Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 sexualpractice. 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