Home
Madonna: Bawdy & Soul (UTP $45 $19.95)
The most famous living woman was born Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone on August 16, 1958 in Bay City, Michigan. Her mother -- Madonna Louise Ciccone -- was French-Canadian.
Since her debut in 1982 Madonna has sold billions of dollars worth of recordings. Harvard, UCLA, Rutgers and Princeton are now among the many U.S. universities which offer accredited studies of Madonna.
As the second-most photographed female in history, she will likely be the subject of analytical study long after she leaves the pop charts. Currently opinion is divided. Norman Mailer says he fears Madonna. Renegade feminist Camille Paglia says she's a healthy role model.
"Feminism says 'No more masks,'" writes Paglia. "Madonna says we are nothing but masks.
"Through her enormous impact on young women around the world, Madonna is the future of feminism... She has introduced ravishing visual beauty and a lush Mediterranean sensuality into parched, pinched, word-drunk Anglo-Saxon feminism."
Although SFU's Karlene Faith doesn't share Camille Paglia's unbridled enthusiasm for Madonna, she admits to being a fascinated fan in Madonna: Bawdy & Soul (UTP $45 $19.95). "In my reading of her," says Faith, "she sees herself as an artist committed to the artifice of performance... Her postured performances often appeal... less to the visceral senses than to the critical or ironic mind.
"Mixing metaphors, just as Lenny Bruce repeated dirty words until he'd shaken the dirt out of them, so did Madonna take the teeth out of sex, through sheer, playful repetitive excess in her representations of it."
Faith's study doubles as a biography, recounting Madonna's career and her tempestuous love life. But the details are grist for analysis, not gossip. One of the critical tangents in Madonna: Bawdy & Soul is black critic bell hooks' allegation that Madonna's 'envy of blackness' and her co-option of Latino and Afro-American styles has resulted in an appropriation 'which denies the pain and white oppression behind the soul of blackness...'
"White folks who do not see black pain never really understand the complexity of black pleasure,' hooks wrote in 1992, 'And it is no wonder that when they attempt to imitate the joy in living they see as the 'essence' of soul and blackness, their cultural productions may have an air of sham and falseness that may titillate and even move white audiences yet leave many black folks cold."
To combat criticism that her videos have advocated sado-masochism, Madonna contends 'she's the boss', she's in control of everything she does. But it's hard not to question some of her choices.
In her book, Sex, Madonna invented a character named Lourdes, a dark-haired salesgirl who offered generous sex to a customer in a dressing room. Several years later Madonna named her baby, Lourdes, after the site in southwest France where, in 1858, a young woman named Bernadette had 18 visions of the Virgin Mary. In French, Lourdes is pronounced with one syllable whereas the name of Madonna's daughter is pronounced with two (Lourd-es).
As a child in smalltown, pre-TV Saskatchewan, Karlene Faith fantasized about being a drummer in an all-girl dance band. After moving to Montana with her parents, she landed a job at age 14 sorting records at KXGN, a 1400 kilowatt radio station in Glendive, Montana, population 12,000, where she later worked as a programmer.
She married at 18. Four children and thirteen years later, she graduated from University of Chicago. Faith began her extensive and ongoing advocacy work with women in prisons in 1972; she completed her Ph.D in History of Consciousness at the University of California in 1981.
Now a professor of criminology at SFU, Karlene Faith won the 3rd annual VanCity Book Prize for best B.C. book pertaining to women's issues with Unruly Women: The Politics of Confinement & Resistance (Press Gang). She was the J.S. Woodsworth Resident Scholar for the SFU Institute of the Humanities in 1990-91.
Faith's book-length study of Madonna follows hundreds of analytical articles (listed in her index) and Tim Riley's perceptive 1992 text for Madonna illustrated (Hyperion), published in the same year as Madonna's Sex (Warner Books).
0-8020-4208-2; 0-8020-8063-4
[BCBW 1997]
Since her debut in 1982 Madonna has sold billions of dollars worth of recordings. Harvard, UCLA, Rutgers and Princeton are now among the many U.S. universities which offer accredited studies of Madonna.
As the second-most photographed female in history, she will likely be the subject of analytical study long after she leaves the pop charts. Currently opinion is divided. Norman Mailer says he fears Madonna. Renegade feminist Camille Paglia says she's a healthy role model.
"Feminism says 'No more masks,'" writes Paglia. "Madonna says we are nothing but masks.
"Through her enormous impact on young women around the world, Madonna is the future of feminism... She has introduced ravishing visual beauty and a lush Mediterranean sensuality into parched, pinched, word-drunk Anglo-Saxon feminism."
Although SFU's Karlene Faith doesn't share Camille Paglia's unbridled enthusiasm for Madonna, she admits to being a fascinated fan in Madonna: Bawdy & Soul (UTP $45 $19.95). "In my reading of her," says Faith, "she sees herself as an artist committed to the artifice of performance... Her postured performances often appeal... less to the visceral senses than to the critical or ironic mind.
"Mixing metaphors, just as Lenny Bruce repeated dirty words until he'd shaken the dirt out of them, so did Madonna take the teeth out of sex, through sheer, playful repetitive excess in her representations of it."
Faith's study doubles as a biography, recounting Madonna's career and her tempestuous love life. But the details are grist for analysis, not gossip. One of the critical tangents in Madonna: Bawdy & Soul is black critic bell hooks' allegation that Madonna's 'envy of blackness' and her co-option of Latino and Afro-American styles has resulted in an appropriation 'which denies the pain and white oppression behind the soul of blackness...'
"White folks who do not see black pain never really understand the complexity of black pleasure,' hooks wrote in 1992, 'And it is no wonder that when they attempt to imitate the joy in living they see as the 'essence' of soul and blackness, their cultural productions may have an air of sham and falseness that may titillate and even move white audiences yet leave many black folks cold."
To combat criticism that her videos have advocated sado-masochism, Madonna contends 'she's the boss', she's in control of everything she does. But it's hard not to question some of her choices.
In her book, Sex, Madonna invented a character named Lourdes, a dark-haired salesgirl who offered generous sex to a customer in a dressing room. Several years later Madonna named her baby, Lourdes, after the site in southwest France where, in 1858, a young woman named Bernadette had 18 visions of the Virgin Mary. In French, Lourdes is pronounced with one syllable whereas the name of Madonna's daughter is pronounced with two (Lourd-es).
As a child in smalltown, pre-TV Saskatchewan, Karlene Faith fantasized about being a drummer in an all-girl dance band. After moving to Montana with her parents, she landed a job at age 14 sorting records at KXGN, a 1400 kilowatt radio station in Glendive, Montana, population 12,000, where she later worked as a programmer.
She married at 18. Four children and thirteen years later, she graduated from University of Chicago. Faith began her extensive and ongoing advocacy work with women in prisons in 1972; she completed her Ph.D in History of Consciousness at the University of California in 1981.
Now a professor of criminology at SFU, Karlene Faith won the 3rd annual VanCity Book Prize for best B.C. book pertaining to women's issues with Unruly Women: The Politics of Confinement & Resistance (Press Gang). She was the J.S. Woodsworth Resident Scholar for the SFU Institute of the Humanities in 1990-91.
Faith's book-length study of Madonna follows hundreds of analytical articles (listed in her index) and Tim Riley's perceptive 1992 text for Madonna illustrated (Hyperion), published in the same year as Madonna's Sex (Warner Books).
0-8020-4208-2; 0-8020-8063-4
[BCBW 1997]
Submitted on August 19, 2003 in By David.
