Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 23

Like A Prayer: Female Desire and Representation in the Music and Image of Madonna Following a decade of her popularity. Madonna's Blonde Ambition tour, hotly contested video "Justify My Love," and the much discussed concert film. Truth or Dare, continue to cast her in the limelight, demonstrating that she remains a significant figure in the music world, with the emphasis on "sign." From the beginning Madonna's evocation of sexuality was intentional. She was quoted as saying that "a lot of what I am about is just expressing sexual desire and not really caring what people think about it" (Worrell, 81). Following the dispute over "Justify My Love" with MTV, she proclaim^, "These fantasies and thoughts exist in every person----- I think the video is romantic and loving and has humor" (Holden, Cl 3). Of course. Madonna's mimed laugh at the end of the video has prompted a few critics to question whether the publicity-hungry star is laughing at fans crazy enough to spend ten dollars to purchase a video, banned by the only agency likely to air it. However, such textual and contextual ambiguity has become a trademark of Madonna's work, making her difficult to assess, and her antics nearly impossible to pin down. Far from proposing any definitive analysis of her work though, I want to identify her strategies of appropriation, blurring, and saturation, which allow her to take a position as a desiring subject vis-a-vis the culturally sexualized female body that she uses, not only as her canvas—as western culture has always used the female body—but also as her pen. In This Sex Which Is Not One. Luce Irigaray characterizes the condition of female pleasure within western culture as "what is most strictly forbidden" (77), signifying "the greatest threat of all to masculine discourse, representjing] its most irreducible 'exteriority,' or exterritoriality'" (157). Certainly, western philosophy and psychoanalysis have usually portrayed female sexuality as a mirror image of the male. Further, Teresa de Lauretis submits that this identification as the reflection of male desire forces women to function, in classical narrative, as the "topos" upon which the hero, always identified as a male subject, inscribes himself. In this way.