Re-inventing the Phallus: Madonna and Female Masculinity ...

Re-inventing the Phallus: Madonna and Female Masculinity
Santiago Fouz-Hernández (University of Durham, UK) and
Freya Jarman-Ivens (University of Liverpool, UK)
In a successful career that spans over twenty years, Madonna has drawn much attention to
issues of gender, sexuality and ethnicity, often problematising those structures that Western
societies take for granted. Having attracted considerable attention in academic circles since
the 1980s, Madonna’s relationship with feminisms has been highly controversial. Hailed by
some as a postmodern heroine of the feminist struggle and dismissed by others as a selfproclaimed
boy-toy moved only by financial ambition, the motivation behind her genderbending
strategies is still an intriguing aspect of her work. This paper looks retrospectively at
her career, from the early video “Borderline” (1984) to her recent collaboration with Britney
Spears “Me Against the Music” (2003) and examines her recurrent and playful relationship
with phallic imagery in order to explore whether these performances are part of a shallow,
sentationalist spectacle or part of a more commited project to challenge existing social
structures.
In the early days of MTV and during the years that saw the birth of the music video,
Madonna, one of the key players in the pop music scene of the last three decades and outspoken
supporter of the music video during that early period, arguably set out the ground rules for female
pop performers, problematizing their place as objects of desire and establishing their position as a
gazing subjects. In the context of film theory, Laura Mulvey (1975) famously used psychoanalytic
concepts such as scopophilia and narcissism to argue the male spectator’s position as “active” and
in control both of the narrative and also of the visual pleasure (the “owner” of the three “looks”:
the diegetic, the camera’s and the spectator’s), and the female spectator as the “passive”, surrogate
and static object of desire. In anticipation of the harsh criticism of her thesis (which still continues
today), Mulvey herself slightly modified her initial argument in the early 1980s, acknowledging
that there was a possibility of visual pleasure in the woman spectator as longs as she adopted a
masculine position in what she regarded as a temporary “phallic phase” which maintained the
“male” quality of the gaze (see Mulvey 1981). In an early piece of academic work on Madonna,
Cathy Schwichtenberg cited “Borderline” (dir. Lambert, 1984 – one of Madonna’s first videos) as
an example of the “reflexive commentaries on “male looking” countered by a feminine “look”

“where the female body “functions as a “prop” that stimulates the excessive femininity of male
projections only to turn that vision against herself” (1993: 134). In “Borderline”, as in many other
of her music videos during the 1980s (notably “Open your Heart” (dir. Mondino, 1986) and
“Express Yourself” (dir. Fincher, 1989)), close-up shots of her eyes emphasize her position as a
gazing subject, especially when looking at the Latino men that feature in the video, which clearly
problematize her apparent positioning as female object (as noted by Kaplan, 1987 and McClary
1991 in relation to “Open Your Heart”). 1
Five years later and with one grab of her crotch, Madonna heralded the starting point of a
history of phallic references throughout her work and fused the power of the gaze with phallic
power. The video for “Express Yourself” (and its notorious live performance during the 1990
Blond Ambition Tour) sees Madonna in a 1930s-style pinstriped men’s suit and monocle, quite
clearly drawing attention to her problematizing gaze and also performing a version of aristocratic
masculinity which she has repeated in various other performances since then. At the same time,
visible beneath the suit is a pink satin basque with embellished cups for her breasts, and the
suspender hooks dangle down her legs, above the men’s trousers, blatantly demonstrating the
constructedness of gender and problematizing it through vestimentary codes. Madonna grabs and
thrusts her crotch, in the style of Michael Jackson, or perhaps of any number of male rap artists in
more recent times. Her deployment of phallic references since that point has become noteworthy.
During the Dick Tracy section of her Blond Ambition Tour, she referred to the dancer playing the
role of the famous detective as “my dick”, 2 playfully demeaning the phallic power inherent in
Tracy’s first name and persona, here ridiculed in the figure of a clownish dancer whose stature is
diminished by the phallic femme fatale that dominates the performance and controls the action. In
the Sex book of 1992, she is seen naked, leaning back ecstatically as a water fountain “ejaculates”
between her legs; in The Girlie Show of 1993, she made explicit use of a walking cane while
wearing a tuxedo and top hat during a self-parodying version of “Like a Virgin”; in the Drowned

World Tour of 2001 a hose, placed between her legs by her dancers, “ejaculated” dry ice across the
audience; a similar scene closed the withdrawn video for “American Life” (dir. Åkerlund) in 2003,
when she sprayed an audience with a high-pressure water jet; the walking cane returned later that
year when she featured in Britney Spears’ video “Me Against the Music” (dir. Hunter).
Given her legendary history of highly sexualised, problematically-gendered performances,
might we read these examples simply as Madonna “gender-bending”, or just as playing with
phallic symbols for the potential shock value (which is surely fading in this age of pomo-
sexuality…)? Possibly. But looking back to “Express Yourself”, we should take careful note of
Melanie Morton’s reading of the notorious crotch-grab. While Morton identifies the phallic nature
of the gesture, she is careful not simply to equate phallus/masculinity/male-ness, writing that even
as Madonna “mimics the phallic swagger of crotch-grabbing rock stars”, there may be “no
pretended allusion to a penis”, asserting instead “her own specific adequacy” (1993: 233). We can
take this reading back to certain other phallic images presented by Madonna over the years, and
justifiably question any interpretation of her “phallic” images as male or indeed as phallic. Andrew
Ross similarly notes that the ejaculatory image in Sex is redolent less of the male ejaculation, and
more of “female ejaculation, the great open secret of lesbian subculture in the 1990s” (1993: 58).
Male climax may be more readily perceptible in the later ejaculations, in “Impressive Instant” and
the “American Life” video, given the accompanying props – a hose and a water-jet respectively –
and their meaningful placement at Madonna’s waist height. Yet aligning this with Morton’s
proposal of Madonna’s “own specific adequacy”, perhaps there are no “pretended allusions to a
penis” in these examples either. Must we necessarily relate her ejaculations to the male sexual
body and/or masculinity, or can they instead evoke something of a metonymic slippage between
clitoral erection and female ejaculation?
The cultural understanding of the clitoris is surely a major factor here, given the common
historical figuration of the organ as analogous to the penis. Certainly, both penis and clitoris

develop physically from the same region of the foetal genital ridge. Moreover, each organ has a
head, a superfluous flap of skin, a shaft, a base, and in these ways they are more or less
physiologically equivalent. But if Madonna “asserts her own specific adequacy”, without phallic
reference, her sexual organ surely performs the same feat. The clitoris is not strictly a small-scale
penile equivalent: it has no urinary or ejaculatory function; no function at all, in fact, except as a
locus of female sexual pleasure. It would be tempting to suggest that the phallic props she deploys
are clearly knowingly phallic in the male-bodied sense, so unsubtle are the ways in which they are
utilised on many occasions, and that consideration of female phallic power should be sidestepped
in favour of the dominant male-centred reading. Yet, arguably, this is precisely the problem of the
female deployment of phallic symbols. Is there no potential for autonomous female phallicism? If
“Phallus” is not the penis, as psychoanalytic discourse suggests, then why does phallic power have
to be a male reserve? Indeed, the question of power is at the heart of this paradox. Judith
Halberstam observes:
If adolescence for boy represents a rite of passage … and an ascension to some version … of social
power, for girls, adolescence is a lesson in restraint … and repression. It is in the context of female
adolescence that the tomboy instincts of millions of girls are remodelled into compliant forms of
femininity (1998: 6).
Is it precisely power which defines masculinity? Possibly, although surely only in the context of
dominant – white, male, middle-class, heterosexual – masculinity: lower class men may be “more
masculine” but certainly have less socio-economic power; upper-class men have more power but
are often figured as insufficiently masculine; similarly, black, Latino, and Asian male bodies
occupy various points in a spectrum of masculinity, but socio-economic power tends to be an
unstable signifier in these configurations.
When Madonna makes use of symbols which are both phallic and not phallic, maleness is
either totally absent (as in the Sex photo) or highly problematic (as in “Impressive Instant” or
“American Life”). One notable example, however, problematises the construction of masculinity in
quite a different way. During the performance of “Like a Virgin” in The Girlie Show, Madonna,

dressed in top hat and tails, great signifiers of aristocratic masculinity, plays with her walking cane,
another relevant signifier of both aristocracy and the phallus. At one point, at a musical break for
dramatic effect, she makes the cane rise between her legs to humorously suggest an erect penis:
thus the cane has its place secured as a symbol of male phallicism in this scene. After “Like a
Virgin”, however, Madonna is joined onstage by two female dancers, also cross-dressed in top hats
and tails, carrying walking canes. In the ensuing rendition of “Bye, Bye, Baby”, the three “men”
are entertained by three other female dancers, in basques, stockings, and high heels, performing as
dancing girls for “male” sexual pleasure”. During the course of the song, the “dancing girls” tease
the cross-dressed women, rubbing themselves on their thighs and using the canes again as phallic
props; they proceed to disposal of the “men’s” signifiers of masculinity, throwing the canes to the
floor and removing their top hats, and ultimately pushing the “men” themselves to the floor. The
dismissal of the walking canes can be read in at least three ways. The first possibility is a quasi-
feminist reading, of female dominance as a replacement for male dominance, although “male”
power ultimately triumphs when the “men” slap the girls and simulate aggressive sex with them.
Second, the exposure here of the “men” as cross-dressed women might justify a lesbian reading of
the scene, especially given the simulated sex which follows. Third, we can perceive it as an
assertion of the performativity of all gender formations. The idea of the drag king is useful here: as
Halberstam describes, “the drag king performs masculinity (often parodically) and makes the
exposure of the theatricality of masculinity into the mainstay of her act” (1998: 232 ). Thus, “Bye,
Bye, Baby” is clearly a drag king performance. Moreover, “the drag king performance … exposes
the structure of dominant masculinity by making it theatrical” (239), an aspect underlined in this
example by the framing of the entire Girlie Show (and the opening of this section) in a highly
theatricalised vocabulary: lush, red curtains open and close ceremoniously; a Pierrot periodically
reappears onstage; circus-style orchestration underscores “Like a Virgin”. The theatricality of the

scene works against dominant notions of masculinity as original (with femininity as the deviation),
and as authentic (where femininity has long since been accepted as constructed and performative).
The problems of maleness, power, masculinity and the phallus are further held up for
scrutiny in the more recent Britney Spears’s video for “Me Against the Music” (dir. Hunter 2003),
in which Madonna appeared, wearing a white trouser suit and again carrying a cane. She clearly
holds a position of moneyed power in the video’s narrative, signified by the suit and the cane,
amongst other factors. Notably, the suit is relatively fitted, especially in the waistcoat, revealing
Madonna’s body to be female (especially when she removes her jacket). Her hair is long, and her
face is made up, and despite her playing suggestively with the cane at the line “Come over here, I
got something to show you”, there is quite clearly no “pretended allusion to a penis” as she
remains proudly female throughout. At the same time, while she holds the power (of the gaze) at
the beginning of the video, she gradually loses this as Spears chases her and becomes the dominant
figure. This loss of power is paralleled by her disposing of her cane and jacket, becoming less
phallic and more noticeably female biologically and more feminine socially. Meanwhile, Spears
also wears a suit, although her female-ness is equally assured with a low-cut top, long hair, and
make up. She becomes more assertive throughout the video, and the sexual subtext is of Spears
attempting to dominate Madonna, but being teased by the older woman, who ultimately seems to
retain the power – and, crucially, the phallus: while she has disposed of her own cane, and Spears
has taken it, in the last seconds of the clip, Madonna recovers her phallic power in the form of a
cigar from an onlooking male, and finally fades into thin air just as Spears seems to have won the
sexual hunt.
Halberstam’s central proposition is that “masculinity does not belong to men [and] has not
been produced only by men”. Rather, “what we call “masculinity” has also been produced by
masculine women, gender deviants, and often lesbians.” (1998: 241). This is perhaps the central
question when considering Madonna’s deployment of phallic and/or ejaculatory props and her

performance of masculinity: to what extent is she referencing male masculinity? Does she present
an autonomously female masculinity?
In his study of the representation of the male body and, in particular, the male genitals in
media, jokes, film and music. Peter Lehman (1993) confronts what he regards as the paradox of
the centrality of the phallus in patriarchal society. This is a paradox because the centrality of the
phallus, he claims, depends on “either keeping [the penis] hidden from sight [. . .] or carefully
regulating its representation” (1993: 28). Susan Bordo made a similar point when she argued that,
while female bodies and genitals are part of everyday life and culture, “patriarchal culture
generally wants [the penis] out of sight” as its physical vulnerability “haunts the phallus, threatens
its undoing” (1993: 699). Madonna’s playful insistence on phallic imagery draws attention not
only to the constructedness of masculinity and of gender as a whole, but also to the precariousness
of a social structure that relies on difference. This re-invention of the phallus is also a reminder
that the power it evokes is not necessarily, or at least not exclusively, a male trait.
WORKS CITED
Bordo, Susan 1993: “Reading the Male Body”. Michigan Quarterly Review 32.4: 696-737.
Halberstam, Judith 1998: Female Masculinity. London and Durham, NC: Dale University Press.
Kaplan, E. Ann 1987: Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism & Consumer
Culture. New York: Methuen.
Lehman, Peter 1993: Running Scared. Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Madonna 1992: Sex. London: Martin Secker & Warburg.
McClary, Susan 1991: Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minnesota and London:
University of Minnesota Press.

Morton, Melanie 1993: “Don’t Go For Second Sex, Baby!”. The Madonna Connection:
Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory. Ed. Cathy
Schwichtenberg. Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview Press. 213-35.
Mulvey, Laura 1975: “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Screen 16.3: 6-18.
------- 1981: “Afterthoughts on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” inspired by “Duel in the
Sun””. Framework 15-17: 12-15.
Ross, Andrew 1993: “This Bridge Called My Pussy”. Madonnarama: Essays on Sex and Popular
Culture. Eds. Lisa Frank and Paul Smith. Pittsburgh and San Francisco: Cleis Press. 47-64.
Schwichtenberg, Cathy 1993: “Madonna’s Postmodern Feminism: Bringing the Margins to the
Center”. The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and
Cultural Theory. Ed. Cathy Schwichtenberg. Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford:
Westview Press. 129-45.
1 This tactic has become more prominent over the years, in a wide range of videos and also public performances.
During parts of the Who’s that Girl tour in 1987, The Girlie Show in 1993 and the Drowned World Tour in 2001, a
blown-up image of Madonna’s eyes dominated the top or sides of the stage, as if counteracting the gaze of the
audience.
2 Dick Tracy was a popular cartoon character made into a film in 1989 by Warren Beatty (then Madonna’s lover).
Madonna starred in the film and performed most of the soundtrack.