In the preface to a new book, The Madonna Connection, which features the latest academic word on the pop star and the growing craze for Post-Madonna studies, editor Kathy Schwichtenberg writes: "This volume demonstrates Madonna's usefulness as a paradigm case to advance further developments in cultural theory." Among these developments are Melanie Morton's Marxist view that Madonna undermines "capitalist constructions [and] rejects core bourgeois epistemes" and Professor Marjorie Garber's analysis of Madonna's tendency to grab her crotch: "[It] emblematize[s] the Lacanian triad of having, being, and seeming."

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