One of the biggest pop stars of the ‘80s and into the mid-‘90s. She’s still doing something I’m sure. (One search later… releasing “Bitch I’m Madonna” ft. Nicki Minaj. Correct.)

And a big part of her schtick was Catholic burlesque. Rosaries and crucifixes as fashion accessories, songs titled “Like a Virgin”, “Angel”, “Papa Don’t Preach” (about standing up to patriarchy by… not aborting an unintended pregnancy, dedicated to the Pope), and “Like a Prayer”, like holy shit, look at that video. (Music videos were the most important art form of the 1980s.) I’d say calling herself “Madonna” was the topper, but that was her (and her mother’s) birth name. Nominative determinism, I guess.

The context here is that it was only in the 1970s that the “white ethnics” - descended from mostly Catholic, Jewish, or Orthodox immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, began being considered as fully the same race as plain “white”, which had heretofore been more specifically Protestant/secularist North/Western Europeans. You still saw echoes of the distinction into the ‘90s, uptight WASPs as opponents to the cool protagonists in cultural works by people who had lived through when that was plausibly a thing.

And part of the twist was that Catholicism had been coded as sexually repressive, particularly upon women but Madonna made a thing of invoking it as an accessory to female sexual assertion, very eroticized videos, wearing see-through clothing and lingerie on tour, you know back in the day she… wait, I should establish some other stuff first.

Also the other big thing she did was pull in this whole multi-racial, multi-sexuality dirty poor NYC thing - New York was still recovering from the bankrupcty of the 1970s, not yet made it to Giuliani Time and the walking-back of the last time we tried not repressing black people. So if we’re talking pop cultural touchstones it wasn’t quite Taxi Driver or The Warriors NYC anymore, but still a ways off from Friends NYC, let alone Sex in the City or Girls’. Ghostbusters/Burton Batman NYC, I guess.

So a lot of sexual contact with hot brown-skinned men in her videos and as backup dancers, also queer culture - “vogueing” and a lot of other things from NYC “ballroom” society (all you babby genderweirds should watch Paris is Burning if you haven’t yet, I am nothing if not insistent that one should learn the history of one’s people), in 1992 releasing a coffee table book of pansexual celebrity kink erotica.

Okay. Anyway, you know back in the day she was known for having her limousine driven through the (predominantly black and Puerto Rican) Lower East Side and picking up teenage boys off the street to use for the night? After a while the locals got tired of this, learned to recognize her limo, and threw trash at it.

I guess you could peg Lady Gaga as her successor, doing queer burlesque at the moment of their incorporation into the mainstream. Also she does that “present yourself as the perfect accessible celebrity friend/avatar to your audience” thing that Taylor Swift does better. Honestly, I think the big problem with her though is that music videos aren’t as big a thing though (and have better competition as “media for young people to consume”) so her visual peacocking doesn’t count for as much anymore.