ABSTRACT
Lynne Layton observes that Madonna straddles a contradictory position by deconstructing the 'humanist notion of a controlled, rational, ego-centred self' by destabilizing her identity while simultaneously asserting and maintaining individual control. This chapter argues that the Madonna-as-geisha numbers force viewers to reconsider Madonna 'live' by reading this part of the Drowned World Tour as a socio-political mode of performance art. Madonna's natural body in the 'Japanese section' becomes a way for critiquing the social bodies that buttress the domination of women by men, and the domination of Western women over Eastern women. At the pivotal segue into 'Sky Fits Heaven', Madonna-as-geisha sheds the demure persona of 'Nobody's Perfect' and goes on the offensive. Thus in the video for 'Nothing Really Matters', Madonna-as-geisha can be read as a hybrid figure that embodies contradictions, whose movements are juxtaposed against the visual landscape of the red kimono and black hair that we measure up against the essentialized notion of the Japanese woman.
