by Hooks, Bell
Just as representations of gayness are not problematized in Sex neither is S/M. No longer an underground happening, S/M scenarios are among the sexual taboos exploited for profit. Such scenarios are now commonly enacted on prime time television shows and in movies. Yet none of what we see in mainstream media (Sex is no exception) shows images of sex radicals who are committed to a vision of sexual pleasure that rests on mutual consent. Consent comes through communication. Yet the S/M we see both in mainstream media and in Sex is not about consent. It is the subject-to-subject dimension of S/M that is lost when symbols of these sexual practices are appropriated to shock or titillate. None of Madonna’s fictive S/M monologues foreground issues of agreement and consent. In both images and written text, S/M is represented solely as being about punishment. Narrow notions of sexual sadomasochism fail to characterize it as a sexual ritual that “works” issues of pain and power. Whatever the degree of punishment present, the point is ultimately pleasure.
In her all-knowing rap on S/M, Madonna assumes the role of teacher/authority, giving us truth learned from an authentic source: “I talked to a dominatrix once and she said the definition of S/M was that you let someone hurt you who you know would never hurt you. It’s always a mutual choice. You have an unstated agreement between you.” Yet in Madonna’s mind the choice is always to hurt or be hurt. It is this perversion of sex-radical practice that informs her assertion: “I don’t even think S/M is about sex. I think it’s about power, the struggle for power.” While S/M is about power, it’s about negotiation—the antithesis of competitive struggle.
By placing herself in the role of instructor and selling Sex as a how-to manual, Madonna dangerously usurps the progressive voices and bodies of diverse individuals engaged in S/M sexual practice. Her most reactionary take on S/M connotes heterosexual male violence against women with consensual sado-masochism. Prefacing her brief discussion of S/M, Madonna asserts:
I think for the most part if women are in an abusive relationship and they know it and they stay in it, they must be digging it. I suppose some people might think that’s an irresponsible statement. I’m sure there are a lot of women in abusive relationships who don’t want to be, who are trapped economically; they have all these kids and they have to deal with it. But I have friends who have money and are educated and they stay in abusive relationships, so they must be getting something out of it.
Revealing that she is no expert on domestic violence, Madonna flaunts her ignorance with the same seductive arrogance of sexist men who have used the same faulty logic to condone, support, and perpetuate violence against women.
More than any visual image in Sex, these remarks signal Madonna’s break with feminist thinking. Reflecting a patriarchal standpoint, these statements are more than just irresponsible; they are dangerous. Madonna uses her position as cultural icon to sanction violence against women. And the tragedy of it all is that these statements are inserted in an utterly gratuitous manner. They are in no way connected to the visual images of heterosexual S/M. By making them, Madonna uses Sex as a platform to express right-wing antifeminist sentiments that, if uttered in another context, might have provoked public protest and outrage.
Concluding her declaration with the insistence that “the difference between abuse and S/M is the issue of responsibility,” Madonna neatly deflects attention away from the real issue of “choice.” To focus on choice rather than responsibility she would have had to acknowledge that within patriarchal culture, where male domination of women is promoted and male physical and sexual abuse of women is socially sanctioned, no open cultural climate exists to promote consensual heterosexual power play in any arena, including the sexual. Few women have the freedom to choose an S/M sexual practice in a heterosexual relationship. Contrary to Madonna’s assertions, female class power rarely mediates male violence, even though it may offer a means of escape. No doubt Madonna knows this, but she is more concerned with courting and seducing an antifeminist public, a misogynist sexist audience that makes exactly the same pronouncements about women and abuse. A similar critique could be made of Madonna’s comments on pornography.
Madonna’s appropriation of gayness as the sign of transgression, as well as her preoccupation with S/M, usually deflects attention away from her use of racially charged imagery. Critics who applaud the way she draws mainstream attention to gay sexuality say nothing about the issue of race. Yet the cultural narrative of white supremacy is woven throughout the visual and written text of Sex. Despite her personal history as a dark ethnic from an immigrant background, Madonna’s mega-success is tied to her representation as a blond. By assuming the mantle of Marilyn Monroe, she publicly revealed her longing to leave behind the experience of her ethnic and bodily history to inhabit the cultural space of the white feminine ideal. In his essay “White,” film critic Richard Dyer describes the way Hollywood’s idealization of white femininity converges with aesthetic standards informed by white supremacy. Emphasizing that the image of Monroe “is an inescapably and necessarily white one,” Dyer calls attention to the fact that “the codes of glamour lighting in Hollywood were developed in relation to white women, to endow them with a glow and radiance that has correspondence with the transcendental rhetoric of popular Christianity.” Significantly, only “white”-skinned females could be imagined as innocent, virtuous, transcendent. This fact affirms my white European friends’ assertion that there is no cultural space within the United States that would allow white folks to deify black femaleness, to worship a black Madonna. Racism and sexism combine to make it impossible for white folks, and even some black folks, to imagine a black Madonna, since such figures are representations of purity and innocence. Within racist and sexist iconography the black female is stereotypically portrayed as experienced and impure. Hence, she can never embody that Birth-of-a-Nation fragile womanhood that is the essence of a Madonna figure.
Within white supremacist culture, a female must be white to occupy the space of sacred femininity, and she must also be blond. Prior to the shooting of images in Sex, Madonna had returned to her natural dark hair color. Yet workers helping to construct her public persona insisted that she bleach her hair blond. Entertainment Weekly reported that Madonna was reluctant, but was told by her make-up artist: “This is your book. If you want to be a brunette, fine. But in black and white, blond magnifies better. Blond says more!” Blond speaks, says more, when it both mirrors and embodies the white supremacist aesthetics that inform the popular imagination of our culture. Concurrently, Madonna’s appropriation of the identity of the European actress Dita and of her Germanic couture is an obvious gesture connecting her to a culture of fascism, Nazism, and white supremacy, particularly as it is linked to sexual hedonism.
Madonna embodies a social construction of “whiteness” that emphasizes purity, pure form. Indeed, her willingness to assume the Marilyn Monroe persona affirms her investment in a cultural vision of white that is tied to imperialism and colonial domination. The conquest of light over dark replays the drama of white supremacist domination of the Native American, African, and so on. In that representation of whiteness, Dyer asserts, “being white is coterminous with the endless plenitude of human diversity.” He explains: “If we are to see the historical, cultural, and political implications (to put it mildly) of white world domination, it is important to see similarities, typicalities within the seemingly infinite variety of white representation.” At the start of her career, the “whiteness” that Madonna flaunted was represented as other than, different from the mainstream, more connected to the reality of folks marginalized by race or sexual practice. For a time, Madonna seemed to desire to occupy both that space of whiteness that is different and the space that is familiar. Different, she is the young Italian white girl wanting to be black. Familiar, she is Marilyn Monroe, the ultimate cultural icon of white female beauty, purity, and sensuality.
Increasingly, Madonna occupies the space of the white cultural imperialist, talking on the mantle of the white
colonial adventurer moving into the wilderness of black culture (gay and straight), of white gay subculture. Within these new and different realms of experience she never divests herself of white privilege. She maintains both the purity of her representation and her dominance. This is especially evident in Sex. In stories of sexual adventures told in Sex, people of color appear as primary protagonists. In one, the young Puerto Rican boy virgin is the “object” of the fictive Dita/Madonna’s lust. We are told: “He was fearless. He would do anything … I was so turned on; it was probably the most erotic sex I ever had. But he gave me crabs.” The stereotypes here are obvious, a fact which makes them no less damaging. Madonna’s text constructs a narrative of pure white womanhood contaminated by contact with the colored “other.” It would be easy to dismiss this construction as merely playful if it were not so consistent throughout Sex. In another adventure story, an apparently well-off white male enters a fancy department store where he is seduced by a Cuban salesgirl. She is, of course, as stereotype would have it, hot and whorish, ready to cheat on her boyfriend when any anonymous “desiring” white man looks her way. The structure of this narrative suggests that it, like the previous one, appeals directly to white supremacist sexual fantasies.
Though Sex appears to be culturally diverse, people of color are strategically located, always and only in a subordinate position. Our images and culture appear always in a context that mirrors racist hierarchies. We are always present to serve white desire. And while Sex exploits the myth of jungle fever, Madonna is carefully positioned within a visual framework where the big black man and the black woman appear as a couple who are her sexual servants; no readers could imagine that Madonna is partnering herself with a black male. No, all her images of conventional heterosexual coupling are with “nice” white boys. Black female sexuality is stereotypically represented as degraded. In the much-remarked and visually powerful come shot. Madonna stands over the prostrate naked body of black female model Naomi Campbell (not an anonymous fantasy image) and mimics a golden shower, by squirting lotion on the reclining figure. This image conveys a serious visual message about race, gender, and nationality. Madonna can be seen here as representing the imperialism of the United States, its triumph over Britain (Campbell is British Caribbean) as well as the conquest of “exotic” black cultures. Campbell has been called by the white-dominated fashion media the new Josephine Baker, a persona which directly contrasts that of idealized white womanhood. As the celebrated “primitive” icon, she must learn her place in relation to the white mistress and master. To conquer and subordinate this representation of “wild black sexuality,” Madonna must occupy a phallic position. In keeping with sexist/racist iconography, the black female is symbolically subordinated by white male power; in this case it is Madonna assuming the white supremacist patriarchal role.
Throughout Sex, Madonna appears as the white imperialist wielding patriarchal power to assert control over the realm of sexual difference. None of this is mitigated by the recognition— emphasized by Madonna herself—that gender is an act of social construction. Nor can Madonna’s disguises, however richly layered, ultimately mask her violence and cruelty towards women. Discussing gender parity, Carol-Anne Tyler (“Boys Will Be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag”) suggests that the male drag queen’s femininity is “a put on, not the real thing, signalling he has what women like, the phallus.” Though Madonna, of course, cannot do male drag, she does appropriate a drag queen look or style. Tyler identifies this female impersonator of the male impersonator as a phallic mother, insisting that “when the active desiring woman still reflects man’s desires, the mirrors of the patriarchal imagination cannot have been shattered.” In Madonna’s latest persona as phallic mother she lets us know that she has no desire to shatter patriarchy. She can occupy the space of phallocentrism, be the patriarch, even as she appears to be the embodiment of idealized femininity.
She claims not to envy men, asserting: “I wouldn’t want a penis. It would be like having a third leg. It would seem like a contraption that would get in the way. I think I have a dick in my brain. I don’t need to have one between my legs.” No doubt that “dick” in her brain accounts for Madonna’s inability to grasp that feminism, or for that matter, women’s liberation, was never about trying to gain the right to be dicks in drag. But wait a minute, I seem to recall that the men I knew back when the contemporary feminist movement was “hot” all believed that us little women didn’t really want our freedom, we just wanted to be one of the boys. And in fact those same men, no doubt thinking through the dicks in their brains, told us that if we “women libbers” just had a good fuck, we would all come to our senses and forget all about liberation. We would in fact learn to find pleasure in being dominated. And when feminists did not fall for this dick rap, men tried to seduce us into believing with our brains and our bodies that the ultimate power was to be found in being able to choose to dominate or be dominated. Well, many of us said “thanks but no thanks.” And some of us, well, some of us were tempted and began to think that if we could not really have our freedom, then the next best thing would be to have the right to be dicks in drag, phallocentric girls doing everything the boys do—only better.
This message has so seduced Madonna that now she can share the same phallic rap with her feminist sisters and all her other fans. Most of the recent images she projects in videos, films, and photographs tell women and everyone that the thrill, the big orgasm, the real freedom is having the power to choose to dominate or be dominated. This is the message of Sex.
Madonna’s feminist fans, once so adoring, are on the positive tip when we insist that we want an end to domination, when we resist her allure by saying no—no more seduction and betrayal. We long for the return of the feminist Madonna, the kind of cultural icon Susan Griffin celebrates in Women and Nature when she writes:
We heard of this woman who was out of control. We heard that she was led by her feelings. That her emotions were violent. That she was impetuous. That she violated tradition and overrode convention … We say we have listened to her voice asking, “Of what materials can that heart be composed which can melt when insulted and instead of revolting at injustice, kiss the rod? … And from what is dark and deep within us, we say, tyranny revolts us; we will not kiss the rod.
2
ALTARS OF SACRIFICE
Re-membering Basquiat
Is your all on the altar of sacrifice laid?
—Black church song
At the opening of the 1992 Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition at the Whitney Museum last fall, I wandered through the crowd talking to the folks about the art. I had just one question. It was about emotional responses to the work. I asked, what did people feel looking at Basquiat’s paintings? No one I talked with answered the question. They went off on tangents, said what they liked about him, recalled meetings, generally talked about the show, but something seemed to stand in the way, preventing them from spontaneously articulating feelings the work evoked. If art moves us, touches our spirit, it is not easily forgotten. Images will reappear in our heads against our will. I often think that many of the works that are canonically labeled “great” are simply those that lingered longest in individual memory. And that they lingered because while looking at them someone was moved, touched, taken to another place, momentarily born again.
Those folks who are not moved by Basquiat’s work are usually unable to think of it as “great” or even “good” art. Certainly this response seems to characterize much of what mainstream art critics think about Basquiat. Unmoved, they are unable to speak meaningfully about the work. Often with no subtlety or tact, they “diss” the work by obsessively focusing on Basquiat’s life or the development of his career, all the while insisting that they are in the best possible position to judge its value and significance. (A stellar example of this tendency is Adam Gopnik’s 1992 piece in the New Yorker). Undoubtedly it is a difficult task to determine the worth and value of a painter’s life and work if one cannot
get close enough to feel anything, if indeed one can only stand at a distance.
Ironically, though Basquiat spent much of his short adult life trying to get close to significant white folks in the established art world, he consciously produced art that was a barrier, a wall between him and that world. Like a secret chamber that can only be opened and entered by those who can decipher hidden codes, Basquiat’s painting challenges folks who think that by merely looking they can see. Calling attention to this aspect of Basquiat’s style, Robert Storr has written, “Everything about his work is knowing and much is about knowing.” Yet the work resists “knowing,” offers none of the loose and generous hospitality Basquiat was willing to give freely as a person.
Designed to be a closed door, Basquiat’s work holds no warm welcome for those who approach it with a narrow Eurocentric gaze. That gaze which can only recognize Basquiat if he is in the company of Warhol or some other highly visible figure. That gaze which can value him only if he can be seen as part of a continuum of contemporary American art with a genealogy traced through white males; Pollock, de Kooning, Rauschenberg, Twombly, and on to Andy. Rarely does anyone connect Basquiat’s work to traditions in African American art history. While it is obvious that he was influenced and inspired by the work of established white male artists, the content of his work does not neatly converge with theirs. Even when Basquiat can be placed stylistically in the exclusive, white male art club that denies entry to most black artists, his subject matter—his content—always separates him once again, and defamiliarizes him.