Madonna studies

The field is commonly called Madonna studies, and that phrase popped up in the late-1980s according to writer Maura Johnston. Although academics like David Gauntlett used that term,), while academics like E. Ann Kaplan called them the "Madonna Phenomenon" (MP). They were also called the Madonna scholarship. ==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". 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". A commentator also observed that the reflection of contemporary attitudes were occurring in the perception of popular art, not only among academics but among mainstream pop critics as well, Spread 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. Madonna was characterized as a multivalent figure, and served "as a vehicle to open up issues", 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. 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". Madonna studies explored a broad range of scientific discourses. Cathy Schwichtenberg, a University of Georgia professor and editor of The Madonna Connection, asserts that it 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. Music professor Antoni Pizà Prohens also observed topics like globalization, immigrant rights, minority rights or sexual liberation, while Ricardo Baca added religion and performance. 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==

dedicated a course to Madonna, marking the first time a female artist was studied in the academy. 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, 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. Other media also informed about Madonna's courses in academic syllabus abroad the United States. 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. Texts In Material Girls (1995), Suzanna Danuta Walters held these academic writings, has produced at least one major academic text devoted to Madonna. 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. The same year, assistant professor Manav Ratti of Salisbury University, writing for Journal of American Studies wrote an essay about her book Sex and called it an extension of the "scholarship on Madonna". Some thesis garnered media exposition and citations, like ''Madonna's 'Like a Prayer:' A Critique of a Critique of the Geritol Generation'' of Chip Wells. ==Madonna scholars==

"Madonna scholars" was the name given to the academics working on Madonna, but other appellative was "Madonnologists". In 1992, Barbara Stewart from Orlando Sentinel reported a "growing number of Madonna scholars" in the United States from professors of English, anthropology or communication. Criticisms , in the sense of academic and public intellectual writing, bell hooks (pictured) was known as a persuasive "detractor" of Madonna. A concern was that "these professors make Madonna the academic equivalent of Shakespeare". Psychologist Abigail J. Stewart asked why many of her academic critics have chosen to look only "at her triumphs and not at her pain". Stewart goes on to suggest that her academics have made of Madonna, a "solo generator of her image". But she problematizes that "these postmodernist have thus contributed at least as much as Madonna's biographers to her self-generated myth that she as individual is in control" citing Susan McClary whom claimed that Madonna is "solely responsible for creating her music, which is not the case even for the two songs McClary analyzes". ==Reception==

National Geographic Society called it a "controversial" area in 2018. Spanish sociologist María Ángeles Durán held that Madonna has been the subject of numerous and diverse studies but "provoking a great controversy of opinions". Charles T. Banner-Haley, a professor of history at Colgate University also confirmed this, saying that "the academic world the force of Madonna has caused a division among scholars that has often gone from the sublime to the silly". David Roediger, described: "The idea of studying the popularity of Madonna has been grist for the mills of many critics of trends in scholarship on American culture. For cultural critics on both the left and right, Madonna studies represented "the first and last word of barbarism", political barbarism for the left, cultural for the right. Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale also commented on its reception in popular press, noting "the ridicule that Madonna studies has provoked among journalists". Given the fact that Madonna's work only occupied consciousness for a mere years during the rise of this branch (she debuted in 1983), Elizabeth Tippens of Rolling Stone asked in 1990, "Do we wait another fifty years before we dare to deconstruct Madonna? To ask what she is teaching us about ourselves and our culture?". Although she also worked on the field, Camille Paglia years later, referred to the "pretentious terminology" citing examples of words like "intertextual", "significations", "transgressive", "subversive" or "self-representation". She decries: "This would be comical, except for its ill effect on students and an increasingly corrupt career system". In this area, author Andrew Blake provides a "musicological" critique, but overall commented that cultural studies have a "problem" with music itself. Another critic said that "neither this study theme sit well with some students of higher education". In the late-1990s, Australian feminist historian Barbara Caine dismissed the field by saying: "While not advocating more Madonna studies (now considerably dated), nor defending them as either scholarly or political, I want to suggest that such studies of girl culture are important". In a similar treatment, American art historian Douglas Crimp said: "My hesitancy to participate in the Madonna studies phenomenon is that I generally think and write about things that really do matter to me, and Madonna doesn't matter to me that much". During the height of the field, Jesse Nash, an anthropology professor at Loyola University, said, "it's more conventional to write Madonna off, to write popular culture off. But that's a big mistake. A whole generation is forming opinions based on her". Some made the comparison of historical figures with Madonna. For instance, Orlando Sentinel reported that some deemed Madonna "is worthy of inquiry [today] as Charles Dickens was in the 18th century". Young also felt that to the generation coming up, "Madonna is more important than Leonard Bernstein". In a class devoted to Madonna in 2008, economist and academic Robert M. Grant commented that the "familiarity with Madonna means that it is possible for everyone to contribute to the discussion". In regards the criticisms to the field and its authors, Ouellette suggested that "if critics had not been so hostile from the start, and had not spent so much time making scholarly work on Madonna seem ridiculous out of context, they might have been more fair in noting that the essays collected in the Madonna Collection, for instance, are nowhere near uniform celebrations of Madonna as a feminist or even populist idol". Years prior, in an interview with Vanity Fair according to Gary Goshgarian, she gave a similar answer: "It's flattering to me that people take the time to analyze me and that I've so infiltrated their psyches that they have to intellectualize my very being. I'd rather be on their minds than off". Ambivalences According to others, the field generated unexpected effects. For instance and according to investigative journalist Ethan Brown in 2000, the Madonna studies "has obscured what made its subject so appealing in the first place (Madonna)" and blamed to Camilla Plagia to university semiotics departments. Following Brown's description, in the beginning of the 21st century, the flood of theories about Madonna subsided, with a commentator suggesting, "a degree of saturation seems to have been reached". Some others defended Madonna's own ambivalences in the perspective of academic writing, while Kaplan proposed that "she is nevertheless a contradictory and complex cultural phenomenon that cannot be simply dismissed". Historian professor David Roediger, noticed that in 1997, The New York Times Magazine ridiculed whiteness studies calling it as the "silly successor" of the porn studies and Madonna studies. In early 2000s, Michael Bérubé commented "as long as cultural studies is taken to be identical to Madonna Studies, the critiques of cultural studies follow an altogether predictable path". Stuart Hall, one of the most influential authors in the cultural studies, commented: "I really cannot read another cultural-studies analysis of Madonna or The Sopranos". In Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (2011), Paglia referred to the "current academic writing on Madonna" and also on American popular culture in general as "deplorably low quality". It is marked by "inaccuracy, bathos, overinterpretation, overpoliticization and grotesquely inappropriate jargon borrowed from pseudotechnical semiotics and moribund French theory". Authors in Evaluating Creativity: Making and Learning by Young People (2000), commented that "whatever one's position on the Madonna debate, she stands as an image for a more general anxiety in the study of culture, and this respect the overall effect of postmodernism has been to unsettle criteria for evaluation in the arts in two ways: the neo-conservative backlash and cultural relativism". ==Impact==

{{Quote box For associate professor Diane Pecknold, the Madonna studies "heralded and hastened the development of American cultural studies". Authors of ''Madonna's Drowned Worlds'' (2004), commented "courses offered at such universities as Harvard, Princeton, UCLA and the University of Colorado have been put forth on the premise that celebrities have social significance and are therefore important topics of study". In ''Madonna's Drowned Worlds'' (2004), authors notated that "academic studies and college courses dealing with Madonna's work benefited from the aura of her celebrity through the mid-1990s". On Madonna's career Various commentators characterized that this academic field both fragmented and impacted on Madonna's image and career, with Daniel Harris of The Nation describing as early as 1992 that "there is a Madonna for virtually every theoretical stripe". Commentators like Colombian writer José Yunis, El Paíss Lola Galán, Chilean literary critic Óscar Contardo and Caroline von Lowtzow from Süddeutsche Zeitung made similar observations. The lattermost adding that this even prompted a parody of these multiple interpretations: a "Postmodernism Generator", In Materialisations of a Woman Writer (2006), Swedish author Maria Wikse from Stockholm University commented "Madonna is no longer in the academic limelight", but stated that "Madonna Studies remains an established field within Cultural Studies". In 2001, Andrew Morton informed: "All those college lecturers endlessly debating her impact on racial and gender relations in post-modern society, are still, after twenty years, desperately seeking Madonna". Authors of Religion and Popular Culture: Rescripting the Sacred (2008), believes that "despite the (perhaps misguided)" mocking of the Madonna studies wave, "the period produced some important and groundbreaking work in cultural studies that focused on the music, videos [and] films" in her career. Measurement of commentary Through her career, various have "measured" these critical commentaries on Madonna including authors in Gender and Popular Culture (2013). while José F. Blanco described Madonna as "overexposed in academic research" for The Journal of Popular Culture in 2015. Others, including Australian historians Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon called Madonna a "performer of inimitable ubiquity" as she "has saturated the pages of academic journals" in the 1990s. Alina Simone, author of Madonnaland (2016), commented while she was working in her book: "I maintained hope of finding some tiny stone left unturned in the giant gravel pit of Madonna studies", but she encountered "there is no dearth of material about Madonna, but an overwhelming excess". Mary Cross described her as an "exalted star on the unlikely stage of academia". During the height of the field, professor Gregory Ulmer at University of Florida labeled her as "the most studied pop figure in universities". ==See also==