Madonna studies

Madonna studies (also called Madonna scholarship, Madonna-ology or Madonna phenomenon) refers to the study of the work and life of American singer-songwriter Madonna using an interdisciplinary approach incorporating cultural studies and media studies. It could refer also to any academic studies devoted to her. After Madonna's debut in 1983, the discipline did not take long to start up and the field appeared in the mid-1980s, achieving its peak in the next decade. By this time, educator David Buckingham deemed her presence in academic circles as "a meteoric rise to academic canonisation". The rhetoric academic view of that time, majority in the sense of postmodernism, generally considered her as "the most significant artist of the late twentieth century" according to The Nation, thus she was understood variously and as a vehicle to open up issues according to The New York Times. Madonna continued to receive academic attention through the next twenty-one century.^[a] Authors of these academic writings were sometimes called "Madonna scholars" or "Madonnologists", and both E. Ann Kaplan and John Fiske were classified as precursors.

These studies analyzed several topics, but mostly Madonna studies involved in the study of gender, feminism, race, multiculturalism, sexuality, and the mass media. The wide-ranging resources used included her films, songs, live performances, books, interviews or her videos. Madonna studies have been characterized as influencing perceptions of Madonna's public image, contributing to increased scholarly attention to pop music artists, and shaping directions within American cultural studies. Although the field received positive feedback, it faced generally both immediate and retrospective criticism and was described by the National Geographic Society in 2018 as a controversial area. Early scholar of Madonna studies, feminist writer Camille Paglia, criticized the field (along with popular culture studies more broadly) for its perceived "ill effect on students and an increasingly corrupt career system".

The field is commonly called Madonna studies,^[5] and that phrase popped up in the late-1980s according to writer Maura Johnston.^[6] Although academics such as David Gauntlett used that term,^[7] others, including Janice Radway, Suzanna Danuta Walters and Maureen Orth have referred to them as the Madonna-ology (also typeset as Madonnaology^[8]),^[9][10] while academics like E. Ann Kaplan called them the "Madonna Phenomenon" (MP).^[11][12][13] They were also called the Madonna scholarship.^[14][15]

The academic literature about Madonna, and its "own industry", has been described as "the Madonna industry", "Madonna business" or the "Madonna boom" by journalists and scholars, including Simon Frith, Michael Bérubé and Jon Pareles.^[16][17] Critics such as Robert Christgau have used the term "Madonnathinking" (or Madonnathink) to describe critical commentaries about Madonna.^[18]

Literary scholar Luis Cárcamo-Huechante from Harvard University traces the origins of the Madonna studies to the camp sensibility associated with Susan Sontag's 1960s works referring to a "fascination of artifice and exaggeration", and what he perceives Madonna illustrated well.^[19] Associate professor Diane Pecknold in American Icons (2006) also discusses the camp sensibility and added that for most of the twentieth century, American scholars subscribed to the idea of an objective and universal canon and academics "were applying to Madonna the same sophisticated textual readings".^[12]

Chilean literary critic Óscar Contardo places it in the context of the British cultural studies when the phenomenon of celebrities began to be analyzed from the 1970s.^[19] American historian Richard Wolin observed that the cultural studies approach expanded during the 1980s, adding that under the influence of Michel Foucault, as well as Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School, popular culture came to be viewed as a site of "resistance to power". It was in this context, Wolin argues, that the "Madonna studies" developed into an academic cottage industry.^[20]

In Madonna: A Biography (2007), Mary Cross argues that "the turmoil of new theory imported from Europe and the culture wars of ideology were bringing huge changes to the American academic world and the college curriculum". She notes that whole departments devoted to popular culture, women's studies and media studies emerged, and suggested that Madonna seemed to illustrate extremely well what was happening on the embattled cultural ramparts of late twentieth-century American, describing her as a "perfect example of the whole theory of postmodernism the academic world was suddenly so immersed in".^[21] A commentator similarly observed that reflections of contemporary attitudes were occurring in the perception of popular art, not only among academics but also among mainstream pop critics at that time that Madonna began to be analyzed by academics.^[22]

Madonna first came to prominence in the mid-1980s, and the discipline did not take long to start up. D Magazine talked about the Madonna scholarship in 1986.^[14] Robert Miklitsch, associate professor of Ohio University dates the start of Madonna studies to 1987 and Rocking Around The Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism & Consumer Culture by E. Ann Kaplan.^[23] Madonna was characterized as a multivalent figure who served "as a vehicle to open up issues", including women's roles.^[17][24] Pecknold observed that her person was open to multiple interpretations, contributing to the rise of the Madonna studies.^[12]

Scholars like E. Ann Kaplan and John Fiske represented Madonna to their academic audiences as an example of how popular culture can reflect and imitates critical theories of history, knowledge, and human identity.^[25] Other academics have cited Steven Anderson of The Village Voice who described her in 1989 as "the repository for our ideas about fame, money, sex, feminism, pop culture, even death".^[13] "Of all the artists who rose to prominence through MTV, none has garnered more attention among academics than Madonna", wrote Murray Steib in Reader's Guide to Music (2013).^[26] Professor Michael Bérubé, when asked why Madonna rather than other act (such as Metallica), partly argued that citizens of advanced Western democracies tend to be more engaged by and informed about figures like Madonna or by blockbuster films.^[16] An author suggested that "pop culture and Madonna are central to political issues",^[27] while, The Nation observed in 1992 that Madonna had come to be regarded in academic discourse not simply as a pop star, but as "the most significant artist of the late twentieth century".^[22]

The Madonna studies is an interdisciplinary field of cultural studies, as well media and communication studies.^[28][29] Professors Andy Bennett (Griffith University) and Steve Waksman (Smith College), in the book The Sage Handbook of Popular Music (2014) commented that "Madonna studies itself took a variety of forms (and not all of these necessarily counted as cultural studies)".^[28] Anne Hull writing for Tampa Bay Times described the Madonna studies as "highly specialized" field.^[30] Miklitsch called it a "mini-discipline".^[23] For Susan McClary all of these studies on Madonna was from an iconographic perspective,^[31] and for author David Chaney, these academic writings are "explicitly concerned with interpreting the fabrication and representational strategies in the star's persona".^[32]

Professor Pamela Robertson Wojcik of University of Notre Dame observes that "media attention fuels academic discourse, which in turn fuels media discourse, and ultimately all becomes a part of 'Madonna'".^[13] In this context, Hull argues that everything became "data".^[30] A review of Dissertation Abstracts International: The humanities and social sciences. A (2008), stated that the Madonna scholarship focused "solely" on identity politics through formalist readings of cultural texts and their reception to explore the influence of the larger political economic, historical, and cultural contexts of capitalist society.^[33]

Madonna studies explored a broad range of academic discourses.^[34] Cathy Schwichtenberg, a University of Georgia professor and editor of The Madonna Connection (1993), described the field as a "touchstone for theoretical discussions" on issues of morality, sexuality, gender relations, gay politics, multiculturalism, feminism, race, racism, pornography, and capitalism to name a few.^[35] Authors of Encyclopedia of Women in Today's World, Volume 1 (2011) also added to the spectrum of topics the subcultural appropriation, politics of representation, consumer culture, the male gaze, body modification, reception studies, and postmodernism.^[36] Music professor Antoni Pizà Prohens also identified topics such as globalization, immigrant rights, minority rights or sexual liberation,^[37] while Ricardo Baca observed themes of religion and performance.^[29]

Scholars of Madonna studies used her work as resources, including her videos, performances, music, films, and interviews. This usage was also known as "texts" in the cultural studies branch.^[38] In Madonna's Drowned Worlds (2004), the authors stated that "this tendency to turn Madonna into a classroom aid becomes most obvious when one examines the basic methods by which her admirers interpret her songs and videos".^[13]

The first scholarly articles on Madonna appeared in 1985, with the field experiencing a significant boom in the early 1990s.^[42] According to academic Laurie Ouellette in 1993, Madonna scholars "have been leading classroom discussions and filling the pages of academic journals and textbooks since Madonna's early days as the Material Girl".^[15] Simon Frith referred to this development as the "boom in the academic Madonna business": "The books! the articles! the conferences! the courses".^[43][16]

Major American universities offered courses on Madonna across the U.S.,^[44][30] particularly during the 1980s and 1990s.^[45][37] French scholar Georges-Claude Guilbert writes in Madonna as Postmodern Myth (2002) that Princeton, Harvard, UCLA, the University of Colorado and Rutgers were among the first to offer courses about her.^[39] Liberal arts colleges, such as the 7 sisters institutions, also taught courses on her cultural influence.^[46] Professor Matthew Donahue lectures on Madonna in several of his classes at the Department of Popular Culture—the first such department in the United States—at Bowling Green State University.^[47]

Other publications have also reported on Madonna's courses in academic syllabi outside the U.S. In the early 1990s, American editor Annalee Newitz commented that "Madonna occupies a definite place in the post-Western Cultures curriculum at universities everywhere".^[25] The University of Amsterdam created the elective academic discipline, Madonna: The Music and the Phenomenon, within the Department of Musicology.^[39] In Finland, Rossi Leena-Maija of Helsingin Sanomat reported in 1995 that Madonna had became part of the "Finnish academic life".^[48] Simon Reynolds has also cited examples from scholars in Frankfurt,^[49] while educator David Buckingham noted similar attention at the Cambridge campus.^[50] In 2015, scholars at the University of Oviedo offered a Madonna-focused course, marking the first time the university had devoted a course to a female singer.^[2][3]

In Material Girls (1995), Suzanna Danuta Walters held these academic writings, has produced at least one major academic text devoted to Madonna.^[10] According to professor Sheila Jeffreys there exists "a slew of scholarly books in postmodern language" about her.^[51]

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor Jane Desmond has argued that "the relevant bibliography is vast" in the Madonna studies, citing works ranging from Cathy Schwichtenberg's The Madonna Connection to Lisa Frank and Paul Smith's Madonnarama both published in 1993.^[52] Another 1993 publication, Deconstructing Madonna (Fran Lloyd) situates Madonna within a British rather than an American cultural perspective.^[53] Scholars including Thomas Ferraro and Santiago Fouz-Hernández have identified additional foundational texts, such as Karlene Faith's Madonna, Bawdy & Soul (1997) and the works previously cited by Desmond.^[54][55] Fouz-Hernández describes The Madonna Connection arguably a "key event" in the history of the relationship between Madonna and the academy.^[55] Professor Pamela Robertson Wojcik has similarly argued that the three books published in 1993, "cemented the institutionalization of a major subdivision of American media studies into Madonna studies".^[13]

In addition, Weisbard noted that some of her bibliographies often combine music criticism with "academic chops" citing Madonna: Like an Icon (2007) by Lucy O'Brien as an example.^[18] Fouz-Hernández further observed that academic discourses on Madonna were periodically amalgamated in volumes such as Desperately Seeking Madonna (Sexton, 1993), Madonna: The Rolling Stone Files (Rolling Stone, 1997) or The Madonna Companion (Metz and Benson, 1999)".^[55] Ferraro describes the latter book as "the better resource for Madonna criticism".^[54] Bitch She's Madonna (2018), written by Hispanic academics was promoted as the first Spanish–language cultural study book dedicated to Madonna, and as an extension of the Madonna Studies in Spain.^[56] In the same year, assistant professor Manav Ratti of Salisbury University, writing for Journal of American Studies, discussed Madonna's Sex book and called it as an extension of "scholarship on Madonna".^[4] Some theses have also received media attention and academic citation, such a Madonna's 'Like a Prayer:' A Critique of a Critique of the Geritol Generation by Chip Wells.^[57][30]

"Madonna scholars" was the term used to describe academics working on Madonna, although another appellation used is "Madonnologists".^[58][39] Anne Hull noted academic interest for Madonna by academics, feminists as well theologians, Marxists, and sociologists.^[30] According to some publications, they worked primarily within cultural theory, cultural studies, film and media studies, as well feminism, gender and LGBT studies, generally associated with left-wing ideological perspectives, including LGBT-related political movements, and radicals antiracism and feminism.^[15][39][36]

In 1986, D Magazine reported that "Dallas academics, have been among the nation's leaders in the newly born specialty of Madonna scholarship".^[14] In 1992, Barbara Stewart of the Orlando Sentinel noted a "growing number of Madonna scholars" in the United States from professors of English, anthropology or communication studies.^[57] One of the earliest academics to be identified as a "Madonna scholar" was John Fiske.^[53]

Madonna scholars faced criticism from both academia and mainstream media, with some describing them as a "marginal group".^[18][30] Ouellette traces the height of this criticism to the publication of The Madonna Connection noting that such scholars became a fashionable target for "concern, condescension, and scorn from progressive quarters". ^[15] Some authors suggested that the branch was no really about Madonna but primarily motivated by professional factors within the academy, particularly a desire among scholars to "prove their social relevance".^[22] Ouellette argued that scholars were not so much interested in Madonna herself, and Spanish sociologist Enrique Gil Calvo of the Complutense University of Madrid states "what scholars want is to take advantage of Madonna's fame".^[15][59]

Some have expressed concerns about bias in the Madonna studies, as various scholars and feminists were accused of "enacting the wannabe syndrome of Madonna fans" according to Carla Freccero writing for Duke University Press.^[60] Psychologist Abigail J. Stewart has questioned why some academics focus primarily on "Madonna's triumphs and not at her pain", further suggesting that they have constructed Madonna as a "solo generator of her image", arguing the postmodernist approaches have contributed at least as much as her biographers to her self-generated myth. She cites Susan McClary, who claimed that Madonna is "solely responsible for creating her music".^[61] In contrast, Guilbert argues that some Madonnologists instead seek to appropriate Madonna's work to serve ideological purposes and criticize her for failing to promote specific causes.^[39]

One critic argued "these professors make Madonna the academic equivalent of Shakespeare".^[57] Anne Hull wrote: "A handful of renegade scholars—students and professors—are studying Madonna. While their colleagues explore gender conflicts in Florentine history or Aristotelian metaphysics, they search for higher meaning in Madonna".^[30] Harris also expressed that "her academic admirers spend a great deal of time studying how she embodies the fantasies of other people; they devote remarkably little time, however, to discussing how she embodies their own".^[13] In 2003, Stephen Brown from University of Ulster who studied Madonna as a marketing genius, commented that "when you read some of the stuff that academics have written about her, then you're inclined to conclude that certain scholars should get out more".^[8]

Some Madonna scholars, particularly women, have argued that they were subject to gender bias in academia, describing some of the criticisms directed at them as "derogatory criticisms" as a similar language to that used to describe Madonna herself, as reported herself Laurie Schulze of University of Denver.^[15] E. Ann Kaplan, an early scholar in the Madonna studies,^[13] expressed surprise over the backlash, interpreting it at that time as part of a broader reaction against feminism.^[15] Chip Wells, who received media attention responded to criticisms from Inside Edition, which taped him stating: "I've read Aristotle, Plato, Descartes. And I'm not finding anything in them I'm not finding in Madonna". He commented in defense, "it's not hard to make us look dumb".^[57]

Others criticized the bibliographical exchanges as resembling groups "who swap bibliographies like 13-year-old girls trade earrings", while Wells described themselves as a "a tight unit" adding by the nature of the area "we are studying, we have to coalesce".^[30] Assistant professor Lisa Henderson, responded "one can be a fan and a scholar, they enhance each other".^[27] Schulze herself, later published an article in The Velvet Light Trap in 1999, in which she examined the controversy surrounding the field and the label of "Madonna's academic wannabes" by left-leaning popular press, as noted her publication.^[62]

In 2018, the National Geographic Society described the Madonna studies as a "controversial" field.^[40] Spanish sociologist María Ángeles Durán has noted that Madonna has been the subject of numerous and diverse studies, but "provoked a great controversy of opinions".^[31] Charles T. Banner-Haley, a professor of history at Colgate University, similarly observed that Madonna's influence in academia has "caused a division among scholars that has often gone from the sublime to the silly".^[63] David Roediger described: "The idea of studying the popularity of Madonna has been grist for the mills of many critics of trends in scholarship on American culture".^[64] For cultural critics on both the left and right, Madonna studies represented "the first and last word of barbarism", political barbarism for the left, cultural for the right.^[23] Professor Robert Miklitsch described the branch as a "political-cultural" phenomenon in 1998,^[23] while others labeled the studies as "the ultimate act of cultural imperialism".^[22]

In 1991, Knight Ridder published an article titled "Madonna Even Controversial for Scholars", citing commentary from teachers and media personalities.^[65] The Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale also noted the controversy surrounding the studies in the popular press among journalists.^[66] Given the fact that Madonna's work only occupied consciousness for a mere years during the rise of this branch (she debuted in 1983), Elizabeth Tippens of Rolling Stone asked in 1990, "Do we wait another fifty years before we dare to deconstruct Madonna? To ask what she is teaching us about ourselves and our culture?".^[44] CBS News president Fred W. Friendly was also critical about the field, saying "writing a major paper is supposed to be an intellectual achievement—a serious matter. Madonna is a media freak. How the media made her—I could see studying that".^[57]

From an educational sense, some reviewers debated about whether Madonna should have a place in curriculums alongside more established and canonical subjects, while argued that she was an "unworthy of academic study" that "adds nothing to the advancement of knowledge".^[15] Various commentators described it as "a waste of time and money" for both professors and students.^[57] It has also been criticised for adding nothing to students' employment prospects.^[67] Another critic said that "neither this study theme sit well with some students of higher education".^[57] Roger Kimball, charged Madonna's presence in the classroom with nothing short of "defrauding students of a liberal-arts education".^[44] By 1991, Camille Paglia also said: "We do not need a whole course in Madonna".^[44] Instructors like Robert Walser found that some students reacted skeptical to the studies on Madonna, because "they haven't thought about in certain ways" and "they've trained not to image that there could be anything important going in popular culture, especially in popular culture produced by women".^[44] Years later, Kathryn Murphy-Judy, an associate professor of French at Virginia Commonwealth University identified issues related to outdated instructional materials.^[68]

The field was also criticized because tends "to be jargon laden and prone to over-interpretation".^[15] A denunciation of the branch and its feminist and gay exponents in cultural studies, rails against "a state of intellectual anarchy that sanctions willfully perverse misreadings".^[69] Paglia, who has also contributed to academic perspectives on Madonna, later criticized field's "pretentious terminology", citing terms such as "intertextual", "significations", "transgressive", "subversive" or "self-representation". She argued that "this would be comical, except for its ill effect on students and an increasingly corrupt career system".^[70] Similarly, Robert Christgau noted that much academic writing on Madonna "feels translated", and noted a tendency that "overanalyzed" and "overstuffed" Madonna's videos in contrast to her pop songs.^[18] Authors of Media and Cultural Theory (2010), stated that from a musicological perspective, the Madonna studies devoted relatively little attention to the musical texts, and focused instead on performance and videos.^[7] Likewise author Andrew Blake offers a musicological review on the Madonna studies, arguing more broadly that cultural studies have a "problem" with music itself.^[23]

In the late-1990s, Australian feminist historian Barbara Caine dismissed the field by saying: "While not advocating more Madonna studies (now considerably dated), nor defending them as either scholarly or political, I want to suggest that such studies of girl culture are important".^[71] In a similar treatment, American art historian Douglas Crimp said: "My hesitancy to participate in the Madonna studies phenomenon is that I generally think and write about things that really do matter to me, and Madonna doesn't matter to me that much".^[39] Robert Clay, a University of Florida English professor called them an "Old Hat".^[57]

Scholars, particularly those working in the Madonna studies defended the field, arguing a justification of studying modern culture as a legitimate object of academic inquiry. Charles Sykes from Milwaukee Magazine stated "there's no subject too ridiculous to be a subject of research in academics".^[57] Historian Marilyn B. Young commented that "pop culture has long been studied in universities" and "Madonna's impact is serious".^[57] Nash further stated that a figure like Madonna is "key to understanding the times in which they live and, by contrast, other eras".^[72] In 1993, Ouellette suggested that "if critics had not been so hostile from the start and had not spent so much time making scholarly work on Madonna seem ridiculous out of context, they might have been more fair in noting that the essays collected in the Madonna Collection, for instance, are nowhere near uniform celebrations of Madonna as a feminist or even populist idol".^[15]

Madonna as an object of study and her relevance was also addressed by scholars. Kaplan described that "she is nevertheless a contradictory and complex cultural phenomenon that cannot be simply dismissed".^[15] Jesse Nash, an anthropology professor at Loyola University argued "it's more conventional to write Madonna off, to write popular culture off. But that's a big mistake. A whole generation is forming opinions based on her".^[57] "Madonna is a figure that is very important to subcultural groups [...] To say she doesn't deserve to be studied is very condescending to a lot of people", opined Schwichtenberg.^[15] Some commentators compared her contemporary appeal with that of historical figures, with Orlando Sentinel reporting that some regarded her as "worthy of inquiry [today] as Charles Dickens was in the 18th century".^[57] Lisa Henderson, an assistant professor claimed that "a dissertation on Shakespeare might have been as laughable 300 years ago as a dissertation on Madonna might be today".^[27] Young also suggested that to younger generations, "Madonna is more important than Leonard Bernstein".^[57]

Harvard University's Lynne Layton, argued that "teaching students how to read popular culture critically is as important as teaching them to read high art".^[44] Gary Burns and Elizabeth Kizer in Madonna: Like a Dichotomy (1990) found that "students in communication classes find it useful to study Madonna because she is a fascinating and prolific cultural figure".^[24] In a Madonna devoted course by economist and academic Robert M. Grant, he noted the "familiarity with Madonna means that it is possible for everyone to contribute to the discussion".^[73] Duke University professor Thomas Ferraro described the field as "quite academic in focus, language, and ideology".^[54]

In 1994, Jon Pareles of The New York Times asked Madonna's thoughts about the academic discipline, while she responded, "I laugh. It's amusing. It's flattering because obviously I'm on a lot of people's minds. But I read about all of these things, and I read what I meant by things, and I just think, all of this comes from my subconscious or my unconscious, I don't even think about it".^[17] In an interview with Vanity Fair according to Gary Goshgarian, she gave a similar answer: "It's flattering to me that people take the time to analyze me and that I've so infiltrated their psyches that they have to intellectualize my very being. I'd rather be on their minds than off".^[74]

The field has been analogously used both to defend or criticize other academic trends, and subfields, mostly from the post-Madonna studies era. Danish professor Erik Steinskog, used the field to defend the courses proposed for Beyoncé.^[45] Michael Dango also compared the Madonna-ology with the ongoing courses of Taylor Swift in 2024.^[76] Historian professor David Roediger, noticed that in 1997, The New York Times Magazine ridiculed whiteness studies calling it as the "silly successor" of the porn studies and Madonna studies.^[77]

For associate professor Diane Pecknold, the Madonna studies "heralded and hastened the development of American cultural studies".^[12] Dutch media scholar Jaap Kooijman, commented that before the Madonna studies, "most scholarly attention was paid to genres and artists that were not considered 'pop'", but she brought 'pop' to the foreground.^[78] Authors of Madonna's Drowned Worlds (2004), commented "courses offered at such universities as Harvard, Princeton, UCLA and the University of Colorado have been put forth on the premise that celebrities have social significance and are therefore important topics of study".^[55] British author Emma Brockes called the "post-Madonna" studies era to those degree courses of cultural studies held by best universities, like when Harvard "pioneered" a study on Madonna back in the early 1990s.^[79]

Authors of Madonna's Drowned Worlds (2004), wrote that "academic studies and college courses dealing with Madonna's work benefited from the aura of her celebrity through the mid-1990s".^[55] In early 1990s, Maureen Orth also noted how academics made a "brisk trade".^[9] Some scholars appeared on talk shows, also gracing a score of national and international newspapers and magazines.^[55] Schwichtenberg, once asserted that "writing about Madonna and her cultural significance had produced "connections with others outside academe that dissolved the boundaries between public and private, academic and popular, theory and practice".^[80]

However, in the early 2000s, Michael Bérubé was critical of the branch's effects commenting "as long as cultural studies is taken to be identical to Madonna Studies, the critiques of cultural studies follow an altogether predictable path".^[16] Writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Bérubé noticed that since the importation of cultural studies to the United States, the field "has basically turned into a branch of pop-culture criticism".^[81] Stuart Hall, one of the most prominent authors in the cultural studies, commented: "I really cannot read another cultural-studies analysis of Madonna or The Sopranos".^[81] According to American writer Julia Keller: "Madonna Studies 101 [is the] derisive nickname sometimes applied to cultural studies".^[82]

Broadly, in Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (2011), Paglia referred to the "current academic writing on Madonna" and also on American popular culture in general as "deplorably low quality". It is marked by "inaccuracy, bathos, overinterpretation, overpoliticization and grotesquely inappropriate jargon borrowed from pseudotechnical semiotics and moribund French theory".^[70] Authors in Evaluating Creativity: Making and Learning by Young People (2000), commented that "whatever one's position on the Madonna debate, she stands as an image for a more general anxiety in the study of culture, and this respect the overall effect of postmodernism has been to unsettle criteria for evaluation in the arts in two ways: the neo-conservative backlash and cultural relativism".^[83]

Other commentators have characterized the academic field as both fragmenting and influencing perceptions of Madonna's image with Daniel Harris of The Nation describing as early as 1992 that "there is a Madonna for virtually every theoretical stripe".^[22] Commentators like Colombian writer José Yunis, El País's Lola Galán, Chilean literary critic Óscar Contardo and Caroline von Lowtzow from Süddeutsche Zeitung made similar observations.^{[11][59][19][42]} The lattermost adding that this even prompted a parody of these multiple interpretations: a "Postmodernism Generator".^[42]

According to the Encyclopedia of Women in Today's World (2011) the studies heralded Madonna as a "symbol, image, and brand".^[36] Authors of Religion and Popular Culture: Rescripting the Sacred (2008), believes that "despite the (perhaps misguided)" mocking of the Madonna studies wave, "the period produced some important and groundbreaking work in cultural studies that focused on the music, videos [and] films" of her career.^[84] In Boricua Pop (2004), Frances Negrón-Muntaner reflected: "Imagine for a second that you are Madonna... Imagine, that there are theory books about you, and that you are the main theme of dissertations and academic essays. Imagine that feminists discuss whether you are a heroine or a demon".^[85]

In Materialisations of a Woman Writer (2006), Swedish author Maria Wikse from Stockholm University commented "Madonna is no longer in the academic limelight", but stated that "Madonna Studies remains an established field within Cultural Studies".^[1] Andrew Morton wrote in his book Madonna of 2001: "All those college lecturers endlessly debating her impact on racial and gender relations in post-modern society, are still, after twenty years, desperately seeking Madonna".^[86]

Through her career, various have "measured" these critical commentaries on Madonna including authors in Gender and Popular Culture (2013).^[5] Author David Chaney referred it as an "enormous academic and popular literature of explanation and comment",^[32] while José F. Blanco described Madonna as "overexposed in academic research" for The Journal of Popular Culture in 2015.^[35] Others, including Australian historians Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon called Madonna a "performer of inimitable ubiquity" as she "has saturated the pages of academic journals" in the 1990s.^[87] Alina Simone, author of Madonnaland (2016), commented while she was working in her book: "I maintained hope of finding some tiny stone left unturned in the giant gravel pit of Madonna studies", but she encountered "there is no dearth of material about Madonna, but an overwhelming excess".^[88]

Broadly, professor Santiago Fouz-Hernández, author of Madonna's Drowned Worlds (2004), argues that the abundance of critical work on Madonna reflects broader methodological developments and trends in academia, noting that the study of popular culture evolved significantly since David Riesman described it in 1960 as "a relatively new field in American social science".^[55]

Mary Cross described Madonna as an "exalted star on the unlikely stage of academia".^[21] In early 1990s, educator David Buckingham labeled it as "a meteoric rise to academic canonisation".^[50] During the height of the field, professor Gregory Ulmer at University of Florida labeled her as "the most studied pop figure in universities".^[57] Elizabeth Tippens from Rolling Stone commented in 1992, that "no female pop-music figure has ever infiltrated the halls of academia as Madonna has".^[44] Andreas Häger from Åbo Akademi University citing Schwichtenberg notes: "Hardly any other popular artist has received as much attention from the scientific community as Madonna".^[89]

However, the flood of theories about Madonna subsided at the turn of the 21st century, with a commentator suggesting, "a degree of saturation seems to have been reached".^[42] In this regard, Loughborough University's Jim McGuigan pointed out that in the cultural studies the case of Madonna was so "overworked" that it has reached tedium, as happened in old schools with the historical problem on the Causes of World War I.^[90] According to investigative journalist Ethan Brown in 2000, the Madonna studies "has obscured what made its subject so appealing in the first place (Madonna)" and blamed to Camilla Plagia to university semiotics departments.^[91]

• Bibliography of works on Madonna
• Academese
• Academic writing

• Chaney, David (2002). The Cultural Turn: Scene Setting Essays on Contemporary Cultural History. Routledge. ISBN 1134850891.
• Church Gibson, Pamela (2013). Fashion and Celebrity Culture. Berg. ISBN 978-0857852311.
• Forbes, Bruce David (2005). Religion and Popular Culture in America. University of California Press. ISBN 0520246896.
• Negrón-Muntaner, Frances (2004). Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture. New York University Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-5818-2.
• Goshgarian, Gary (1993). The Contemporary Reader. HarperCollins. ISBN 0673522229.
• Hall, Dennis R.; Hall, Susan G. (2006). American Icons. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0313027676.
• Jeffreys, Sheila (2005). Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West. Routledge. ISBN 1134264437.
• Roediger, David R. (2010). Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0307482297.