Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry's Productions

African American playwright, actor, television producer and filmmaker Tyler Perry is an American cultural phenomenon. Perry has made over half a billion dollars through the development of films, plays, and television series that center storylines about black women, black communities and black religion. The success of a Tyler Perry Production, coupled with Perry's participation in a range of media and in multiple roles as creator and actor, position him as a significant site of black religious and cultural expression, and thus critical inquiry and reflection. Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry's Productions examines Perry's works from interdisciplinary perspectives and provides a necessary response to Perry's current prominence regarding black representation, black religion and black cultural production.

"Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry's Productions is the first scholarly text that analyzes, from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, Perry's body of work—plays, films, and television series. Long overdue are these probing assessments of the most successful, yet controversial black filmmaker of our era. Especially compelling are their assessments of Perry's complex gender politics, his religious themes, and the dissonance between his popularity and the responses of critics. The anthology includes prominent theologians, literary and film critics, and womanist/feminist scholars from a broad array of disciplines, which include African American Studies, Women's Studies, Ethics, Performance Studies, and Theology. One of the most provocative explorations of black popular culture that I have had the pleasure of reading."

—Beverly Guy-Sheftall is founding Director of the Women's Research and Resource Center and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women's Studies at Spelman College, USA.

"For the past decade Tyler Perry has been at the center of many discussions of gender and respectability politics within black communities. Despite the decidedly low brow quality of his productions, the contributors to Womanist and Black Feminist Response to Tyler Perry Productions brilliantly respond to the challenges and possibilities afforded by Perry's emergence.'

—Mark Anthony Neal, author Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013).

"This is both a timely and profound project—to have black women thinkers taking the lead in analyzing a producer who has made millions of dollars on his reductionist productions of black women's maybe-lives. This book breaks new ground as different generations of scholars bring a revived black cultural criticism out to play."

—Stephanie Y. Mitchem, Professor, Religious Studies/Women and Gender Studies, University of South Carolina, USA.

Tyler Perry has made over half a billion dollars through the development of storylines about black women, black communities and black religion. Yet, a text that responds to his efforts from the perspective of these groups does not exist.

LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College, USA.

Tamura A. Lomax is Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, USA.

Carol B. Duncan is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada.

Foreword; Emilie M. Townes

Introduction; LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, Tamura Lomax, and Duncan

Part I: Filmography

Part II: Theology, Spirituality and Black Popular Religious Imaginations

1: Tyler Perry Reads Scripture; Nyasha Junior

2: Signifying Love and Embodied Relationality: Towards a Womanist Theological Anthropology; Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan

3: Jesus Will Fix It, After While: The Purpose and Role of Gospel Music in Tyler Perry Productions; Lisa Allen-McLaurin

4: Screening God; Andrea C. White

Part III: Theorizing Intersecting Identities and (Re)Envisioning Black Womanhood

5: A People That Would Take Care of Ourselves: Tyler Perry's Vision of Community and Gender Relations; Yolande M.S. Tomlinson

6: It aint where you comin' from, honey: Class, Social Mobility and Marriage in Tyler Perry's Madea's Family Reunion; Carol B. Duncan

7: Mad Black Bitches and Lady-like Saints: Representations of African American Women in Tyler Perry Films; Tamura A. Lomax

8: (Re)Mediating Black Womanhood: Tyler Perry, Black Feminist Cultural Criticism and the Politics of Appropriation; Whitney Peoples

Part IV: The Politics of Performance

9: Pause, Auntie Momma!: Reading Religion in Tyler Perry's Fat Drag; LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant

10: Madea vs. Medea: Agape, and the Militarist or Murderous Maternal; Joy James

Part V: Black Women as Religio-Cultural Capital

11: Tyler Perry and the (Mis)Representation of Religious Morality; Terrion L. Williamson

12: Talking Back and Taking My 'Amens' with Me: Tyler Perry and the Narrative Colonization of Black Women's Stories; Brittney Cooper

13: Do You Want to Be Well?: The Gospel Play, Womanist Theology, and Tyler Perry's Artistic Project; Robert J. Patterson

Afterword: T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting