Madonna to Madame X: Naming & Discursive Construction of Identity in Pop Culture

 

ANS 2023, January 21, 2023 "From Madonna to Madame X: Naming and the Discursive Construction of Identity in Pop Culture" by Mirko Casagranda (Università della Calabria, Italy) In the entertainment industry, names play a fundamental role in the representations of the public persona of performers as they function both as identity markers and forms of branding (Lieb 2018). Occasionally their social influence is so pervasive that names are used as paragons of the qualities embodied by the artists bearing them (Bergien 2013). When it comes to music, the names of singers and musicians are sometimes used to give a title to their albums, which results in an overlapping between art and cultural identity (van der Hoeven 2018) that is particularly interesting to investigate. Madonna is a case in point of these practices since throughout her 40-year career she has often played with names not only to identify herself and her music but also to link her manyfold postmodern personae (Guilbert 2002) to the exploration of gender, sexuality, race, politics and religion (Blanco 2014; Schwichtenberg 1993) in a process in which the private and the public inextricably intertwine. Adopting a cultural studies perspective to the analysis of pop music (Clayton 2003; Storey 2010), this presentation focuses on names in Madonna’s production – from the titles of albums like Madonna (1983), I’m Breathless (1990), MDNA (2012), Madame X (2019) to the personifications (like Dita and Veronica Electronica) she employs to mark a shift in the theme of her lyrics or in the genre of her music – so as to demonstrate how she frequently resorts to naming as a productive strategy to construct a broader cultural discourse and disseminate it across the media. MIRKO CASAGRANDA (PhD) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Calabria, Italy. His areas of interest include onomastics, critical discourse analysis and translation studies. He has edited the volume Names and Naming in the Postcolonial English-Speaking World (2018) and published articles on toponyms and trade names, gender and translation, and ecocritical discourse analysis.