Unsettling Domesticity: Desperately Seeking Susan , Madonna and the Voyeuristic Politics of MTV Stardom

This chapter discusses Susan Seidelman’s work, particularly Desperately Seeking Susan, in relation to MTV’s depiction of 1980s female youth culture. MTV’s development of female music videos through musicians like Pat Benatar, Cyndi Lauper, and Madonna challenged cultural hierarchies by positioning personal agency against Victorian attitudes about women’s sexuality. By casting Madonna in the role of Susan in Desperately Seeking Susan, Seidelman’s film highlights dimensions of Madonna’s stardom and dramatizes it, as reports throughout the 1980s regularly featured commentary on contests and concerts where fans would dress up and impersonate the singer. As the character Roberta grapples with her suburban domesticity (and, in some sense her privileged experience of whiteness), she echoes this sense of impersonation as she begins to lose herself in the persona of Madonna’s Susan. This narrative of mistaken identity highlights how MTV’s female stardom in the 1980s premised itself, partly, on the rejection of gendered cultural hierarchies while working to reclaim possibilities of female autonomy and sexual agency through a voyeuristic engagement with Madonna’s celebrity. Seidelman’s work positions female music celebrity in opposition to domesticity, unsettling gendered hierarchies that restrict women’s personal and sexual fulfilment, themes that find further resonance Sex and The City.