ABSTRACT
Madonna is criticized from a variety of perspectives, but each assumes a higher social, moral, or aesthetic ground from which she can be seen as unworthy of emulation. This chapter looks at those who hate, rather than love, Madonna, to try to explain why such a popular woman engenders hostility as well as praise. Madonna often is positioned as the low-Other in the domain of aesthetic culture. Madonna's most visible fans in the first two or three years of her career were the "wanna-bes," adolescent girls who reinterpreted Madonna's look to become a cultural phenomenon in their own right. Madonna, in contrast, is "pop"—juvenile, formulaic, artificial, shallow, self-centered, escapist fantasy, committed to making a profit. Madonna is interpreted under different definitions of feminism in different social and discursive formations, and the result is a case study in the ways that popular culture may be articulated to competing social and political practices.
