inART

The Gospel According to Madonna

Repositioning Madonna's live performance career as a form of public philosophy, arguing that her major tours collectively tell a coherent story about the evolution of human values, identity, power, and ultimately liberty. Rather than treating the performances as isolated moments of popular culture, the work frames them as a decades-long philosophical journey that moves from rebellion and self-assertion toward relational maturity and coexistence.

We posit that Madonna's artistic evolution mirrors a broader process of human development. Drawing on the concepts of felt values, taken values, and formed values, it argues that people begin with instinctive desires, absorb social norms and cultural expectations, and eventually develop consciously chosen ethical commitments through reflection, conflict, and experience. Madonna's performances are presented as a living illustration of this process, with each stage of her career embodying a different moment in the formation of selfhood and agency. We therefore treat popular music not as entertainment alone but as a cultural laboratory in which philosophical questions are enacted before a mass audience.

The theoretical framework rests primarily upon three intellectual influences: Michel Foucault's analysis of power and knowledge, Ian Hacking's work on identity formation and "making up people," and the relational philosophy of Ubuntu. Together these lenses provide a progression from critique to reconstruction. Foucault helps explain how social norms and categories constrain human possibility; Hacking illuminates how identities are created, resisted, and transformed; and Ubuntu offers a vision of liberty grounded in relationship and mutual flourishing rather than individual domination. The document's distinctive contribution is the way it synthesizes these traditions into a single narrative arc culminating in a relational conception of freedom.