“Justify My Love”: Revisiting Queer Aesthetics, Politics and Feminist “Sex Wars”

This article has been peer reviewed

After famously being banned from MTV, Madonna’s “Justify My Love” (Jean Baptiste Mondino, 1990) was released as a VHS tape single; this prompted a lesbian slumber watch party with my friends. The clip arrived at a time when I was beginning to draw connections between politics, aesthetics and desire in both the queer and straight world. So many of us had insisted that everything was political, which included measuring the worth of a film, TV show or music clip by its so-called “politics”. Our politics were left-wing, coalitional and sometimes snobby. We marched for Aboriginal people’s land rights; we debated what the fall of the Berlin Wall meant for Marxism and communism; and we fought over what came to be known as the feminist sex wars. Our language was not framed by diversity, equity and inclusion, but difference, solidarity and liberation. We identified as lesbians, dykes and queers, and we understood the aesthetics of our dress, and manner of carrying ourselves, as crossing the straight world. But our watch party was organised neither to measure political import nor to review the clip’s aesthetic choices. We gathered for the visual pleasure – wait for it – of looking at Madonna’s arse. If I was at first uncertain as to whether Madonna’s music video had made me the queer I am today, my return to the clip – 35 years later – has reminded me that if not formative, “Justify My Love” reflects much more about my queer lefty subjectivity than I initially remembered from my scopophilic arse watching. 

The clip was shot over three days in the Royal Monceau Hotel in Paris and directed by Jean Baptiste Mondino.¹ As is the case with many of Mondino’s video clips – he also directed music videos for David Bowie, Björk, Sting, and won several MTV awards for Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer” (1984)² – “Justify My Love” is shot in black and white. It has been said that the clip is a tribute to French New Wave screenwriter and director Jacques Demy’s The Bay of Angels (1963), which was the last film Demy shot before switching to colour.³ Also associated classic style, film noir, and documentary truth-telling, the black and white veneer of “Justify My Love” moves us through a more playful pushing of boundaries and binaries than the clear-cut opposition the two colours are used to represent. The blurring of boundaries had pleased certain critics embracing what became associated with postmodern strategies of reading, writing and doing, where academic commentary emerged mostly in literature, architecture, art, cultural studies, feminist studies and queer theory.⁴ So-called postmodern critique emphasised the superstructure of capitalism (culture, media, consciousness), which coincided with various area studies highlighting the significance of race, gender, and sexuality as sites for materialist analysis. In its celebratory reception, critique stressed steering the orthodox Marxist focus on class and economy to more sites and broader interventions for social change. Those less optimistic, from both progressive and conservative perspectives, hailed postmodernism as spurious, relativist and nihilistic. Madonna and “Justify My Love” became a dense site of cultural critique through which the status of postmodernism, politics and morality were debated.

There are at least 70 books written about Madonna in English. She has authored and published her own works, including 11 coffee table books, of which the 1992 book of erotic photographs, Sex, sold over 1.5 million copies only a few days after its release.⁵ There is an abundance of biographies, and numerous popular works that range from titles like I Dream of Madonna: Women’s Dreams of the Goddess of Pop (1993)⁶ to Encyclopedia Madonnica (1995).⁷ As indicated, perhaps due to the decade in which Madonna reached a peak in fame, many academic works on the artist explored relations between identity, “postmodern” culture and representation, as evident in titles like Madonna as Postmodern Myth: How One Star’s Self-Construction Rewrites Sex, Gender, Hollywood and the American Dream (2002)⁸ and  The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory (1993).⁹ 

The Madonna Connection contains a few essays that refer to “Justify My Love”, with Lisa Henderson’s¹⁰ devoted to it entirely. While Henderson includes a narrative of the scenes shot in the film clip, other commentaries regarding the video clip tend to focus on the cultural impact and controversies raised. My own commentary follows this trend, and it is hard to find formal film analysis of the clip. Henderson’s essay focuses on queer and feminist connections. She observes that the gay and lesbian press had already developed an interest in Madonna “before the MTV brouhaha over ‘Justify My Love’”. Yet, she notes, “virtually none of the thirty-three columns, reports and features” she reviewed from the mainstream press writing about the clip “so much as mentioned Madonna’s popularity among lesbian and gay audiences or her connection to gay culture and politics”.¹¹ Our watch party confirmed this popularity, where we suspended our distaste for capitalist commercialism to embrace Madonna’s command to express ourselves.

In the early 1980s, I recall in-jokes within left-wing circles when one or some of us would consume something that could be considered “ideologically unsound”, like eating a burger from McDonald’s, or watching pornography.¹² By the 1990s, the new term for describing this became “political correctness” (PC). Both terms can be traced to sentiments expressed by defectors from authoritarian versions of a Communist Central Committee party line, such as in Stalin’s Soviet Russia.¹³ When cultural significations like PC move from left expressions to right-wing culture wars, crossing the line of political and moral judgment becomes more slippery. Debate and confusion over the correct party line, feminist line, or appropriate form of queer politics continues in today’s uses of these terms, most often uttered as a put-down for being overly “woke”. 

“Justify My Love” entered popular culture at such a juncture when many of us were figuring out for ourselves where we would draw the line when anti-capitalist principles would conflict with the pleasure of consumption, or if publicity about subcultures would fall into the extraction of cultural appropriation on one side, or the credit of appreciation and gain on the other. As I rewatched the clip in preparation for the My Formative Queers symposium, I could see that these questions, alongside those concerning sexual objectification, sex work, queer identity and gender diversity have not lost their currency in both the culture wars focused on traditional values, and feminist sex wars arguing over where we were drawing what lines over politics, identity, work and desire.

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) features a one-sentence summary of “Justify My Love”: “A distressed, tired woman becomes seduced into a sexual encounter with a mysterious man and woman”.¹⁴ Most commentaries draw attention to the fact that this tired woman is walking down the corridor of hotel rooms, in look-a-like make-up and hairstyle of Marilyn Monroe. She is straining to carry a suitcase; she wears a dark, heavy overcoat, which is open enough to reveal that perhaps she wears only lingerie underneath. Madonna, however, is not in the first frame we see. 

“Justify My Love” (Jean Baptiste Mondino, 1990)

The clip begins with a three-to-four-second close-up of Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza¹⁵ looking into the camera, who rises from visible squat to upright shadow and down again through the dance style of voguing. Xtravaganza is perhaps the most famous name of one of the LGBTQ alternative family Houses forming part of the underground ball scene in Harlem, New York City, where voguing competitions blossomed in the 1970s and 1980s. The ball scene became publicised through the documentary Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1990). In the same year, Madonna released her number one hit, “Vogue”, in which Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza featured and collaborated in choreography. 

The direct connection to Black, Afro-Caribbean, and Latinx gay and trans culture raised questions about the extent to which credit moves toward enhancing the lives of those who have developed voguing on the one hand, or whether, on the other hand, the style becomes emptied of and unmoored from its historical roots when appropriated by more privileged outsiders to the culture.¹⁶ Jose’s dancing appears about eight times in the five-minute clip. No doubt Madonna has earned far more fame and money from the publicity of voguing than the drag ball’s House of Xtravaganza or House of Ninja, where the “Godfather of voguing”, Willi Ninja, resided. It would be worth taking stock of how the increased publicity about voguing has affected or enhanced (or not) the living conditions of the communities that live in the LGBTQ houses adjacent to ball culture. Nonetheless, for some, having someone from the House of Xtravaganza reach the public sphere through a music video has been cause for celebration.

“Justify My Love” (Jean Baptiste Mondino, 1990)

The second open hotel door we see shows a person wearing pantyhose, with a backless top that is vertically cut in its front to hang loosely over the visibility of their right breast and nipple. Each arm rests on the frame of the doorway, one raised higher than the other; the cropped, greased short hair resembles the style of a 1920s flapper. It is hard not to associate the dress and stance in the hotel doorway as signifying a sex worker, and that is exactly what some critics alluded to when evaluating what feminist lines Madonna might have crossed. While the feminist sex wars have been written about as peaking in the 1980s and 1990s, debates over sex work, sexual objectification, BD/SM sexual practices, and how the category of woman relates to trans and gender diverse identities have no doubt peaked again. Today, these issues and the status of trans women have taken a turn toward the traditional values associated with religious conservatism, right-wing politics, as well as trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and sex worker exclusionary radical feminists (SWERFs).

When Henderson notes that Madonna leaves sex work ambiguous in “Justify My Love”, she also states “the sale of sexual services has long benefitted men and subjugated women as sexual and economic property, notwithstanding Madonna’s coy gender reversals”.¹⁷ Yet, singling out sex work as benefiting men and subjugating women exceptionalises these jobs from the legacy of patriarchal property relations within workplaces in general, as well as in other spheres like the heteronormative family home. Such positioning also takes away the agency of sex workers themselves. Organisations like peak sex workers association, Scarlet Alliance, books like Laura María Agustín’s Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Labour Industry (2007) and Lizzie Borden’s classic film Working Girls (1973) all ask us to look through the lens of labour over focusing on sexual propriety. The battle within feminist circles around sex work gathers around the same fault lines as those concerned with the objectification of women. Explicit lyrics about sex and the explicit sexual attire of BD/SM role play invite onlookers to the side of desire, the pleasure of looking and being looked at. So how might Laura Mulvey’s conception of the male gaze and objectification of women respond to this?

Much commentary and revision of the “male gaze” has been written since the publication of Mulvey’s famous 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, including from the author herself.  Mulvey’s psychoanalytic approach to reading film gives us a question that was far from our minds at the watch party, but to which I now turn to recall how feminist criticism has always had to struggle within itself to find a place for desire. Mulvey asks us to look at how “the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form”.¹⁸ When reflecting on the worth of a concept like the male gaze in this case, debates about postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s can be useful for breaking out of ruts that demand the “either/or” logic to either accept or reject one side of a binary position over another. 

Nonetheless, there is something to be said for how the gender binary dominates the positioning of looking and being looked at, as John Berger also emphasised in his gem of a book, Ways of Seeing (1973). Mulvey’s contention that every viewer, regardless of gender, is positioned to adopt the gaze of a male in the psychoanalytic sense of needing to separate from and reverse dependency on one’s Mother can offer an appealing explanation for the repetition of cinematic tropes that contain, control and exert domination over women in general. I think it is fair to say that the unconscious of patriarchy is yet to be smashed. Yet trouble with the male gaze begins as soon as we move from abstracted, dominant and average positions of viewing subjects to the concrete specificity of marginal and deviant classifications of people who also look and get looked at. 

Within feminism, bell hooks¹⁹ exposed the whiteness of the imaginary viewer as well as the marginality and difference of black women compared to white women on screen. And as Angela Davis²⁰ had pointed out in an early essay, contrary to presumed male privilege, Black men have been historically prohibited, punished and sometimes imprisoned for looking at white women. Adding to this, criticism of presumed heterosexuality and the stability of the gender binary in mainstream feminist thought, most famously articulated by Judith Butler, has lent itself to extending the conceptualisation of the male gaze to ask what a female gaze might look like.²¹ In 2001, Jack Halberstam expanded the concept to encompass a specific instance of a transgender gaze.²² 

For the moment in which we were viewing Madonna’s arse, however, I am pretty sure that none of us at the watch party was concerned with what the subject position of our gaze might have been. Still, looking back at the clip today with a more critical eye, there is enough going on in “Justify My Love” to demand that any recourse to the male gaze becomes more sensitive to race, gender ambiguity, gender reversals, queer and trans subjectivity as both lookers and revellers in being looked at. 

“Justify My Love” (Jean Baptiste Mondino, 1990)

All people who appear in “Justify My Love” are either in various stages of undress, getting ready for sex, having sex or watching others have sex. Most wear BD/SM gear. At timestamp 00:02:45, through the shadowed triangle of the voguer’s torso and upper arm, we look at the reflection of two people, both facing the bathroom mirror. One leans back into the other’s embrace, whose hand rests on their lower neck and upper chest. One has bobbed hair, the other a straight fringe and high bun; both have dark, sculpted eyebrows and heavily applied eye makeup and lipstick. I see both as trans femme. As I look at them today, and as they look at themselves in the mirror, I do not turn to the male gaze of objectification for critical aesthetic analysis, but the queer and trans aesthetics of both quiet and loud assertion of being that resonates with the feminist slogan, “wherever we go, however we dress”.

The room for gender diversity in “Justify My Love”, from cis-women and cis-men, through to trans femme, non-binary, gender diverse, and what Jack Halberstam has called “Female Masculinity”, is cause for celebration. This is especially so given that only a few months after the My Formative Queers symposium, the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of woman is to be narrowed to one’s biological assignation of sex at birth.²³ Over the forty years of my own engagement with the feminist sex wars, the warning back then of what could happen if TERFS and SWERFS join hands with the guardians of traditional values is playing out before us now. 

The postmodern debates over essentialism and social construction ought to have equipped us all with a better understanding of how the dominant categories of gender, race and sexuality (among others) have been made available to us through historical struggles between norms of governance and control in regulating favoured populations over the heterogeneity of existing peoples. Far from rendering these categories meaningless, exposing the grounds through which gender, race, sexuality and other identities shift should have expanded and transformed the terrain in which we make sense of ourselves and others. Instead, the narrow confines of “traditional values” have been allowed to enforce cis-normativity, the gender binary, and hetero-normative ideals from which to express sexuality. Each time we make a dent in the public sphere to highlight how these norms tie to what Sandy O’Sullivan²⁴ calls the “Colonial Project of Gender (and everything else)”, we are accused of being overly woke or/and disturbing the natural order of tradition.

If Madonna and “Justify My Love” have challenged traditional values, she and her music video have not explicitly denounced them. There is nothing about expressing the spectrum of gender identity and engaging in queer and kinky sexual practices that undermines the existence of those who identify with the gender binary and vanilla sex. We might also ask if including Catholic iconography within the video is sacrilegious, as those supposedly protecting traditional values claim. Having been brought up Catholic and having not completely renounced my attachment to my once holy self, I relate to Madonna’s embrace of the old saying “once you’re a Catholic … you’re always a Catholic”.²⁵ 

“Justify My Love” (Jean Baptiste Mondino, 1990)

There are moments in “Justify My Love” where we catch sight of the crucifix attached to the hotel wall, in which the camera gives us a two-second close pan at 00:03:32. Before this, at around 00:02:51, we see her lover’s neck carrying the weight of a few chains and lariat with big and small crucifixes attached to them; they move with him as he tops Madonna. In an interview, Madonna asks why not incorporate crosses and rosaries into one’s everyday and sexual life? She makes the case to criticise the organised institution of Catholicism while retaining her own connection to the church’s spirituality. 

“Justify My Love” (Jean Baptiste Mondino, 1990)

From acknowledging the racial roots of voguing and acknowledging sex workers through to playing dress-ups in corsets and incorporating rosary beads into sexual expression, I would not have guessed that returning to this clip would have given me so many things to reflect on that are undoubtedly part of my queer inheritance. This is the case, even though the VHS copy of “Justify My Love” would have been near worn out from repeated rewinds of Madonna’s arse in the scene where a presumably heterosexual couple are having sex. The surrounding characters in the clip, however, are unmistakably the regular kinds of people I have mixed with in all the LGBTQ+ worlds I have inhabited. This is what I noticed most when watching “Justify My Love” again. 

“Justify My Love” (Jean Baptiste Mondino, 1990)

This time around, it was not so much the arse watching that I revelled in; rather, it was the moment at 00:04:15 involving a close-up of two masculine characters. They are dressed in suits, both wearing leather caps, and one of them shows their white pressed shirt cuffs and cufflinks. From the cuffs, beautifully manicured hands attend to their partner’s face. One hand is spread to steady their partner’s face and neck, while the other draws a moustache with what looks like eyeliner. My heart was warmed not only by the tender looks that this suited couple give one another, but also because the still of this image captures the common practice many of us engage in when getting dressed up for a party. As it happened, our host for the My Formative Queers symposium entered the second session, lip synching to Queen’s “I Want to Break Free” (1984), donning a moustache that her girlfriend had painted on her in the break. 

My Formative Queers was a lot of fun, which did not mean we were not aware of other pressing political issues that surrounded us. While the symposium prompted me to reflect on the spaces between politics, aesthetics and desire in a music video, it also opened the space to confront the through line where TERFs and SWERFs have formed alliances with the far-right protectors of so-called “traditional values”. “Justify My Love” may have been banned on MTV in 1990, but it is now freely available through video-sharing platforms; however, there is growing censorship over trans people’s very right to be. As the UK enforces transphobic legislation, and the USA’s Trump administration rolls back protections and rights for LGBTQ+ people, film and music videos can remind us that our continued existence forms a jagged line of struggle, survival and celebration in history. Over the decades since my first watching, I have learned just how entangled making sense of my queer becoming is with making sense of all other types of identity. And as I continue to struggle and build solidarity alongside others to fight against the rise of fascism, transphobia, the genocide in Gaza, the ongoing oppression of First Nations people on the stolen land in which I live, I am thankful for having spaces where I can still enjoy the pleasure of looking and being looked at.

Bibliography

• Bennett, David, “PC Panic, The Press and The Academy” Meanjin, 52.3 (September, 1993), pp. 435-446.
• Breihan, Tom, “The Number Ones: Madonna’s “Justify My Love”, https://www.stereogum.com/2165394/the-number-ones-madonnas-justify-my-love/columns/the-number-ones/ October 29 2021
• Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London, 1990).
• Davis, Angela Y. “Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist” in Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), pp. 172-201.
• Feldstein, R. Political Correctness: A Response from the Cultural Left (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
• Frow, John, What Was Postmodernism? (Sydney: Local Consumptions, 1991).
• Guilbert, Georges-Claude, Madonna as Postmodern Myth: How One Star’s Self-Construction Rewrites Sex, Gender, Hollywood and the American Dream (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Company Inc., Publishers, 2002)
• Halberstam, J. “The Transgender Gaze in Boys Don’t Cry”, Screen, 42: 3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 122-128.
• Henderson, “Justify Our Love: Madonna and the Politics of Queer Sex” in The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory, Cathy Schwichtenberg ed. (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993), pp. 107-128.
• Hooks, Bell “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators” in Black Looks: Race and Representation Boston: South End Press, 1992), pp. 115-132.
• Hooks, Bell “Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), pp. 157-164
• Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com.
• Jay, “Tag Archives: Royal Monceau Hotel”, Today in Madonna History https://todayinmadonnahistory.com/tag/royal-monceau-hotel/ November 9 2014
• Laing, Morna and Willson Jackie eds. Revisiting the Gaze: The Fashioned Body and the Politics of Looking, (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022).
• Madonna, Sex (New York: Warner Books, 1992), https://landslide.sydney/products/madonna-sex
• Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, 16.3 (Autumn, 1975): 6-18.
• O’Sullivan, Sandy. “The Colonial Project of Gender (And Everything Else),” Genealogy 5: 67 (July, 2021).
• Rettenmund, Matthew, Encyclopedia Madonnica (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995).
• Schwichtenberg, Cathy, ed., The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993).
• Turner, Kay ed. I Dream of Madonna: Women’s Dreams of the Goddess of Pop (San Francisco: Collins Publishers, 1993)
• “UK’s Top Court Rules Legal Definition of a Woman Refers to Biological Sex”, SBS (17 April 2025), https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/uks-top-court-rules-legal-definition-of-woman-refers-to-biological-sex/1smpvln2h
• Wilson, Janelle L. and Markle, Gerald E. “Justify My Ideology: Madonna and Traditional Values”, Popular Music and Society 16: 2 (1992), pp. 75-84.

Endnotes