "Madonna: A Biography" (2007), Mary Cross asserts that "the turmoil of new theory imported from Europe and the culture wars of ideology were bringing huge changes to the American academic world and the college curriculum. Whole departments devoted to popular culture and media studies emerged as well women's studies came into its own. And Madonna seemed to illustrate extremely well what was happening on the embattled cultural ramparts of late twentieth-century American. A perfect example of the whole theory of postmodernism the academic world was suddenly so immersed in".
According to professor Santiago Fouz-Hernández, author of "Madonna's Drowned Worlds" (2004), the abundance of critical work on the artist has almost certainly been part of broader developments in methodological trends in academia: the study of popular culture has come a long way since David Riesman described it in 1960 as "a relatively new field in American social science". During the growth of the Madonna Phenomenon, a reflection of contemporary attitutes were occurring in the perception of popular art, not only among academics but among mainstream pop critics as well.
Spread.
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"Madonna has been drafted into the staggeringly implausible role of spokeswoman of the values and professional interests of university instructors..."
—Daniel Harris, from "The Nation" ("Make My Rainy Day"- June 8, 1992).
Madonna first came to prominence in the mid-1980s, and the discipline did not take long to start up. "D Magazine" talked about the Madonna scholarship in 1986. Robert Miklitsch, associate professor of Ohio University dates the start of Madonna studies to 1987 and "Rocking Around The Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism &amp; Consumer Culture" by E. Ann Kaplan.
At this point, scholars like Kaplan and John Fiske represented Madonna to their academic audiences as a moment in which popular culture imitates critical theories of history, knowledge, and human identity. For them, Madonna quickly served "as a vehicle to open up issues", and she was placed at the center of the debate in the 20th century of high and popular culture. Various academics cited the point of view of Steven Anderson from "The Village Voice" (1989): "Madonna serves as the repository for our ideas about fame, money, sex, feminism, pop culture, even death". In numerous ways, Madonna was viewed as a multivalent figure, especially on women's roles.
"Of all the artists who rose to prominence through MTV, none has garnered more attention among academics than Madonna", wrote Murray Steib in "Reader's Guide to Music" (2013). From other reports, professor Michael Bérubé, asked why Madonna and not others acts (he cited Metallica, for instance). In his lengthy explanation, Bérubé said partly because most citizens of advanced Western democracies tend to be more engaged by and informed about Madonna or blockbuster movies. Other author suggested that "pop culture and Madonna are central to political issues", as by this point in the academic rhetoric, Madonna emerges not simply as a pop star but as "the most significant artist of the late twentieth century", according to "The Nation" in 1992. Anne Hull summarized that the singer come out as the "intrigue of academics, feminists, theologians, Marxists, sociologists, who want to take her apart and slide her under the microscope". Pecknold also wrote that "the fact that not only her work but her person was open to multiple interpretations contributed to the rise of Madonna studies".
Issues and approaches.
The Madonna studies is an interdisciplinary field of cultural studies, as well media and communication studies. Professors Andy Bennett (Griffith University) and Steve Waksman (Smith College), in the book "The Sage Handbook of Popular Music" (2014) commented that "Madonna studies itself took a variety of forms (and not all of these necessarily counted as cultural studies)". Anne Hull writing for "Tampa Bay Times" described the Madonna studies as "highly specialized" field. Miklitsch called it, a "mini-discipline". For Susan McClary all of these studies on Madonna was from an iconographic perspective, and for author David Chaney, these academic writings are "explicitly concerned with interpreting the fabrication and representational strategies in the star's persona".
Professor Pamela Robertson Wojcik of University of Notre Dame noticed that "media attention fuels academic discourse, which in turn fuels media discourse, and ultimately all becomes a part of 'Madonna'". In this line, Hull mentioned that everything "is data". In a review from "Dissertation Abstracts International: The humanities and social sciences. A" (2008), it was written that the Madonna scholarship focused "solely" on identity politics through formalist readings of cultural texts and their reception to explore the influence of the larger political economic, historical, and cultural contexts of capitalist society.
Madonna studies explored a broad range of scientific discourses. Cathy Schwichtenberg, a University of Georgia professor and editor of "The Madonna Connection", asserts that served as a "touchstone for theoretical discussions" on issues of morality, sexuality, gender relations, gay politics, multiculturalism, feminism, race, racism, pornography, and capitalism to name a few. Authors of "Encyclopedia of Women in Today's World, Volume 1" (2011) also added to the spectrum of topics the subcultural appropriation, politics of representation, consumer culture, the male gaze, body modification, reception studies, and postmodernism.
As with others observers, music professor Antoni Pizà Prohens also described the kindness of the academic writing discussed on Madonna, describing it as "a long and stretched "et cetera"". Among those topics, he added, globalization, immigrant rights, minority rights or sexual liberation. Another observer, Ricardo Baca added religion and spectacle. In addition, critic Daniel Harris, provides an overview of the academic reaction and approaches to Madonna studies arguing that "Madonna's work has spawned an entire industry of academic commentary" discussing her impact on music, feminism, sexuality, and dozens of more issues.
Her scholars also encompassed a broad spectrum of resources, including Madonna's work as her videos, performances, her music, films, interviews and so on. This usage was also known as a "texts" in the cultural studies branch. In "Madonna's Drowned Worlds", authors stated that "this tendency to turn Madonna into a classroom aid becomes most obvious when one examines the basic methods by which her admirers interpret her songs and videos".
Illustrative examples of reference works.
The Madonna studies saw its developments mostly at academic conferences, journals, courses, seminars, theses and books (including textbooks). The first scientific articles about Madonna appeared in 1985, only two years from her debut (1983) and experienced a boost in the early-1990s. According to academic Laurie Ouellette, Madonna scholars "have been leading classroom discussions and filling the pages of academic journals and textbooks since Madonna's early days as the Material Girl". Simon Frith, refers to this as the "boom in the academic Madonna business": "The books! the articles! the conferences! the courses".
Major American universities dedicated classes to the singer across the nation, mostly in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s. In this regard, Frenchman scholar Georges-Claude Guilbert wrote in the book "Madonna as Postmodern Myth" (2002), Princeton, Harvard, UCLA, the University of Colorado and Rutgers were the first to propose courses "about" Madonna. Liberal art colleges, such as 7 sisters also taught courses that examined Madonna's cultural influence. Professor Mathew Donahue lectures about Madonna in many of his classes at the Department of Popular Culture (the first Popular Culture department in the United States) of Bowling Green State University.
Although probably the United States saw more classes about Madonna than any other country, internationally various also informed about Madonna's courses in academic syllabus. In early 1990s, American editor Annalee Newitz commented that "Madonna occupies a definite place in the post-Western Cultures curriculum at universities everywhere". The University of Amsterdam created the elective academic discipline, "Madonna: The Music and the Phenomenon", within the Department of Musicology. In Finland, Rossi Leena-Maija from "Helsingin Sanomat" informed by 1995 that Madonna became part of "Finnish academic life". Simon Reynolds mentioned the example of scholars from Frankfurt, and educator David Buckingham of the Cambridge campus. In 2015, a group of scholars dedicated a Madonna class at the University of Oviedo, marking the first time Oviedo devoted a course to a female singer.
Texts.
In "Material Girls" (1995), Suzanna Danuta Walters held these academic writings, has produced at least one major academic text devoted to Madonna. On the report of Eric Weisbard, only Madonna books proliferated in the 1990s (compared to her fellows Michael Jackson and Prince), and the bulk coming from a new group of cultural studies academics, mostly women. According to professor Sheila Jeffreys there exists "a slew of scholarly books in postmodern language" about her.
Professor Jane Desmond from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign held that "the relevant bibliography is vast" in the Madonna studies, citing examples from Cathy Schwichtenberg ("The Madonna Connection") to Lisa Frank and Paul Smith ("Madonnarama") both from 1993. Another book from 1993 is "Deconstructing Madonna" (Fran Lloyd) that articulates Madonna in British rather than an American cultural perspective. Academics from Thomas Ferraro to Santiago Fouz-Hernández have identified others some core originating texts, like Karlene Faith's "Madonna, Bawdy &amp; Soul" (1997) and