ABSTRACT
Madonna presents semiotic collages in her music videos that rewrite the fate of sexual women, and she rejects any kind of representation that would call forth the kind of subject posited by liberal humanist ideology and constructed in Metropolis. In content, a confrontation would identify Madonna with the powerless victims of a dangerous discourse and praxis, and in rhetoric on the formal level, Madonna would be aligned with the authoritative voice of the master. This chapter shows how Madonna work is influenced by the historical avant-garde, which she manages to both address and outdistance by refusing to reject pleasure as a source of power, lending support to her arguments. Madonna's work is informed by a keen insight into the connection between subjectivity, power, and ideology. Madonna's approach is similarly deconstructive, refusing to restrain the play of signifiers through an insistence on foregrounding the partial and constructed nature of the signs she employs.
