Self-Organizing Man

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On the topic of Madonna singing "Live to Tell" while hanging from a mirrored cross:

She has been accused of blasphemany and may be breaking a German law that prevent insulting religious beliefs.

Dr. Donna Freitas declares this state of affairs a "failure of the religious imagination" because we can’t imagine a woman on the cross. She goes to describe taking her religion students through an exercise in which she asks them to imagine Jesus on the cross, then a Jesus as a black man on the cross, as a Latino man on the cross, as an Asian man on the cross. Then she asks them to imagine a (presumably white) woman on the cross.

"My students laugh."

Are there some icons that are so gendered that they cannot rise above, beyond, etc, their gendered nature? If Dr. Freitas is correct, Jesus the Icon can transcend racial boundaries, but not gendered ones.

Is the icon of Jesus on the cross so intrinsic to the construction of masculinity - particularly white masculinity - that we achieve a failure of imagination when we think of a woman there?

Can we imagine its opposite: a long-suffering Joseph weeping over the crucified body of Jesus? How integral, truly, are these two religious icons in the construction of modern, Western, white masculinity and femininity?

And what are we to make of the student’s mockery of Madonna on the Cross? Or my own: "well, no woman would ever end up on the cross anyway" response?

In the end isn’t this really a failure of the human imagination?