Description
Valerie R. Renegar and Stacey K. Sowards suggest that contradiction, as a rhetorical tool of strategic choice, provides women with the opportunity to cultivate agency in "Contradiction as Agency: Self-Determination, Transcendence, and Counter-Imagination in Third Wave Feminism". By examining various third wave feminist texts, Renegar and Sowards illuminate how contradictions function as useful rhetorical tools for negotiating the complicated world we live in and for developing agency in new ways. To posit contradictions as a strategic choice suggests that there are possibly new ways to evaluate how we rhetorically read and understand texts, and in the case of this study, a new way to examine the work Madonna is doing in her music videos. Madonna -- as an image -- continually presents contradictory aspects in her music videos. The visual elements of male gaze and female spectacle are dominant characteristics of her videos and provide typical evidence of contradictions working to enhance Madonna's agency. Contradiction allows for possibilities of self-determination, transcendence, and counter-imaginations that embody and foster a sense of agency through its various usages. Therefore, contradiction, in this sense, is conceptualized as performative and participatory and creates opportunities for a self-determination that enhances agency. Through her performances in videos such as "Material Girl," "Express Yourself," and "Justify My Love," Madonna presents images that challenge male-female relationships through visual forms of sexual expression, and she invites her audience to participate in a new discourse that preaches female empowerment. However, behind this professed rhetoric of female empowerment lies the underlying motivation of female desirability, which links female sexual expression -- as spectacle -- to the appeal of the male gaze. And in appealing to the male gaze, the female spectacle turns into female exploitation. Therefore, by extending Renegar and Sowards's theory of contradiction in third wave feminist texts to Madonna's music videos, I contended that Madonna's music videos simultaneously empower and undercut female liberation and in doing so demonstrate the functionality of contradiction. Madonna's use of contradiction -- specifically in terms of how she plays with the rhetorical forms of gaze and spectacle to form her rhetoric of female empowerment and exploitation -- magnifies a possible innovative process that allows women to claim agency in a manner that is unmarred by patriarchal dilution. This analysis, thus, not only augments research on Madonna, but it also suggests that we should reevaluate preconceived notions of rhetorical terms -- such as contradiction. Most important, this analysis of contradiction in Madonna's music videos indicates a need for further analysis of the functionality of contradiction so that we can locate more ways for women, specifically, to better develop their positions and sense of agency within society
