Madonna Louise Ciccone has constructed one of the most enduring and influential careers in popular music history. Across four decades, she has reinvented herself with a frequency that has become her signature, moving from the streetwise New York dance club denizen of the early 1980s to the Kabbalah-studying spiritual seeker of the 2000s, from the disco queen of the 1970s revival to the Portuguese-inflected Madame X of 2019. Each transformation has been accompanied by a corresponding shift in musical style, visual aesthetic, and cultural reference. Yet beneath each of these carefully curated personas lies a consistent and deeply problematic pattern: the systematic appropriation of marginalized cultures for commercial gain, personal reinvention, and the maintenance of white supremacy’s most insidious operation, the consumption of the Other without accountability to the Other. The scholar bell hooks, in her seminal essay "Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister?", captured this dynamic with devastating precision. White women stars like Madonna publicly name their interest in and appropriation of black culture as yet another sign of their radical chic. This fascination, hooks argued, is a threat, one that is always ready to destroy, erase, take over, and consume the desired object. It is a sign of white privilege to be able to see blackness and black culture from a standpoint where only the rich culture of opposition black people have created in resistance marks and defines us. This perspective enables one to ignore white supremacist domination and the hurt it inflicts via oppression, exploitation, and everyday wounds and pains. White folks who do not see black pain never really understand the complexity of black pleasure. And it is no wonder then that when they attempt to imitate the joy in living which they see as the essence of soul and blackness, their cultural productions may have an air of sham and falseness that may titillate and even move white audiences yet leave many black folks cold. The Black Madonna: Appropriating African American Culture Madonna’s relationship with Black culture predates her fame. She has publicly stated that she wanted to be Black as a child. This confession, offered as evidence of her authentic connection to Blackness, actually reveals the profound privilege at the heart of her project. To want to be Black is to misunderstand Blackness as an aesthetic choice rather than a lived experience of oppression. It is to treat Blackness as a costume one can put on and take off, a set of stylistic signifiers available for consumption without the accompanying reality of racism. From her earliest recordings, Madonna drew heavily from Black musical traditions. Her sound emerged from Black dance clubs, and she built her career on a foundation of musical forms created by African American artists. This pattern of extraction is not unique to Madonna, it is the standard operating procedure of the American music industry, but Madonna’s particular genius lay in making appropriation itself into a brand. The 1990 single "Vogue" represents perhaps the most notorious example of this dynamic. The song and its accompanying video brought the dance style of Harlem’s drag ballroom scene to a global audience. Madonna received backlash for utilising the voguing dance style of the balls in her music video, with many in the LGBTQ+ community feeling that Madonna, a straight white woman, commercialised and commodified their culture. The track produced by house-pop pioneer Shep Pettibone was at once a musical map of disco, shamelessly ripping MFSB’s "Love Is the Message" and Salsoul Orchestra’s "Ooh, I Love It (Love Break)". Like the Harlem drag balls that inspired it, "Vogue" is about presentation. The critic Jackie Goldsby argued that Madonna relied on the ball community’s limitations to claim voguing as her own. Madonna converted voguing into excess, into a cultural cash crop, banking on the ball world’s invisibility and its inability to publicly claim voguing. The reason Madonna could take the cultural goods from the ball and benefit from them stemmed from the social divide that impeded the ball world’s ability to rebut her move. This dynamic echoes W.E.B. DuBois’s concept of the veil, which symbolised the problematic nature of the colour line, the metaphorical veil that placed skin as an indication of African Americans' difference and a lack of capacity from white people to see African Americans as Americans. Goldsby suggested that the latter half of the twentieth century saw a conversion of the veil into commodity. The video for "Vogue" featured flawless monochromatic cinematography that, to some, represented the ultimate democratization of beauty, while to others represented a presumptuously preemptive eradication of the racial question entirely. Madonna sang that it makes no difference if you’re black or white, but it is unclear whether she realised to what extent this sentiment functioned as a convenient erasure of the very racial dynamics that made ball culture possible in the first place. bell hooks identified a deeper dimension to Madonna’s appropriation of Blackness. In her most recent appropriations of blackness, Madonna almost always imitates phallic black masculinity. While many critics noticed her appropriation of male codes, no critic seemed to have noticed her emphasis on black male experience. This is significant because it reveals that Madonna’s interest is not in Black women or Black culture in its full complexity but in a particular fantasy of Black male power. She desires to possess power she perceives men have, and Black men have a masculine quality allusive to white men. The crotch-grabbing gesture that became her signature referenced Michael Jackson and a theatrics of an excessive black masculinity that dramatically reinscribed her as a powerful white woman, even as she was overtly blurring gender and racial boundaries. The 1989 "Like a Prayer" video presented another complex moment in Madonna’s engagement with Blackness. In the video, she breaks the bonds of white patriarchy and chooses to create ties with a Black man, going against the racist idea of Black men as rapists of white women. Yet the video remains constrained within the idea of white supremacy: it is Madonna, a white woman, who frees the Black victim of racism, his freedom a generous act of mercy. The Black man is passive, the white woman is savior. This pattern of positioning herself as the liberator of the very communities she extracts from recurs throughout her career. When confronted with accusations of cultural appropriation, Madonna has consistently defended herself with a combination of artistic entitlement and historical revisionism. I am not appropriating anything, she told the Huffington Post in 2015. I am inspired and I am referencing other cultures. That is my right as an artist. She invoked Elvis Presley, claiming that they said Elvis Presley stole African-American culture, and that this is our job as artists. This defense reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the critique. The issue is power imbalance that allows some to take while others are taken from, to profit while others are erased. The Latin Madonna: Consuming Hispanic Culture Madonna’s engagement with Latin culture has been equally extensive and equally problematic. In 1984, she exploded onto MTV with brazen American street style which she had taken from urban blacks, Hispanics and her own Italian-American family. The adoption of subaltern ethnic and queer styles has been noted as an example of her capacity for reinvention. But these cultures allowed Madonna to do much more than simply distinguish herself in the cluttered marketplace. Latino and African American masculinities allowed Madonna to represent herself with the same power as men in brokering transcultural commodification processes. Almost every year since 1984 and up to 2003, Madonna presented either a song, video, photo shoot or live performance displaying a Hispanic influence, and she recorded and performed in Spanish some of her hit singles. It has become common place both in academic and journalistic criticism on Madonna to describe her subcultural practices as an appropriation of style rather than a substantive politics. "La Isla Bonita" from 1986 represents an early example of this pattern. The song was co-written by Patrick Leonard, who originally pitched an instrumental demo to Michael Jackson. When Jackson rejected it, Madonna shrewdly snatched it up. Throughout the song, she plays a humble observer, captured by the rhythm of an imagined island, her effortless vocals emphasized on the downbeat. The song presents a fantasy of Latinidad, an imagined island that exists primarily as a backdrop for Madonna’s exoticized longing. "Take a Bow" from 1994 took this dynamic further. Madonna journeyed to Ronda, Spain to film the torero-inspired music video. During the shoot, she informed MTV’s Kurt Loder that she was Spanish in another life. This claim to spiritual or ancestral connection to a culture not her own is a common feature of appropriation, the assertion that one has a special relationship that transcends the mundane facts of ethnicity and power. If Madonna caught any flack for "Take a Bow," it was for the video’s supposed glamorization of bullfighting, not cultural appropriation. The scholar Santiago Fouz-Hernández has argued that despite the plethora of stereotypical images used in these videos, Madonna’s appropriations of Hispanic cultures and her own ethnic malleability could be read as a subversive reminder of the multi-racial and multi-cultural make up of the USA. Yet this reading, while generous, cannot fully account for the power dynamics at play. Madonna, often hailed as the All-American girl, is in fact half Italian, half French-Canadian and the mother of a half-Hispanic girl. Her personal connections to Latinidad may actually make the extraction more insidious because it is cloaked in the language of personal connection. Arriving in New York City in 1978, Madonna quickly came to see Puerto Ricans and other Latinos as raw sources of sexual and cultural energy to be enjoyed, plundered, and eventually drawn from to reproduce. One scholar argued that Madonna has arguably eaten, digested, and defecated on Latino culture. This visceral language captures the violence inherent in the appropriative process, the way that consumption of culture is also a form of erasure. During the 1980s through the 1990s, it was Madonna who came to most successfully commodify Puerto Rican cultural practices for all to see. Without the means to record, disseminate, and pass on Puerto Rican cultural capital on a national scale, the hunger to consume and show off Puerto Ricanness was often fed by white stars who seduced us with their attention and polarized us by their expropriation. Madonna framed as a paradigm of Americanness is gainfully ironic. Any attempt to engage with her as a cultural site immediately points to the various racialized communities whose practices flavored Madonna’s distinct American persona. Madonna’s 2019 album Madame X continued this pattern. Some were quick to accuse Madonna of attempting to cash in on the increasing popularity of Latin pop with the album’s first single "Medellín" featuring Colombian reggaeton star Maluma. But she has been incorporating Latin culture into her music as far back as 1986. The pattern is foundational. The Oriental Madonna: Appropriating Asian and South Asian Cultures Madonna’s appropriation of Asian cultures reveals another dimension of her project, the consumption of the East as a source of spiritual authenticity and exotic coolness. In her "Asian Kool" phase, Madonna used Asian cultural signifiers to provide a sense of coolness. The culture was often consumed to provide this effect, stripped of context and meaning. The 1998 Rolling Stone photo shoot featuring Madonna in Indian saris and bindis represented a particularly clear example of this dynamic. She adopted bindis, mehndi, and South Asian symbolism as part of her spiritual persona during her Ray of Light era. This was the extraction of aesthetic signifiers to signal spiritual depth and cosmopolitan sophistication. The following year, Madonna participated in a geisha-inspired photo spread for Harper’s Bazaar magazine. She dyed her hair black and wore makeup like a Japanese geisha for a music video that had exactly nothing to do with Japan. Instead of condemnation for appropriating Asian culture, Madonna received high praise. Reviewers called the video deliciously subversive, daring, surreal. This double standard, where white artists are celebrated for what artists of color are criticized for, is central to the operation of cultural appropriation. The visual manipulation of East Asian women in American pop performances has been noted by scholars. American pop singers such as Madonna, Katy Perry, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj have employed mute Asian female artists in their music videos. These women’s voiceless images reinforce the stereotype of Asian women as subaltern through the concept of Orientalism and techno-Orientalism. Madonna’s use of Asian women as silent accessories in her work participates in this long history of Orientalist representation. The scholar John Hutnyk questioned the meaning of cultural hybridization, asking what it means when Madonna dons a bindi. Is this a celebration of multiculturalism or cultural appropriation? The answer depends on whether we understand culture as something that can be freely borrowed or as something that is embedded in histories of power, colonialism, and racism. Madonna’s bindis were a consumption of South Asian culture for her own purposes. The Jewish Madonna: Spiritual Tourism and Kabbalah Madonna’s engagement with Judaism, particularly her embrace of Kabbalah, represents perhaps the most extended and explicit example of her appropriative project. In the mid-2000s, Madonna became a devoted follower of the Kabbalah Centre, adopting the Hebrew name Esther, wearing a red string around her wrist to ward off the evil eye, and reportedly refusing to perform on the Jewish Sabbath. On the one hand, she wears a Jewish star, says she attends synagogue, performs with a version of the prayer accessory known as tefillin and with Hebrew letters flashing across a screen, and has let it be known that she won’t have concerts on the Jewish Sabbath. But on the other hand, Madonna is not Jewish. Her spokeswoman denied that she was dropping the name Madonna, saying that sometimes people have their secret name, a dream name. Madonna’s appropriations make a hash of Judaism, of whatever flavour, as well as Kabbalah. In Kabbalah, Hebrew letters are said to have enormous power, with some writers believing that God created the universe out of the energy in words and that words contain the secrets of creation. An observant Jew would never flash a name of God across the screen in so frivolous a forum as a rock concert, nor imprint the letters as tattoos, as Madonna sometimes does, since tattoos are regarded as pagan. Madonna wore tefillin in a music video for "Die Another Day". Berg says that donning tefillin represents diminution of the desire to receive and a strengthening of the desire to share. But for a woman to don tefillin is still not a common practice and for a gentile to wear tefillin might be regarded by some Jews as sacrilege. For some Jews, even Orthodox Jews, Kabbalah is something reserved for over-40 male scholars who have mastered Torah and Talmud. The Kabbalah Centre, a 50-branch organisation whose beliefs Madonna adheres to, essentially takes Kabbalah out of Judaism and preaches that its teaching should be available to everyone. This contemporary pop Kabbalah is superficial in the sense that it doesn’t require real Hebrew learning. It is Kabbalah stripped of its Jewish context, made available for mass consumption. Madonna does not only attract attention by attending the Jewish New Year’s celebrations in Israel and by visiting the graves of Kabbalist sages for meditation and prayer, but by also using the iconography connected with the Kabbalah for the promotion of her CD and tour. The song "Isaac" on her 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor was dedicated to the Kabbalist rabbi Yitzhak Luria and drew criticism from rabbis who said that Jewish law forbids the use of the name of the holy rabbi for profit. One rabbi called for Madonna to be thrown out of the community. Madonna’s adoption of Jewish practice represents a form of spiritual tourism, the extraction of religious meaning from its community context for personal benefit. It is the ultimate expression of the appropriative impulse, the belief that all cultures and all traditions are available for consumption by those with sufficient resources and entitlement. The Religious Madonna: Blasphemy and Sacred Consumption Madonna’s relationship with religion extends far beyond her engagement with Judaism. Her entire career has been marked by the appropriation and subversion of religious imagery, particularly Catholic imagery. She has been accused by critics of sacrilege, heresy, iconoclasm, and blasphemy. Religious adherents staged protests against Madonna numerous times. The 1989 "Like a Prayer" video featured burning crosses, stigmata, and a Black saint, provoking outrage from the Catholic Church. The 2006 Confessions Tour featured Madonna performing on a mirrored cross, wearing a crown of thorns. According to Madonna, this performance, in which she played the role of the crucified, was intended to keep attention focussed on the millions of AIDS orphans in Africa. This justification, the use of sacred imagery to draw attention to a social cause, reveals the instrumentalization of religion that characterizes Madonna’s approach. Religious symbols are not sacred in themselves, they are tools to be deployed for other purposes. Madonna’s use of religious imagery has been defended by some as critique, as a subversion of patriarchal religious authority. Yet this critique is complicated by the fact that Madonna is a white woman from a Catholic background, not a member of a marginalized religious community. Her blasphemy is the blasphemy of the insider, the one who can afford to mock what she has never been oppressed by. The controversy surrounding Madonna’s religious appropriations reveals the double standard at work in cultural appropriation more broadly. When white artists appropriate religious imagery, it is often read as subversive or artistic. When artists from marginalized communities engage with religious imagery, it is often read as offensive or inauthentic. This double standard is the mechanism by which appropriation operates. The Legacy: Madonna and the Normalization of Appropriation Madonna’s career has had a profound impact on popular culture, not just through her music but through the model she established for how to succeed in the entertainment industry. That model, the systematic appropriation of marginalized cultures for commercial gain, has been adopted by countless artists who followed her. The scholar Michael Dango has argued that Madonna’s 1992 album Erotica was and is central to a developing consciousness about cultural appropriation. This is a crucial insight. Madonna’s work has been central both to the practice of cultural appropriation and to the critique of cultural appropriation. She has made appropriation visible, forcing audiences to confront the question of who has the right to use whose culture. Yet this visibility has not led to accountability. Madonna has continued to appropriate throughout her career, from the Black and Latino cultures of her early work to the South Asian cultures of her Ray of Light era to the Jewish culture of her Kabbalah phase to the Latin cultures of her Madame X album. The pattern is consistent and unrepentant. The critic bell hooks noted that many of the grown black women she spoke with about Madonna had no interest in her as a cultural icon and said things like the bitch can’t even sing. It was only among young black females that hooks could find die-hard Madonna fans. This generational divide reveals something important about appropriation. The young, who have not yet fully experienced the violence of racism, may be more willing to embrace a white appropriator. The old, who have experienced that violence, are less willing to forgive.