Marketing Madonna: Celebrity agency across the cultural industry

This dissertation offers a theory of celebrity agency and argues that celebrities are active negotiators of the culture industry, processes of commodification, and cultural values at the intersection of media institutions and audience response. It uses Madonna as a case study because she is such a clear example of the agency of celebrity across the media apparatus, the processes of bringing a product to the marketplace and the ongoing negotiation of power and meaning through audience practices. This dissertation explains how Madonna has achieved, negotiated, and maintained her success in the culture industry by outlining her relationship to her record company and larger media corporation. Given that power is not a straightforward mapping of dominant ideologies through cultural productions I contend that there are particular methods for negotiating power relations and bringing subversive content to mainstream culture. Madonna's success as a celebrity follows larger patterns of commodification including the primacy of the visual and the importance of packaging. In particular, Madonna's commodified female body acts as product packaging and is subject to market preference for youth and prejudice against aging adopting larger commercial ruling catchphrases such as "best before" and "expiry" date. Additionally Madonna's pattern of reinvention follows larger models of reinvention applied to commercial products from dish soap to roller blades in order to revitalize her commodity package from album to album and video to video. This dissertation explores the symbiotic relationship between celebrities such as Madonna, the larger media corporations, the production of particular cultural texts and audiences' meanings and practices. It does so in an effort to surpass some of the limitations of previous Madonna scholarship which focused solely on identity politics through formalist readings of cultural texts and their reception to explore the influence of the larger political economic, historical, and cultural contexts of capitalist society.