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MADONNA

Matador Madonna in ‘glamourizing gore’ row

Animal rights activists have called on Madonna to stop 'glamourizing gore' by dressing as a bullfighter, as the US star announces a Barcelona date on her upcoming tour.

Published: 3 March 2015 16:45 CET
Matador Madonna in 'glamourizing gore' row
Madonna with a dancer dressed as a bull at the Grammy Awards on February 8th. Photo Robyn Beck/AFP.

The superstar has found inspiration in Spain's polemic national fiesta choosing to don corrida inspired outfits to promote her latest album. The 56-year-old material girl paraded matador style between dancers wearing bull-like masks during performances at both the Grammy and Brit awards, where at the latter she came a cropper in an incident with a cape.

But her fashion choice and clear referencing to the "bloody spectacle" of bullfighting has outraged animal rights campaigners.

"Madonna has clearly lost her footing with outfit choices on her tour," PETA UK Director, Mimi Bekhechi, told The Local.

Bullfighting has been banned in Barcelona – the last bullfight held in the region of Catalonia was held in September 2011 – and Madonna is unlikely to find many supporters of los toros in the region when her Rebel Heart tour stops in Barcelona on November 24th.

"If Madonna wants to ingratiate herself to audiences she might consider choreography that reflects something less offensive than imitating a bloody spectacle where an exhausted animal is speared stabbed and weakened until finally, its spine is severed with a dagger," Bekhechi told The Local.

"We wouldn’t wish that kind of suffering on Madonna, but we do wish she would get a clue and stop trying to glamourize gore."

People have been taking to social media and blogs to have their say on the controversy, especially following the live Brits performance marked by the memorable tumble when Madonna could not untie her cape. 

"She may be nursing a bruise today but it’s nothing compared to the bullring suffering she is shamelessly trivializing," said a blog post on 'Ban Blood Sports' blog, written after Madonna’s fateful Brit’s fall.

Fan reaction

While she may have come under fire from animal rights campaigners, Madonna will be welcomed with open arms by her large fan base in Spain when she plays the Barcelona leg of the tour to promote her new album, Rebel Heart.

"This morning we laughed, we cried, we were so excited," Chris Márquez, President of the Spanish Madonna fan club, told The Local.

Madonna has a particularly strong fan base in Spain; the Spanish Madonna fan club is the oldest in the world, according to Márquez.

"There is no other fan club in the world that is so old and constant," he said. 

The fan club was born in 1987, coinciding with her 1986 album True Blue, which spawned the hits Papa Don’t Preach, Open Your Heart and La Isla Bonita.

The US megastar’s latest tour will take in 35 dates and will kick off on August 29th in Miami.

Tickets go on general sale on March 16th, but the star’s Spanish super fans can buy tickets from March 10th, the day Rebel Heart is released in Spain. Tickets are expected to cost between €45 and €175.

And what did Madonna’s staunchly loyal Spanish fans make of her recent tumble at the Brit Awards?

"At first, we were all completely in shock," Márquez told The Local, "but then we saw a master, rise like a phoenix and continue performing with enviable professionalism.

"She showed, yet again, that she remains number one, the queen of pop."

Now, the question on many people’s lips is whether the queen of pop will reference bullfighting in a country where the tradition remains divisive and is, increasingly, waning in popularity.

The Local warned against wearing bullfighting outfits as a fashion statement. 

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CULTURE

French MP abandons bid to ban bullfighting

A bid to ban bullfighting in France has been abandoned, to the relief of lovers of the traditional blood sport and dismay for animal rights' activists.

Published: 25 November 2022 09:33 CET
French MP abandons bid to ban bullfighting

The 577-seat National Assembly had looked set to vote on draft legislation that would have made the practice illegal.

But the MP behind the bill withdrew it after lawmakers filed more than 500 amendments, many of them designed to take up parliamentary time and obstruct the vote.

“I’m so sorry,” Aymeric Caron, a La France insoumise (LFI) MP and animal rights’ campaigner, told the national assembly as he announced the decision in raucous and bad-tempered scenes.

Though public opinion is firmly in favour of outlawing the practice, the bill had already been expected to be rejected by a majority of lawmakers who
are wary about stirring up the bullfighting heartlands in the south of the country.

“We need to go towards a conciliation, an exchange,” President Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday, adding that he did not expect the draft law to pass. “From where I am sitting, this is not a current priority.”

His government has urged members of the ruling centrist coalition not to support the text from the opposition LFI, even though many members are known to personally favour it.

During a first debate of the parliament’s law commission last week, a majority voted against the proposal by Caron, who denounced the “barbarism” of a tradition that was imported from Spain in the 1850s.

“Caron has antagonised people instead of trying to smooth it over,” a lawmaker from Macron’s party told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The bill proposed modifying an existing law penalising animal cruelty to remove exemptions for bullfights that can be shown to be “uninterrupted local
traditions”.

These are granted in towns such as Bayonne and Mont-de-Marsan in south west France and along the Mediterranean coast including Arles, Beziers and Nîmes.

Around 1,000 bulls are killed each year in France, according to the Observatoire National des Cultures Taurines.

READ ALSO EXPLAINED: Could bullfighting finally be banned in France?

Many so-called “bull towns” depend on the shows for tourism and see the culture of bull-breeding and the spectacle of the fight as part of their way of life – idolised by artists from Ernest Hemingway to Pablo Picasso.

They organised demonstrations last Saturday, while animal rights protesters gathered in Paris – highlighting the north-south and rural-versus-Paris divide at the heart of the debate.

“Caron, in a very moralising tone, wants to explain to us, from Paris, what is good or bad in the south,” the mayor of Mont-de-Marsan, Charles Dayot, told AFP recently.

Other defenders of “la Corrida” in France view the focus on the sport as hypocritical when factory farms and industrial slaughter houses are overlooked.

“These animals die too and we don’t talk enough about it,” said Dalia Navarro, who formed the pro-bullfighting group Les Andalouses in southern Arles.

Modern society “has more and more difficulty in accepting seeing death. But la Corrida tackles death, which is often a taboo subject,” she told AFP.

Previous judicial attempts to outlaw bullfighting have repeatedly failed, with courts routinely rejecting lawsuits lodged by animal rights activists, most recently in July 2021 in Nîmes.

The debate in France about the ethics of killing animals for entertainment is echoed in other countries with bullfighting histories, including Spain and Portugal as well as Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela.

In June, a judge in Mexico City ordered an indefinite suspension of bullfighting in the capital’s historic bullring, the largest in the world.

The first bullfight took place in France in 1853 in Bayonne to honour Eugenie de Montijo, the Spanish wife of Napoleon III.

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