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Madonna studies

Madonna studies (also called Madonna scholarship, Madonna-ology or Madonna Phenomenon) is the study of the work and life of American singer-songwriter Madonna using an interdisciplinary approach incorporating cultural studies and media studies. In a general sense, it could refer to any academic studies devoted to her. After Madonna's debut in 1983, the discipline did not take long to start up and the field appeared in the mid-1980s, achieving its peak in the next decade. Educator David Buckingham deemed her presence in academic circles as "a meteoric rise to academic canonisation". The rhetoric academic view of that time, majority in the sense of postmodernism, generally considered her as "the most significant artist of the late twentieth century", thus she was understood variously and as a vehicle to open up issues. In the 21st century, academic studies about Madonna have remained and continued in many aspects.[a] At the height of its developments, authors of these academic writings were sometimes called "Madonna scholars" or "Madonnologists", and both E. Ann Kaplan and John Fiske were classified as precursors.

These studies analyzed several topics, but mostly Madonna studies involved in the study of gender, feminism, race, multiculturalism, sexuality, and the mass media. The wide-ranging resources used included her films, songs, live performances, books, interviews or her videos. Both Madonna studies and its authors received a variety of criticisms from academy and media outlets. It was also, however, defended in equal measure. The Madonna studies played a major role for the direction of the American cultural studies, and brought pop artists to the foreground of scholarly attention.

Terminology[edit]

The field is commonly called Madonna studies,[5] and that phrase popped up in the late-1980s according to writer Maura Johnston.[6] Although numerous academics like David Gauntlett used that term,[7] scholars such as Janice Radway and Suzanna Danuta Walters to journalists like Maureen Orth have referred to them also as the Madonna-ology,[8][9] or Madonnalogy.[10] Another group of academics like E. Ann Kaplan called them the "Madonna Phenomenon" (MP),[11][12][13] while others used the term Madonna scholarship.[14][15]


The academic literature about Madonna, and its "own industry", was called as "the Madonna industry", "Madonna business" or the "Madonna boom" by a variety of scholars such as Simon Frith and Michael Bérubé or journalists like Jon Pareles.[16][17] Critics like Robert Christgau called the "Madonnathinking" (Madonnathink) to commentaries about the singer, including the academic vein.[18]

Origins and development[edit]

Background[edit]

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".[19] 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.[12]


Chilean literary critic Óscar Contardo set its background with the British cultural studies when the phenomenon of celebrities began to be analyzed from the 1970s.[19] American historian Richard Wolin, observed that the cultural studies approach blossomed during the 1980s, further adding that under Foucault's growing influence as well as that Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School, popular culture was viewed as a site of "resistance" to power. It was in this vein that "Madonna studies" blossomed into an academic cottage industry, Wolin said.[20]


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".[21]


According to professor Santiago Fouz-Hernández, author of Madonna's Drowned Worlds (2004), the abundance of critical work on the artist has almost certainly been part of broader developments in methodological trends in academia: the study of popular culture has come a long way since David Riesman described it in 1960 as "a relatively new field in American social science".[22]

Bibliography of works on Madonna

Academese

Academic writing

Chaney, David (2002). The Cultural Turn: Scene Setting Essays on Contemporary Cultural History. Routledge.  1134850891.

ISBN

Church Gibson, Pamela (2013). Fashion and Celebrity Culture. Berg.  978-0857852311.

ISBN

(1993). The Contemporary Reader. HarperCollins. ISBN 0673522229.

Goshgarian, Gary

Hall, Dennis R.; Hall, Susan G. (2006). American Icons. . ISBN 0313027676.

Greenwood Publishing Group

(2005). Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West. Routledge. ISBN 1134264437.

Jeffreys, Sheila

(2010). Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0307482297.

Roediger, David R.