How would you describe Madonna? In her illustrious 43-year career, she has established herself as the best-selling female artist of all time, the queen of pop, a queer icon and advocate, an agent provocateur, a mother, and more. But as we discussed her legacy and impact on popular culture at the Dazed office this week in preparation for the release of her 15th studio album, Confessions II, only one phrase came to my mind: feminist icon. 

Debates around what makes an individual a feminist or feminist icon are contentious and often silly. Nothing highlights the absurdity of this debate more than the infamous X post that reads “Is [insert random pop star] a feminist? Is Mastercard a queer ally? Is this TV show my friend?”. It is also a debate that one can easily disregard when you understand that feminism is not just an identity label you put on your shirt, but a movement to fight for the freedom and justice of all marginalised people. But Madonna – with her hit songs about women’s bodily autonomy (“Papa Don’t Preach”), gender experimentation (“Express Yourself”), queer love (“Forbidden Love”) and her unbridled commitment to sexuality and pleasure (“Erotica” and her accompanying controversial soft porn Sex book, condemned by the Pope) – has been embroiled in this debate since the beginning of her career. 

In 1990, feminist scholar Camille Paglia argued in the New York Times that Madonna is the “future of feminism”, following the release of her controversial music video for “Justify My Love,” which featured Madonna seducing and initiating sex with her then-boyfriend, Tony Ward and a mysterious woman, as well as acts of sadomasochism and voyeurism. “Madonna is the true feminist,” Paglia writes. “She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode… She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive and funny, all at the same time.” 

Contrastingly, bell hooks in her 1993 article for On The Issues Magazine titled “Desperately Seeking Madonna The Feminist”, writes that she has conflicting feelings towards the artist: “I see her work projecting the worst aspects of white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal culture, [but] I am also fiercely affirming of her successful attempts to challenge sexist notions of womanhood, female sexuality, contributions to Aids activism and the like.” hooks argues that Madonna often betrays her own radical questioning of women’s sexist objectification, because she is desperate to appear like “one of the boys” or in today’s words: a pick me. For hooks, nothing highlighted this desire more than her 1992 Vanity Fair cover, where the 33-year-old is dressed akin to a “sexy baby” – debasing herself in pigtails, a pink baby doll dress and hugging stuffed animals, with some images exposing her bum and breasts. Does this discourse sound familiar? 

With critiques from both feminists and anti-feminists, Madonna viewed both sides as having a limited understanding of women’s power. In an interview with Norman Mailer in 1994, she explained: “My whole thing is you use all you have, all you have: your sexuality, your femininity – any testosterone you have inside you, your intellect, use whatever you have”. As an individual so heavily debated within feminist discourse, it is only in the last 10 to 15 years that Madonna has come to fully accept her feminist labelling. In 2016, during her acceptance speech at the Billboard Women In Music event, where she was honoured as Woman of the Year, she firmly proclaimed that she did not agree with the anti-sex or anti-porn feminists of her youth. She decided to be a different kind of feminist, “a bad feminist”. 

Though Madonna meant this in a cringy, ‘I don’t follow the rules’ kind of way, which avoids accountability for her past feminist faux pas, it is the perfect way to describe the pop star, who, as academic Douglas Kellner described, “is a site of genuine contradiction.” At her best, Madonna has shown young people, particularly young women, that their sexuality is their own, that their thirst for pleasure is not frivolous, that women can be toned and sexy, that you do not need to give a shit about what the world thinks of you, or your sexual orientation and that you can stand strong in your convictions. At her worst, she has appropriated Black culture, used marginalised people to uplift her own image (you can read more about this here), reinforced the male gaze and patriarchal ideals of womanhood, and succumbed to some of the same cosmetic pressures around “successful” ageing that her career has otherwise challenged. She has been everything to popular feminism and its enemy, all at once. In some ways, Madonna is the ultimate feminist polemic – an individual, as Grace Byron writes for Lux, who has taken a hard stance on “contentious issues like pornography, rape, trans rights, or lesbian separatism,” and forces us to think. “Bold proclamations,” as Byron writes, “have an important role in our culture.”  

My first memory of Madonna is particularly positive and striking. As she stretched in her pink leotard and purple high heels in the music video for the lead single from Confessions I, “Hung Up,” I remember seeing a muscular, flexible woman and being astonished that she had a body and knew exactly what to do with it. To me, she was, and continues to be, one of the coolest people on the planet, despite her numerous flaws. And with the release of Confessions II, my admiration of her only grows. For decades, Madonna has been subjected to the kind of tabloid cruelty and extreme ageism reserved for women who refuse to become smaller, quieter or less sexual with time. In her 2016 Billboard speech, she put it plainly: “the most controversial thing I have ever done is to stick around.” At 67 years old, she has not yet left the dancefloor – continuing to challenge and provoke people who believe women should disappear after they turn 40 – but hopefully she never will.