Spike Lee Can Go Straight to Hell! The Cinematic and Religious Masculinity of Tyler Perry (original) (raw)
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Take Your Place: Rhetorical Healing and Black Womanhood in Tyler Perry's Films
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society., 2014
The unparalleled commercial sucessess that gospel-playwright-turned-screenwriter Tyler Perry has attained through converting his stage plays into films that depict black women overcoming personal crises raises questions about the intent behind his seemingly feminist-inspired representations of black womanhood. Through an analysis of the rhetoric of healing in Perry’s first two films, this essay reveals one of the suppressive pedagogical functions of Perry’s representation of black womanhood. Rhetorics of healing are a series of persuasive messages, performances, and literacy acts that writers deploy in order to convince readers that redressing or preventing crises requires them to follow the curriculum for ideological, communicative, and behavioral transformation that the writer considers essential to wellness. In Diary of a Mad Black Woman and Madea’s Family Reunion, Perry’s representation of rhetorical healing constructs black Christian women as students who must learn prescribed attitudes and behaviors to achieve, or remain in, states of wellness, and these lessons reinforce conservative gender ideologies and reify patriarchal constructions of the family and home. Given black women’s historically tenuous relationships with representations of themselves and their families in mainstream film, and given the ways in which their labor in the home is simultaneously desired and exploited, the popularity of Perry’s films does not suggest that his representations of healing foster black women’s self-empowerment. Rather, his popularity points to a moment where black women’s pain is a commodity and their instructive journeys to wellness are an exploited site where writers can carry out their own agendas.
The main purpose of this paper is to examine the representation of black masculinity in four popular Hollywood movies. In the first part of the paper, the key terms and analytical points are developed, based on the relevant literature from the fields of cultural, film and media studies, African American studies and black feminism. A special emphasis is placed on the transition from a stereotype of the " Black Buck " , a common on-screen representation of a violent, vengeful, highly sexual black male to the " Black Hero " , created in the Blaxploitation movies and further developed in more recent movies. The four movies that are closely analyzed are Sergio Corbucci's Django from 1966, Gordon Parks's Shaft from 1971 and their contemporary adaptations, Shaft (2000), directed by John Singleton and Django Unchained (2012), directed by Quentin Tarantino. One of the tasks of the research is to examine how the stereotype of a violent black thug has been deconstructed and modified in more recent movies to usher the " Black Hero " character.