ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Madonna, the musician. It locates her within a history of gender relationships in the music world, hoping to demonstrate that Madonna has served as a lightning rod to make only slightly more perceptible the kinds of double binds always presented to a woman who attempts to enter Western music. The chapter highlights her music and examines some of the ways she operates within a persistently repressive discourse to create liberatory musical images. It discusses her music videos, illustrating the interactions between musical and visual components. The chapter stresses Madonna's agency in her own self-representation in part because there is such a powerful tendency for her agency to be erased completely—for her to be seen as just a mindless doll fulfilling male fantasies of anonymous puppeteers. It then focuses on how a woman artist can make a difference within discourse.
