Madonna's adoption
Mother and Child, and NBC
Like some kind of strange avatar of controversy, the pop singer Madonna from time to time bursts back into the national conversation, through carefully transgressive acts that can seem at once silly and yet revealing of our cultural preoccupations. This month has witnessed a double-header. Most visibly, her fast-tracked adoption of an infant from Malawi has generated lots of hyperventilating headlines about the unfair prerogatives and unseemly habits of celebrity. Less visibly, but more importantly, she has once again offended religious sensibilities in a provocative stage performance – and this time lost.
