Diva
Related: Venus - Aphrodite - femme fatale - godess - opera diva - sex symbol - vamp
Definition
Diva is the Latin and Italian word for "goddess", the feminine form of the Latin word divus (= "god").Time Magazine observed in its 21 October 2002 issue: "By definition, a diva is a rampaging female ego redeemed only in part by a lovely voice." The word was originally used of great female opera singers, almost always sopranos (like Maria Callas), but is now used to describe any female celebrity, whether a female singer, movie actress, or athlete. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diva
Disco divas
[...] Disco was an extended conversation between black women female divas and gay men. Straight men were welcome to join the party, but only if they learned the lingo. Some did, but for many, this new demand aroused a kind of "castration anxiety," as Alice Echols put it in a 1994 essay. Disco symbolized a world where straight men were not only expected to engender the female orgasm, but to incorporate it. --Peter BraunsteinSome of my fave female disco divas include Loleatta Holloway, Grace Jones, Rochelle Fleming, Jocelyn Brown, Taana Gardner | Fonda Rae, Gwen Guthrie and Christine Wiltshire.
Horror diva
Barbara Steele has been called a horror diva.Diva (movie)
French film Diva (1982), the debut film of Jean-Jacques Beineix, about a young French mail carrier (and opera lover) who secretly and illegally taped the vocal performance of an opera soprano, thereby becoming involved in affairs of the criminal underworld.Cult of the diva
Salome was vital to Moreau and all Symbolists because she represented to them the ultimate castrating female. Moreover, her story has clear hints of male Oedipal anxieties, and even sadomasochism. Salome became a metaphor for the new man troubled by his gender role.Symbolist artists tended to be fastidious aesthetes, dandies, reclusive hermits, or mystics, and they were frequently attracted to the priesthood. Most were what we would now classify as homosexual or bisexual; they were certainly not traditionally heterosexual.
They were, however, obsessed with the female muse in her various guises. Figures such as Eve, Lilith, Judith, Medusa, Pandora, and Jezebel recur in their works, usually as wicked divas. Whereas in Baroque art, female figures tend to be the victims of male cruelty and sexual assault, in Symbolist art men are more often sexual victims. --http://www.glbtq.com/arts/symbolists.html [May 2004]