Madonna's foregrounding of sexuality falls into the category of third-wave feminism, with its edgy, in-your-face tactics. This type of feminism glorifies rebellion, whether it is directed at the patriarchal status quo or at second wave feminism's monolithic critique of gender, tendency toward "victim politics," and suspicion of non-normative sexuality.
Within Judith Peraino's proposed Garland-Ethridge-Madonna matrix of queer iconicity, Madge's 2000 hit What it Feels Like for a Girl neatly articulates what de Courtivron refers to as "the wish to be a woman." Anxiety accompanying such a wish drives much of Peraino's analysis, yet she critiques the recording What it Feels Like for a Girl as an invocation of an opposite desire, noting how "the lyrics describe…an inner wish for masculine power disguised by an outer mask of womanliness that serves to avert retribution." Yet the spoken intro to the song, daintily intoned in Madonna's faux British accent (this, I think, was the start of her British phase), is a direct address presumably not to her female fans but her male (queer?) listeners:
For a boy to look like a girl is degrading
'Cause you think being a girl is degrading
But secretly you'd love to know what it's like, wouldn't you?
Wish to be a woman, indeed! Peraino celebrates Madonna's acknowledgement of a polysexual fanbase, but in the music video version of What it Feels Like for a Girl, directed by her husband Guy Ritchie, the subjects to whom she addresses the song are perhaps most easily identified as heterosexual, even machismo males (an interpretation complicated by her concert version of the song, featuring backup dancers Peraino describes as "salsa dancing soft-butch women.").
For Peraino, the chief difference between the recorded and video versions of What it Feels Like for a Girl is gendered. The former she deems hyper feminized while the latter, with its dance beat and violent imagery, masculinized. Peraino's description of the video is great, and thorough. She reads Madonna as "a leather-clad female Robin Hood with tattoos and bruises, guns and Camaros. An elderly woman, whom she 'liberated' from an old folks home, rides as a catatonic 'shot gun' while Madonna commits gratuitous acts of violent mischief against men."
I want to offer an alternative reading, one that critiques Madonna's Judy Garland lineage as much as it perpetuates it. Let's say the song is addressed to the old lady.
To be sure, What it Feels Like for a Girl is a violent video, so much so that MTV banned it from the airways. Madonna rams her car into men whose only crime is grinning at her, she tasers a man from behind and steals his cash, hijacks a man's a car and then lights him on fire. And she buys the old lady a slurpy. When the shock of the first crash knocks the woman's glasses down her nose, Madonna pushes them back up again.
What does she want the old lady to see?
If Peraino is correct that third wave feminists rebel against the second wave's "tendency toward 'victim politics,'" then it's not simply Madonna's use of sex that places her squarely in the third wave: the video What if Feels Like for a Girl aggressively rejects female victimhood, belying the unthreatening femininity which the lyrics prescribe.
But I don't think the song is meant to chastise second wavers. Perhaps Peraino is right about Madonna's desire to "liberate" the old lady, but I'm not sure she's liberating her from the nursing home so much as from her beliefs about, yes, what it feels like for a girl in this world. The three words which, in the chorus, follow the titular phrase, are telling. This world, our world, is different from the world in which the old lady spent her girlhood, thanks in part to the hard work of second wave feminists, themselves probably at least a generation younger than the old woman in the video.
Judy Garland, perhaps a contemporary of Madonna's shotgun passenger, is beloved for what Peraino calls her "tragic queerness" but also for her resilience, especially in her "resistance to predictable repetitions of behavior." Generations later, Madonna is likewise iconic in her ability to reinvent her public image, yet her reinvention is unburdened by a pretense of victimhood. She's aware of the precedent of feminine feebleness, as the lyrics to What it Feels Like for a Girl assure us, but the video makes it clear that she's not beholden it. She comes out swinging from the start, and takes the old lady along for the joy ride.
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in this world
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