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Madonna Research Paper

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Madonna

There can be only one Madonna. Her public identity as an artist is well established; in performance, her many-sided and changing image fascinates and energizes our cultural moment. Madonna is not the product of some music industry idea, but her own woman. She is still driven to achieve: "Even though I've become Somebody, I still have to prove that I'm Somebody. My struggle has never ended and it probably never will." From the first, Madonna herself has created her own image, expressing in her music a compelling emotional life. That seems to resonate with the audience. She's been the soundtrack for their lives and the queen of an entertainment culture where visual image reigns. "My sister is her own masterpiece," her brother Christopher says. "Is there any other way to do it right?" …show more content…

And the feminists have taken Madonna severely to task, not just for the Sex book, but for her entire sexual persona, seeing her as endorsing woman-as-sex-object and slave to men. They say her sexually saturated image, her sexual shock tactics, and her display of her body make her an antifeminist, inviting the male gaze and endorsing the same old patriarchal codes of woman as seductress. Yet while feminism itself is split into various camps and the word "feminist" has acquired negative connotations (man-hating, radical, shrewish), scholars like Camille Paglia see Madonna's pleasure in her own sexuality and her seeming independence from men as signs of "the future of feminism." Playing with the outlaw personae of prostitute and dominatrix, Madonna has made a major contribution to the history of

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