ABSTRACT
HUMANITIES
MEGGS, MICHELLE RENEE B.A. JOHNSON C. SMITH UNIVERSITY, 1993
M.DIV. WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY, 2003
“OH, SHE RATCHET”: AN EXAMINATION OF TYLER PERRY’S MADEA AND
CHRISTIANEE PORTER’S MISS SHIRLEEN CHARACTERS AS AGENTS OF
BLACK WOMEN’S LIBERATION
Committee Chair: Stephanie Y. Evans, Ph.D.
Dissertation dated July 2019
This purpose of this dissertation is to utilize womanism and ratchetness to determine how the actions of Tyler Perry’s Madea and Christianee Porter’s Miss Shirleen characters represent Black women’s agency through their ratchet actions. This dissertation analyzed two Tyler Perry films and five Miss Shirleen videos to determine whether their actions conveyed cultural and liberative significance beyond entertainment.
This research discovered that both characters engaged in resistance to disempowering narratives through actions that embraced a radical subjectivity and subsequent dismissal of respectability politics that embraced the strengths of Black womanhood in affirming, creative, and audacious ways. This dissertation also found that ratchetness and
i womanism as liberative agency leaves room for Black women to redefine themselves and evolve based on their own indigenous knowledge and create a language that is familiar and uplifting for themselves. Moreover, Black women can be ratchet, womanist, and respectable simultaneously regardless of class status thereby rejecting a pathologized
Black womanhood.
ii
“OH, SHE RATCHET”: AN EXAMINATION OF TYLER PERRY’S MADEA AND
CHRISTIANEE PORTER’S MISS SHIRLEEN CHARACTERS AS AGENTS OF
BLACK WOMEN’S LIBERATION
A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF CLARK ATLANTA UNIVERSITY
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR
THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF ARTS
BY
MICHELLE RENEE MEGGS
DEPARTMENT OF HUMANITIES
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
JULY 2019
© 2019
MICHELLE RENEE MEGGS
All Rights Reserved
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This dissertation would not be possible without the faith and strength God provided me and sent to me through others when mine was not enough. I want to honor
Dr. Josephine Bradley who started this journey with me. Although she now walks with the ancestors, her spirit remains ever present. I want to acknowledge Dr. Viktor Osinubi for his constant encouragement.
Also, this dissertation exists because of support from my parents Hugh and
Roberta Meggs. Without them none of this would be possible. Their ever present emotional, spiritual, and financial support throughout this process made the difficult moments easier.
I want to recognize the support of my family, friends, colleagues, sorority sisters, the supportive communities I belong to, and my church families. There were angels that
God and the ancestors sent along the way to help and whisper an encouraging word when
I needed it most. All of whom provided love, kindness, and a reassuring word that this work was possible.
I would like to acknowledge my dissertation committee, Dr. Stephanie Y. Evans,
Dr. Daniel Black, and Dr. Maisha I. Handy for their guidance, feedback, patience, and support. They continued to press me toward the finish line with humor and wisdom. I am eternally gratefully for their support.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iii
CHAPTER
I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1
It’s Madea not Medea, Honey ...... 5
The Chitlin Circuit and the Theatre Owners Booking Association ...... 8
Minstrelsy and Drag Performance ...... 12
Who is Tyler Perry? ...... 18
Who is Madea? ...... 26
Madea as Mammy ...... 27
Who is Miss Shirleen? ...... 31
Womanism Defined ...... 38
Womanism and the Politics of Respectability ...... 41
Ratchet ...... 43
Significance of the Study ...... 47
Research Questions ...... 49
Methodology ...... 50
Theoretical Framework ...... 55
Dissertation Organization ...... 57
iv
CHAPTER
II. LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 58
Respectability Politics ...... 62
The Idea of Ratchetness ...... 72
The Relevance of Womanism ...... 78
III. MADEA’S RATCHET AND WOMANIST ACTS ...... 102
Oh No He Didn’t: Critiques of Tyler Perry and his Work ...... 103
Madea’s Ratchet and Womanist Liberative Power ...... 108
Diary of A Mad Black Woman Film Summary ...... 113
Diary of A Mad Black Woman Scene One: Rip It ...... 114
Diary of A Mad Black Woman Scene Two: Please Hit Her...... 121
Diary of A Mad Black Woman Scene Three: Which Half do you Want? .....126
Madea’s Family Reunion Film Summary ...... 130
Madea’s Family Reunion Scene One: Foster Mother – Stop Popping That Gum...... 132
Madea’s Family Reunion Scene Two: School Bus Bully ...... 133
Madea’s Family Reunion Scene Three: Grit Ball ...... 139
IV. MISS SHIRLEEN’S RATCHET AND WOMANIST ACTS ...... 147
Miss Shirleen and Respectability Politics ...... 148
Miss Shirleen and Ratchetness ...... 149
Miss Shirleen and Womanism ...... 151
Womanist Theology ...... 154
v CHAPTER
Miss Shirleen’s Ratchet and Womanist Liberative Power ...... 159
A Ratchet and Respectable Language ...... 161
Miss Shirleen First Video: You Done Let the Devil Use You ...... 164
Miss Shirleen’s Ratchetness ...... 165
Miss Shirleen’s Womanism ...... 168
Miss Shirleen’s Second Video: Sounds Like a Question Straight From Your Grandmother ...... 172
Shirleen’s Ratchetness ...... 173
Shirleen’s Womanism ...... 176
Miss Shirleen’s Third and Fourth Videos: Pineapples and Shirleen Would Rather go Hungry than go out with Adults with Baby Hair ...... 178
Shirleen’s Ratchetness ...... 181
Shirleen’s Womanism ...... 181
Miss Shirleen’s Fifth Video: Hershel out my Face ...... 184
Shirleen’s Womanism ...... 185
Shirleen’s Ratchetness ...... 188
V. CONCLUSION ...... 192
Ratchet Is…Ratchet Ain’t ...... 192
You Still Acting Womanish? Good! ...... 195
Findings on Madea ...... 197
Madea’s Ratchetness ...... 198
Madea’s Womanism ...... 200
Findings on Miss Shirleen ...... 202 vi CHAPTER
Miss Shirleen’s Ratchetness ...... 202
Miss Shirleen’s Womanism ...... 203
Why This Matters - Ratchetness as Praxis: Ratchet(procity) ...... 205
We Help Each Other ...... 209
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………218
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this research is to investigate Tyler Perry’s Madea and Christianee
Porter’s Miss Shirleen characters as figures of Black women’s agency through the lens of ratchetness and womanism. Using these lenses demonstrates how these characters resist the limits that respectability politics places on Black women’s agentive practices. This dissertation seeks to fill the gap in the literature regarding the analysis of Madea and Miss
Shirleen and how they construct additional spaces for Black women’s outrageous creativity, audacious agency, and revolutionary resistance.
The researcher acknowledges that Madea is Tyler Perry in drag. Several academicians and cultural critics take issue with his appropriation and representation of
Black womanhood, utilization of Black cultural spaces, and knowledge. Scholars like
Brittney Cooper take Perry to task for his narrative colonization, how Perry through his drag performance grants himself access to spaces traditionally off limits to men and uses it to reinscribe patriarchal norms. Cooper also argues that his cultural productions perpetuate negative stereotypes of Black women.
1 2 Other scholars, like Tamura Lomax, critique Perry for using his work to reinscribe a narrowly defined Black sexual politic that limits Black women’s agency and pleasure around sex and sexuality.1 While not denying some of the problematic aspects of Madea, this researcher also recognizes that there are other lenses to view this character that are empowering for Black women. This study classifies the actions of Madea and Miss
Shirleen with a term used in popular culture called “ratchet,” those acts that are so over the top that they transgress, ignore, and intentionally disregard respectability politics2 in ways that give Black women visibility and voice in spaces that seek to silence their ways of being. Ratchet acts are about liberation. They reflect a liberatory consciousness that seeks to undermine misogyny and the anti-Black messages that impedes the well-being of
Black people in general, particularly Black women. Ratchetness demands that Black women use their agency and power to engage in radical subjectivity to intentionally and excessively subvert oppressive structures and institutions. When Black women embrace their authentic ways of being, unapologetically speak back to, and subvert white supremacy, patriarchy, and the violence that is often the by-product of these systems, they are engaging liberatory acts of ratchetness.
Womanism affirms Black women’s authority, wisdom, and bold actions as a part of their identity. The ways that Black women use their experiences and share their resistance strategies helps to ensure their survival. Black women’s womanist actions and
1. Tamura Lomax, Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 175.
2. Respectability politics is a term coined by Evelyn Brooks-Higgenbotham to explain a 19th century idea that if Black people adopted particular behaviors that reflected that of the larger white culture they would become respectable and erase the rationale for racial oppression. For more in respectability politics see Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
3 behaviors actively engage in resistance to patriarchy and respectability politics because they recognize the intersectionality of oppressions and its impact. They are committed to the necessity of self-love, self-care, and liberation from physical, mental, and spiritual bondage and systemic injustice and oppression.3 Black women who reflect a womanist approach are clear about how silence in the face of oppression and injustice connotes complicity with those very forces and systems that diminish life and wholeness.4 The ratchet and womanist actions of Madea and Miss Shirleen offer a vision of Black women’s experiences that both illustrates their humanity and complicated lives in ways that popular culture often misses, dismisses, and punishes. Womanism and ratchetness are legitimate forms of Black women’s agency because they embrace and encourage truth-telling as a means to resist exploitation and disrespect. Their ways of speaking truth to power functions as a tool to dismantle the master’s house built from and on the sands of racism, sexism, classism, and domination.5
To tell the story of Black womanhood is to share a narrative of strength, courage, and resistance. It is to share the stories of women who care deeply for their communities and who persevere through hellish circumstances. They are those women who seem tireless and invulnerable to what life has placed before their feet. These are the women who use the tools available to them to fight back against oppression and injustice. They understood the role of community support and accountability that reflected an ethos of family that emphasizes mutuality, observed affection, affirmation, and loyalty without the
3. Mitzi J. Smith, Womanist Sass and Talk Back: Social (In)Justice, Intersectionality, and Biblical Interpretation (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2018), 3.
4. Ibid., 29.
5. Ibid., 44.
4 repressive aspects of respectability.6 Locating the roots of womanist resistance within the lineage of womanish exemplars such as Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells,
Anna Julia Cooper, and Harriet Tubman,7 Black women remind themselves of their own courage during times of conflict and celebration. Lomax argues that within these roots lie the template for the creative resistance that is necessary to counter structural exploitation and oppression.
Conjuring and embodying defiant stances is not limited to publicly claimed lineages but also calls upon personal, ancestral maternal lineages. These are the women in families whose hard work went unnoticed, made a way out of no way, and took jobs that nobody wanted so that their families could eat and have a roof over their heads. They are the mamas, the grandmothers, the aunties, and the Madea’s. This is not a glorification of the ways that patriarchy calls for women, and Black women in particular, to be self- sacrificial and subordinate. These stories open up conversations and reveal the narratives of women who interrupt allegiances to white supremacy because of how it stigmatizes
Blackness – Black culture and Black bodies. Moreover, their stories highlight and integrate the roles and contributions of Black women and other marginalized people who are excluded and erased from history. The stories of women who construct their own liberation, sometimes forcefully, makes space for discussion of female subjectivity as normative rather than exceptional. One such story is found in the Greek tragedy Medea written by Euripides.
6. Robert J. Patterson, “Do You Want to Be Well? The Gospel Play, Womanist Theology, and Tyler Perry’s Artistic Project,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30, no.2 (Fall 2014):52.
7. Lomax, Jezebel Unhinged, 86.
5 It’s Madea not Medea, Honey
In Euripides’ Medea, the main character is a woman whose actions reflect what some may consider a form of ratchet agency that is similar to that of Tyler Perry’s
Madea. Medea is abandoned by her husband, Jason, and is left to care for their two sons without support from him. Medea left her homeland after helping Jason acquire the
Golden Fleece through acts of murder and deception against her own family and community. After Medea made sacrifices for Jason, he leaves her to marry the young princess in an effort to gain status. Medea, a foreigner in this new kingdom, cannot return to her homeland because she betrayed her own family for Jason, and she now finds herself in a precarious situation. She is a woman bruised, misunderstood, and ignored.
Medea is a woman who reflects a similar form of personal, ratchet agency as
Madea. Both women, according to Joy James, are the antithesis to the obedient female and are capable of planning acts that destabilize their enemies.8 However, the women are fundamentally different in that Madea threatens violence without killing anyone. Medea threatens and executes a violent plan of vengeance against those who have wronged her.
Jason’s rejection leads Medea into a deep depression. Others would say into madness.
She plots her revenge against Jason, the princess, and her father, King Creon. The king heard of Medea’s threats against his family and moves to banish her from his kingdom.
After pleading with King Creon about the impact of banishment on her two young sons,
Medea is given an additional day to leave the country. Unbeknownst to the King this sets her murderous plot in motion. Medea summons her young sons and a servant to take a
8. Joy James, Madea v Medea: “Agape and the Militarist or Murderous Maternal,” in Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions, ed. Carol B. Duncan, Tamura A. Lomax, LeRhonda S. Manigault (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 189.
6 gift, a dress, to the princess as a peace offering. The dress is laced with poison. After the princess puts on the dress and crown she falls dead from the poison. When her father goes to see her, he finds her dead on the floor. Overwhelmed with grief he grabs hold of his dead daughter. The poisonous hooks from the dress pierce his skin and he instantly dies next to his daughter.
A servant from the castle returns to Medea to share the details of what transpired.
She gloats in the fact that her plot worked and moves to enact the final part of her plan.
She takes her sons into the castle and kills them to get back at Jason for his abandonment and neglect. When Jason returns to Medea to kill her, he learns that his sons are dead and
Medea has no intention of returning their bodies to him for burial.
Medea, in many ways is a prophet of rage and retribution, shocks the consciousness with her violence because it is unexpected, astonishing, and over the top.
Medea’s actions reflect ratchetness. Her murderous acts, her refusal to be silenced, the brutal severing of her ties to patriarchy and its requirement that women sacrifice themselves for men embodies a defiant stance against marginalization. Medea presumes that she has the right to air her grievances, to resist subordination, and to fight back against patriarchy. However, Medea’s rage, her superpower loses its liberative edge because while it is clear and expressive,9 it is misguided.
Medea’s rage does not lead to the liberation of individuals or communities from the burden of oppression. She uses the killing of her children as a way to destroy her ex- husband Jason. In fact, Medea’s violent response creates more pain, which is an anti-
9. Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 4-5.
7 liberatory use of rage. Precisely focused rage can become a powerful source of energy for progress and change.10 Rage and ratchetness can serve as the basis of transformative action to subvert tyrannical systems. Both call on women to embrace an oppositional politic that challenges dominant narratives without advocating for the destruction of life.
There is no liberation in Medea’s acts of murder. Her actions are limiting because they are self-serving, which moves her actions from the realm of ratchetness to the arena of trifling.
Trifling acts are those that are simply self-serving. When one’s actions are not helpful to the larger community, work toward the growth of the self in healthy ways, or lack a liberative edge, they become trifling. Trifling actions fail to move marginalized and disenfranchised communities toward liberation. Moreover, these acts do not help to redefine or recenter the experiences of those of are often ignored, dismissed, and disregarded. Medea’s murderous actions leave the women in the community bereft of a powerful ally in their fight against oppression; they are left feeling invisible with the same negative impact that empire has on the lives of ordinary women.
Madea’s rebellious female agency resists those who seek to dominate those under her care; however, her confrontations are not lethal. Madea threatens violence to prevent it from happening. Her threat of violence can be seen as a proactive defense ignited by centuries of brutality against Black family life.11 Madea uses her agency as a Black woman to destroy oppression and works to rebuild a resilient form of Black womanhood
10. Cooper, Eloquent Rage, 5.
11. James, Madea v Medea, 192.
8 that desires to reconnect people and communities not destroy them. Madea’s actions help those under her care avoid depression when faced with repetitive structural violence and deprivation particularly when one is Black and female.12
For this study, two of Tyler Perry’s films and five of Ms. Shirleen’s videos are the focus of analysis. The two Tyler Perry’s movies are Diary of A Mad Black Woman and
Madea’s Family Reunion. These two films establish the Madea character. The five Ms.
Shirleen’s videos are Pineapples, Hershel Out My Face, Sounds Like A Question from
Your Grandma, Shirleen Would Rather Go Hungry, and You Done Let the Devil Use You.
These are the most viewed videos on Christianee Porter’s YouTube channel, The Christi
Show.
The films and videos are considered primary texts with their own narratives. Each of these narratives communicate meanings that will be analyzed for content. This form of content analysis is called visual rhetoric – that is, the way visual images are used to communicate messages and ideas. As an analytical tool, visual rhetoric aids in extracting meaning from the cinematic images and cultural cues within the films and videos that speak to the distinct ways Black women exist, resist, and display agency in society.
The Chitlin Circuit, Minstrelsy, and the Theater Owners Booking Association
In the 1990s, a poor, homeless, unknown Black man rose to prominence on the
American stage. He discovered, quite accidentally, that working-class Black folks needed a medium for the public expression of their ideas and convictions. He answered the call by elevating Chitlin Circuit performances into a serious multimillion-dollar enterprise.
That man is Tyler Perry.
12. Ibid., 196.
9 The Chitlin Circuit refers to entertainment spaces that were friendly to Black performers. These performances date back to the 1920s; the Chitlin Circuit bought plays to the South and Midwest that featured accomplished Black comedians, actors, and musicians.13 The name Chitlin Circuit reveals its significance. These leftovers given to enslaved Africans on plantations in the American south became the epitome of soul food as a result of a survival mechanism and pure mechanical genius.14 The Chitlin circuit was the way in which a segment of the population was transmuted into an art form. The larger culture dismissed these people and their form of theater as legitimate or containing any intellectual wherewithal and elevated to an art form.
Mark Anthony Neal suggests that the Chitlin circuit was a crucial site for the incubation of modern Black culture. The circuit provided opportunities for legal and illicit economies to develop that spawned networks of independent Black businesses largely within the realm of entertainment.15 The earliest performers on the Chitlin circuit performed in Blackface as part of their traveling shows. Since emancipation Black performers have alternately embrace, exploited, subverted, and turned stereotypes inside out, quite often becoming successful with both Black and white audiences in the
13. Henry Louis Gates, “The Chitlin Circuit,” in African American Performance and Theater History: A Cultural Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 139.
14. Mark Anthony Neal, More Than Chitlins on the Chitlin Circuit, www.madamenoire.com/69929/more-than-chitlins-on-the-chitlin-circuit, Accessed February 28, 2019.
15. Ibid.
10 process.16 The Chitlin Circuit and its performers became more formalized in the early
1900s with the development of the Theater Owners Booking Association.
The Theater Owners Booking Association (“TOBA”). TOBA, also known as
Toby, Tough on Black Artists, and Tough on Black Asses, had a reputation for both providing better opportunities for Black performers and for providing inadequate conditions and remuneration.17 TOBA booked their entertainers to perform in churches, schools, and theaters. They crisscrossed Black America and the Chitlin Circuit established an empire of comedy and pathos, the sublime and the ridiculous; a moveable feast that enabled Blacks to patronize Black entertainers.18 These stage plays came to small towns bringing trunks filled with scenery, costumes, and props to offer entertainment. They made some money and moved on to the next stop after providing entertainment.
The Chitlin Circuit platform was a space where Black performers used their space to escape the threat of lynching. Performers on the Chitlin Circuit often had to dress as field hands and stay in train stations to avoid being attacked by angry white mobs.
Performing in the North was safer than the South where there was the very real threat of lynching for all performers. At its peak, in the 1920s, the TOBA circuit had over 100 theaters booking performers like Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Fats Waller, and Ella
16. Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen, Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip Hop (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2012), 3.
17. Nadine George-Graves, “Spreading the Sand: Understanding the Economic and Creative Impetus for the Black Vaudeville Industry,” Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre and Performance 1, no 1. (June 2014), 2.
18. Gates, The Chitlin Circuit, 139.
11 Fitzgerald.19 TOBA remained a serious option for Black performers until the stock market crash of 1929. While TOBA did not always have the best reputation for how it treated its talent, it did play a major role in providing Black entertainers with the opportunity to move beyond subsistence level livelihood into a larger political economy of livelihood.20
TOBA is the forerunner to today’s urban theater circuits that reach untapped markets of predominately Black people. In its current iteration, the Chitlin Circuit refers to theater productions designed to be a bridge between the traditional urban theater circuits and a more traditional theater format.21 These are full-fledged theater productions with costumes, scripts, and music. These plays tell of matters that are of immediate concern to their urban audiences such as gang violence, dead beat dads, and drug addiction. They reflect the realities that have become a part of many African-American communities.22 Chitlin Circuit plays are promoted through urban radio stations, barber shops, beauty salons, local churches and often use locally known celebrities or nationally known artists. These performances, as popular as they are, do not garner respect within traditional theater circles.
19. George-Graves, Spreading the Sand, 10.
20. Ibid., 14.
21. C. Martin-Via, (2009, Mar). Tyler Perry’s Therapy: At Your Expense. Call and Post Retrieved from https://login.ezproxy.auctr.edu:2050/login?url=https://search-proquest- com.ezproxy.auctr.edu:2050/docview/368746036?accountid=8422 22. Steve Tillis, “The Long View of the World of Theatre History,” Theatre History Studies 35 (December 2016):107.
12 Scholars and theater professionals have criticized gospel plays for trafficking stereotypes. For example, scholar Henry Louis Gates asserts that some critics argue that these plays are an embarrassment because they are replete with stereotypical gay characters, loud-mouthed Black women, a beautiful vamp, a churchy granny, and a mix of melodrama and farce.23 However, the plays allow Black people laugh at themselves outside of the white gaze and they take a temporary escape from the heaviness of the world. Perry grew his brand on the Chitlin Circuit where Madea became a household name and developed an enormous following. Critics of Perry and his performances contend that his work hearkens back to minstrel performances and characters that bought about racist depictions of Blacks on stage and screen.
Minstrelsy and Drag Performance
Rutgers Professor Marc Aronson asserts that being called a minstrel was the ultimate accusation of wearing a mask – being false.24 In an American context minstrelsy means more than that. Blackface is a performance rooted in white supremacy and as such is an act of epistemological and ontological terror.25
Blackface is a product of a long history of whiteness and its attempt to make sense of itself through both the consumption and the negation of Black humanity, it speaks to the parasitic nature of whiteness and its need to “feed.” After all, whiteness, in its colonial expression, must consume and yet exclude that which is the other, that which is Black. Blackface also
23. Gates, The Chitlin Circuit, 146-7.
24. Marc Aronson, “The Complicated Mix of Racism and Envy Behind Blackface,” Washington Post, July 22, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/201.8/07/22/the- complicated-mix-of-racism-and-envy-behind-Blackface/?utm_term=.b1.e27f5cdc04 Accessed March 5, 2019.
25. George Yancy, “Why White People Need Blackface,” New York Times, March 4, 2019, https://www.newyorktimes.com/201.9/03/04/opinion/Blackface-racism.html Accessed March 5, 2019.
13 echoes the pain and suffering felt by Black people whose bodies and identities underwent transmogrification, where they were rendered grotesque and bizarre, defined by ugly white myths.26
Blackface reduced Black people to limiting racial stereotypes, it promoted economic and social exclusion, and it was used to justify racism. By wearing Blackface, a white person tried on a life he simultaneously disdained.27 Minstrel performances demeaned Black people and at the same time it provided economic opportunities for Black people who performed in Blackface. Minstrelsy bought to public form racialized elements of thought, feeling, time, and impulse residing at the very edge of semantic availability which
Americans only dimly realized they felt, let alone understood.28
Black performers made use of the humiliating dialect, gestures, and characteristics that they loathed to become stars.29 They utilized these stereotypes to remind audiences about the harshness of slavery and the reality of living in the South where they had to play certain roles in order to survive. In an art form that many dismissed as being less than legitimate theater and lacking intellectual wherewithal, Black people utilized the stereotypes, caricatures, improvisation, and verbal dexterity to communicate messages of resistance and affirmations of their humanity to their audiences. 30 For Black entertainers
26. Yancy, Why White People Need Blackface.
27. Aronson, The Complicated Mix.
28. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 6.
29. Aronson, The Complicated Mix.
30. Taylor and Austen, Darkest America, 6-7.
14 who performed in Blackface it provided an avenue to provide a social critique that was safe from retaliation from white audiences.
Blackface minstrelsy originated in the 19th century as a form of American music theater where mostly white male performers portrayed comic southern Blacks in skits and songs. White performers blackened their faces with grease paint or burnt cork and dressed in outrageously oversized and/or raggedy Negro costumes.31 Minstrel show performances by European immigrants was an avenue for them to shed their foreigner status and become American citizens. To participate in the denigration of Blacks was to contribute to a racial demarcation where these newly arrived immigrants were no longer the other in American society. Blackface performances by whites signaled a recognition, although a troubling one, of Black culture where they could enter the haunted realm of racial fantasy.32
Because minstrel shows rarely had female performers in their performances, men played both male and female characters. Black drag has its roots in minstrelsy which featured clown like burly men in dresses and performing as convincing female impersonators.33 Drag exaggerates gendered dress and mannerisms with enough little incongruities to show the otherness of the drag artist.34 Judith Lorber suggests that the parody that lies at the center of drag performance is the exaggerated gender display.
31. Lott, Love and Theft, 4-5.
32. Ibid.
33. Taylor and Austen, Darkest America, 299.
34. Judith Lorber, “Preface,” in The Drag Queen Anthology: The Absolutely Fabulous but Flawlessly Customary World of Female Impersonators, eds. Steven P. Schact and Lisa Underwood (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2004), xv.
15 Moreover, the joke in drag is to set up masculinity or femininity as performance.35
However, there are other places where men in drag served other purposes. E. Patrick
Johnson shares that Black men in drag is not a new phenomenon.
My hometown of Hickory North Carolina puts on these plays, there called “shotgun weddings” where all of the men are dressed in drag, the bride is a man in drag in a wedding dress and all of the groomsmen are women. And it’s a fundraiser. And in my hometown it’s a fundraiser for the NAACP. And this tradition goes back as far as the 1930s. It’s been chronicled in a number of histories of drag. And in a way that many communities use subversive performance to sort of turn, make the high low and the low high. That’s sort of the way these things function.36
These performances questioned gender norms because gender tends to be accepted as fixed. They demonstrate that identities are performative, social constructed, contextual, and only appear to be fixed or mapped onto the body.37 Perry’s performance in drag reveals his conceptions and perceptions of femininity. Madea symbolizes a particular notion of femininity – that of the masculinized female.38 Perry comes from a long line of female impersonators, Flip Wilson, Martin Lawrence, Eddie Murphy, and Jamie Foxx.
What is common to their performances are the ways they disrupt seemingly normative understandings of gender, sexuality, and tradition.39
35. Ibid., xv.
36. Brittney Cooper, Mark Anthony Neal, Racquel Gates, Daniel O Black, E. Patrick Johnson, Miriam Petty, “Madea’s Big Scholarly Roundtable: Perspectives on the Media of Tyler Perry,” Lecture, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, November 28, 2012.
37. Heike Perkruhn, “Performing Bodies in the Classroom: Multiple Identities and (Mis) Recognition,” Spotlight on Theological Education (April 2015): 24-25.
38. LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, “Pause, Auntie Momma! Reading Religion in Tyler Perry’s Fat Drag,” in Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions, eds. LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, Tamura A. Lomax, and Carol B. Duncan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 176.
39. Ibid.
16 In this study, Madea will be discussed as a woman since that is how she portrayed, understood, and addressed in the films. She is not viewed as a man playing the role of a woman in the films and will not be analyzed from that perspective. However, it is important to recognize that it is impossible to separate Perry from the performance of
Madea and that there are problematic aspects of Perry’s performance of gender in his work.
Perry’s performance of gender as Madea for some mocks Black womanhood in ways that play up problematic historical stereotypes. Particularly images of Black women and Black womanhood as violent, loud, and rude. Perry engages in the standard comedic tropes of Black womanhood that are recognizable, relatable, and profitable. The millions that Perry makes telling stories about the interior lives of Black women through Madea resonates in ways that are both comforting and challenging.
What makes Madea popular among Black people is that this portrayal of “big mama,” a figure that many in the Black community can identify with, is ascribed masculinist traits. As Madea, Perry’s physicality as a large six-foot character is an announcement of her power; it is a celebration of the pieces of masculinity in women that the community celebrates. Madea carries a gun and she can whip anyone who challenges her authority. What this performance of gender also suggests is that Black women are conflicted in their femininity and that they strive to present an air of masculinity.40 This portrayal negates the idea that the feminine has its own power that is not subject to patriarchy and it questions Black women’s ability to be feminine and embody
40. Manigault-Bryant, Pause, Auntie Momma, 176.
17 womanhood. Furthermore, it intimates that Black womanhood has value only if it is imbued with masculinity and is exaggerated. bell hooks avers that Black men in drag use their performance to give their public expression of hate and contempt toward Black women.41
As a masked man in drag behind the performance, Perry perpetuates of the myth of the robust and violent Black matriarch in ways that parodies Black women. Glenda
Dickerson asserts that the power of the ancient matriarchy for Black women was corrupted and distorted because their voices were choked off and excluded.42 For some
Perry’s politics of performance reifies an otherness and marginalization ascribed to Black womanhood that Black feminist and womanists have worked to dismantle. Black women do not have the privilege to play on destructive representations burned in their collective minds, on their bodies, and souls for generations.43 Perry’s patriarchal, conservative
Christian beliefs about Black womanhood seem implicit in his rendition of Madea.
Morehouse Professor Stephanie Dunn shares that:
Neither the comic delivery (successful or not) or Perry’s commercial success negate that there are some troubling gender, class, and sexual politics that have come staples of his brand, especially with regard to Black women and the traditional gender hierarchy within the African American community. Furthermore, the notes of realness that Perry imbues in Madea and other characters, and which resonates with his
41. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation, (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 146.
42. Glenda Dickerson, “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward A Womanist Attitude in African American Theatre,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 2 (May 1988): 179.
43. Sirma Bilge, “Developing Intersectional Solidarities: A Plea for Queer Intersectionality,” Spotlight on Theological Education (April 2015): 21.
18 audiences, do not negate the ways his characters imitate some very disturbing historical racialized inscriptions of African American identity.44
Perry argues that his performance of Madea is reminiscent of the women he knew growing up in New Orleans, Louisiana. There were Black women who claimed their own space, created their own narratives, and refused to be limited to constrains of respectability politics. He sees accusations as an attack on his region by northerners who slickness has removed them from their essence.45 Put simply, they have forgotten their roots and the ways of everyday folks. For Perry, playing Madea is a way to share a memory of the strong, nurturing Black women from his childhood. He believes that if these women knew that their stories and strengths inspired him to pay homage to them and this this loving tribute had moved, helped, and lifted people all around the world, they would be proud.46 Despite the criticism Perry receives about the character he is certain that the impact of the lessons Madea teaches about self-esteem, respecting yourself, and using your voice is worth breaking the rules of storytelling and performance.
Who is Tyler Perry?
Tyler Perry was born Emmet Perry, Jr. in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1969. Perry endured a difficult childhood and his father abused him. The chaotic nature of his home
44. Stephanie Dunn, “Fat, Sass, and Laughs: Black Masculinity in Drag,” in Communicating Marginalized Masculinities: Identity Politics in TV, Film, and New Media, eds. Ronald L. Jackson, II and Jamie Moshin (London: Routledge, 2012), 141.
45. Taylor and Austen, Darkest America, 300.
46. Tyler Perry, “Time to Move on From Madea,” New York Times, March 3, 2019, 12.
19 left Perry exposed to neighborhood pedophiles who molested him.47 Perry’s mother,
Maxine, tried to shield him from his father’s abuse; however, she was a victim of domestic violence. On the road toward success, Perry has survived two suicide attempts, fear, and self-doubt.48 As a teenager, he began journaling about his experiences of abuse and poverty as a way to heal himself. He was following advice that he received from watching an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show. A long-time fan of Oprah’s show, he followed her advice on an episode about healing and journaled as a form of catharsis.49
This experience set his play writing career in motion. Characterized by strength, faith, and determination during a turbulent adolescence, these letters provided Perry with the inspiration to delve into writing his first play.50
In 1992, Perry launched his theater career with his first stage play, I Know I’ve
Been Changed. He wrote, directed, promoted, and starred in his first production. Funding totaled $12,000, Perry self-financed the production, and he failed miserably. The play opened to a nearly empty house; he ended up bankrupt and homelessness. Six years after his first failed venture, Perry held several jobs to fund another play. Even his mother begged him to give up on his dreams of a future in the theater and find a steady 9-to-5
47. Robin Means-Coleman, Tyler Perry: The (Self Appointed) Savior of Black Womanhood in Our Voices: Essays in Culture, Ethnicity, and Communication (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 54.
48. Christian A. Margena, Becoming Tyler: Bill Collector Turned Billion-Dollar Media Mogul Was Molded From Pain, Promise and Persistence Ebony Magazine (October 2008) 72. Volume 62, issue 12.
49. Zondra Hughes, “How Tyler Perry Rose from Homelessness to a 5 Million Dollar Mansion,” Ebony, January 2004.
50. TylerPerry.com, “Tyler Perry’s Story,” http://tylerperry.com/tyler/story/ (Accessed May 15, 2016).
20 career.51 After Perry revamped the play and reopened it in 1998 at the House of Blues in
Atlanta, Georgia, it was a renowned success and sold out eight times over. Perry notes that every promoter who initially turned him down offered him their services.
In 2000, as Perry continued to develop the play, he dressed in drag to portray
Madea who has emerged as his signature elderly grandmother character. Perry did not intend on playing the character Madea. The R&B singer he hired to play the part of
Madea did not show up for the play and he had to fill in.52 Following the tradition of Flip
Wilson, Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence, and Jamie Foxx, Perry turned Madea into a character who seems to have become Black America’s favorite icon. This marked a new chapter in Perry’s life and in the urban theater circuit as a whole – a genre heavily criticized by some Black people in the traditional theater.53
Perry achieved brand recognition by touring with his plays and speaking before
African-American cultural and church groups. This is part of what makes him an important and fascinating popular culture figure. He grew his grass roots audience into a near cult following of working class of African-Americans. Perry completed The Tyler
Perry Studios, located in Atlanta, Georgia, and expanded his operations with his acquisition of Fort McPherson, a former confederate army base. His studio is currently
51. TylerPerry.com, “Tyler Perry’s Story,” http://tylerperry.com/tyler/story/ (Accessed May 15, 2016).
52. NBC News, “Tyler Perry Reveals How He Created his “Madea: Character, Interview with Willie Geist,” November 25, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/dateline/video/tyler-perry-reveals-how-he- created-his-madea-character-1.1.03552579871. (Accessed January 15, 2018).
53. Hughes, How Tyler Perry Rose, 92.
21 home to over 19 films and seven television shows.54 In the last decade, no one has matched his impact on American filmmaking and he has become one of the most powerful voices in Hollywood.
Black people are Perry’s primary audience and his work in part reflects their stories and experiences. Plays that were once performed in small theaters or churches are now performed before sold-out crowds. Audiences come to hear interesting story lines, inspiring music, redemptive messages, and see actors who sound and look like them.
Storytelling tailored to Black people was conceivably lacking in traditional theatrical productions, and Perry filled the gap.
He then took his grassroots following to Hollywood and produced films that were box office breakers that grossed millions of dollars. Perry’s first film, Diary of a Mad
Black Woman, one of his stage plays from the Chitlin Circuit, grossed over $22 million its opening weekend. His audience was one that mainstream academic theater and
Hollywood films missed and, perhaps, had no intention of addressing. There is a sense that major film studios ignored the fact that Black people also loved theater, film, and the arts, in general. Perry’s work, focused on the interior lives of Black women, filled that gap and he was able to make over $130 million surpassing Steven Spielberg and Jerry
Bruckheimer.55
54. TylerPerry.com, Tyler Perry’s Story, http://tylerperry.com/tyler/story/ (Accessed August 23, 2017).
55. LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, Tamura Lomax, and Carol B. Duncan, Introduction, Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 2.
22 Critics of Perry’s oeuvre argue that his work offers problematic images of Black women. Soyica Diggs-Colbert asserts that Perry as Madea
Creates an opportunity for the audience to delight in recognizable and humorous images while achieving some distance from them. One the one hand Perry’s stature (he stands over six feet tall), the clownish gray wig he wears as Madea, and the excessive violence he often performs call attention to the performative nature of his role and draw a critical question about the materialization the Mammy figure. At the same time, the humor reflects a concretization of sex the interrupts any gender critique the Madea films might offer.56
For Diggs-Colbert, Perry has a responsibility to dismantle stereotypes and repudiate distortions of Black womanhood. Her argument is one that reflects the historical debate between African-Americans on Black representation and subjectivity in American popular culture. It also reflects the social stigmas associated with “low brow” Black cultural productions that middle and upper middle-class Black people reject as a representation of themselves.57 Nicole Persley-Hodges argues that these kinds of evaluations are often situated within these kinds of high/low binaries without considering how the actions of Perry’s Madea figure inspires Black women to question the inherent heteronormativity within the Black family structure.
Cooper asserts that Perry’s work demonstrates a penchant towards cultural battery through narrative colonization. Moreover, she believes that his work reflects a hatred of
Black women despite his statements to the contrary. In her article, Tyler Perry Hates
56. Soyica Diggs-Colbert, Resisting Shame and Offering Praise and Worship in the African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 130.
57. Nicole Hodges-Persley, “Bruised and Misunderstood: Translating Black Feminist Acts in the Work of Tyler Perry,” Palimpsest: A Journal of Women, Gender, and the Black International 1, iss. 2 (2012): 220.
23 Black Women, Cooper asserts that he is a cultural batterer. While her article is written in response to his show The Haves and the Have Nots, her argument can be extrapolated to his other work given her critique of his films and other television shows. In her article,
Cooper asserts that his work remixes culturally harmful stereotypes about Black women and he throws them under the bus in order to make straight Black men look good.58 For
Cooper, Black women become objects rather than subjects in their own narratives, rendering them as marginalized persons within their own stories. Perry’s major fault is his participation in what Cooper calls narrative colonization. Narrative colonization occurs:
When Black men utilize cultural, political, or theological mandates that sanction male supremacy to reframe Black women’s stories and Black women’s lives in terms of dominant male centered narratives that are sympathetic to patriarchy. It demands a communal return to patriarchy by inculcating a compulsory allegiance to Black male authority forcing Black women to subjugate their stories and their political and emotional needs to the stories and political prerogatives of Black men.59
For Cooper, Perry’s portrayals of Black women render them powerless and one- dimensional; they are unable to assert themselves within their own narratives. He banks on a cultural narrative of Black women and that is how he gets their buy-in. Perry traffics in an emotional investment that makes Black women pay by reinscribing the patriarchy and tells Black women that they are the source of their problem. For Cooper, Perry’s
58. Brittney C. Cooper, “Tyler Perry Hates Black Women,” in The Crunk Feminist Collective, eds. Brittney C. Cooper, Susanna M. Morris, Robin M. Bylorn (New York: The Feminist Press, 2017), 247.
59. Brittney C. Cooper, “Talking Back and Taking My “Amens” With Me: Tyler Perry and Narrative Colonization,” in Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry Productions, eds. Carol B. Duncan, Tamura A. Lomax, and LeRhonda S. Manigault (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 237.
24 project is about gaining sympathy for Black men. And while his work has the potential to be subversive, it loses its power because it does not critique of systemic oppression in ways that dismantle patriarchy and problematic images of Black women.60
Nicole Hodges-Persley counters Cooper’s point by arguing that critics like
Cooper fail to account for the critical perspective of Perry’s mostly Black, female, working-class audience.61 Hodges-Persley notes that Perry’s television shows such as
House of Payne and Meet the Browns demonstrates how the seemingly stereotypical
Black images are transformed. She focuses on Ella Payne, a married, employed, middle class parent to one son. For Hodges-Persley, Ella can represent, for some, a modernized version of the mammy figure including a highly educated, well dressed, and coiffed version that has become commonplace in mainstream situation comedies.62 Perry, however, complicates Ella’s character because she challenges patriarchal notions about a woman’s role in the home.
Ella breaks the prescribed gender role of a stay-at-home mother by returning to school and she encourages her drug addicted niece to reclaim her feminine power by standing up for herself and her children.63 Furthermore, she disrupts the mammy characterization by affirming her body, standing up to adversity, and expressing her faith as a part of her personal power. Perry’s attention to Ella’s struggle allows her to
60. Brittney Cooper, Mark Anthony Neal, Racquel Gates, Daniel O. Black, E. Patrick Johnson, Miriam Petty, “Madea’s Big Scholarly Roundtable: Perspectives on the Media of Tyler Perry,” Lecture, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, November 28, 2012.
61. Hodges-Persley, Bruised and Misunderstood, 218.
62. Ibid., 221.
63. Ibid.
25 formulate a feminism all her own while simultaneously drawing attention to the invisible, discounted physical and intellectual labor of Black women.64 A rereading of Ella Payne shows Perry’s ability to create characters that are multidimensional, central to their own narrative, and who are not invested in upholding patriarchy. While this does not absolve
Perry from a call to develop more characters who work to dismantle oppressive systems, it does offer insight to his ability to do so. Madea offers some insight into that possibility.
Perry argues that his shows build bridges and marry what is deemed “legitimate theater” and so-called “Chitin Circuit” theater. His work allows people to enjoy theater.
Perry cites advice given to him by playwright August Wilson, “Do what you do. Don’t worry about these people, do what you do because I don’t think it’s bad at all.”65 These words from Wilson continue to inspire Perry to create and continue his work. African-
American women’s history of struggle against invisibility and marginalization, and their shared experiences of living in a society that denigrates them, provides a template to examine their unique experiences. African-American women’s ability to aggregate and articulate individual expressions of everyday consciousness as a self-defined, collective standpoint is key to their survival.66 One can see Perry’s character and films as ghettoized entertainment, although this researcher contends that to do so is to miss the deeper significance of Perry’s work.
64. Ibid.
65. Hughes, How Tyler Perry Rose, 92.
66. JoAnne Banks-Wallace, “Womanist Ways of Knowing: Theoretical Considerations for Research with African American Women,” Advances in Nursing Science 22, no. 3 (March 2000): 36.
26 Who is Madea?
The term Madea is a combination of two words, mother and dear. It is a particularly southern term of affection for grandmothers.67 Perry asserts that Madea is a compilation of the women who saved him as a child, specifically his mother and his aunt.
He cites his mother’s protection and his aunt’s support and nurturance68 as part of how he created this character. Madea also reflects the women who were a part of his neighborhood growing up. He claims that these women seem to have disappeared from the community around the 1970s and their influence has left an unmistakable void.69
The Madea’s of his memory were the no-nonsense, older Black women who looked kept an eye out for the children in the neighborhood. They were tough, self -assured, and powerful.70
Madea provides an alternative narrative for Black women to move from survivalist mode to a state of triumph.71 Madea’s emergence as the quintessential, comedic grandmother figure-type somehow resonates with Black culture. Her unique wisdom calls upon a particular form of agency for Black women. Despite all of the
67. Jabari Thomas, “Perry Explains the Meaning of Madea: Interview Part 1.,” October 5, 2017, https://wgno.com/201.7/1.0/05/tyler-perry-explains-the-meaning-of-madea-interview-part-1./ (Accessed December 22, 2018).
68. Means-Coleman, Tyler Perry, 54-55.
69. Tyler Perry, Don’t Make a Black Woman Take off Her Earrings: Madea’s Uninhibited Commentaries on Love and Life (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006), ix.
70. Means-Coleman, Tyler Perry, 57.
71. LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, Tamura Lomax, and Carol B. Duncan, “Introduction,” in Womanist and Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions, eds, LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, Tamura Lomax, and Carol B. Duncan. (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 12.
27 critiques regarding the revival of Madea as the mammy, she resonates with ordinary
Black women.
Madea as Mammy?
Mammy is the creation of the white southern imagination about Black manhood and womanhood. She was a central figure in this mythmaking about Black bodies and the need to support segregationist policies.72 This image of the Black woman as the faithful, obedient, domestic servant was used to justify the economic exploitation of Black bodies for the slave economy and Black women’s domestic labor. Mammy functions to manipulate ideas about Black womanhood to make the intersecting oppressions or race, gender, and class seem normal even though the images are not reflective of reality.73 As a mythologized image, the mammy was constructed to be happy and content with her position as a servant in the service to an anti-Black, sexist, and oppressive system. The assumption of the mammy was that Black women are naturally fit for servitude and subservience.
As a formulation of the white racist imagination, the mammy is framed as docile, maternal, fat, dark-skinned and unfeminine. The reality is that mammies were malnourished and, consequently, quite thin as evidenced by historical photographs of real slave women who served as wet nurses, child care providers, and household slaves.74
72. Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.), 72.
73. Patricia Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 69.
74. Patricia J. Sotirin and Laura L. Ellingson, Where the Aunts Are: Family, Feminism, and Kinship in Popular Culture (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013), 38.
28 Those domestic servants were forced to nurse white babies while their own infants subsisted on sugar water. Moreover,
They were not voluntary members of the enslavers family; they were women laboring under coercion and the constant threat of physical and sexual violence. They had no enforceable authority over their white charges and count not even resist the sale and exploitation of their own children. Domestic servants were not grandmotherly types but teenagers or very young women. It was the white supremacist imagination that remembers these powerless, coerced slave girls, as soothing, comfortable, consenting women.75
According to the white racist imagination, the Black woman’s body and economic production is solely for the white families she serves. Out of this ideology, a narrowly defined version of Black womanhood emerges, one immersed in the idea that Black women are complicit in her own oppression. She remains objectified, marginalized, and permanent the “other” within the larger culture. Mammy stands outside of what has been considered the cult of true womanhood that represented by purity, piety, submissiveness, and domesticity.
The cult of true womanhood was based on white women and it is an impossible standard for Black women to meet. Her failure to conform to this standard was seen as a source of cultural deficiency among Black women. Being unable to model what was deemed to be appropriate to white feminine behavior, she is deemed unworthy of protection because she was both breeder and caretaker. To refer to Madea as a mammy misreads her more agentive practices, misses the ways Black women counter Black male domination, and fails to see how Madea brings attention to Black women’s self- sufficiency and wisdom traditions.
75. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen, 72.
29 Madea is as a large, Black woman with a brown complexion and she never sees herself as unattractive. Madea’s function as a nurturer, a caregiver, and a protector does not make her a mammy. Madea’s investment in nurturing those around her shows her ability to care for her family and community, which she manages to do while caring for herself. In this way, she demonstrates an ability to walk the fine line of being a resource for others without falling into the trap of being almost entirely other directed.76 She commands respect for herself from those around her and refuses to be exploited by her own community. Perry’s performance of Madea destabilizes the negative assumptions associated with stereotypes that demean Black women.77 One example occurs in Madea’s
Family Reunion.
In Madea’s Family Reunion, Madea encourages Nikki, her foster child to go to college. Madea’s mentoring, love, and care shifts Nikki’s perception of herself and helps her to see herself as someone who is capable. Madea’s nurturing and caretaking capabilities reflects characteristics of someone who is an influential leader with the ability to positively shift the trajectory of someone’s life. Madea’s capabilities help Black women strategize, plan, and heal so they can fight oppressive forces another day.
To see her solely as a mammy misreads her transformative power and only views her as disempowering for Black women. Hortense Spillers affirms that this othering of Black
76. Ibid., 83.
77. Persley-Hodges, Bruised and Misunderstood, 225.
30 women through this kind of objectification can lead to a sense of powerlessness over
Black women’s agency to explode these negative cultural markers.78
For many, some aspects of Madea’s character are reflected in their own families.
Perry admits that Madea is representative of women from his childhood and resonates with his experience:
Madea is a cross between my mother and my aunt. She’s the type of grandmother that was on every corner when I was growing up. She smoked, walked out of the house with her curlers and a Mu-Mu, and she watched everybody’s kids – she didn’t take no crap. She’s a strong figure where I come from – in my part of the African-American community – and I say that because I’m sure that there are some other parts of the African-American community that may be looking at me now going, “Who does he think he’s speaking of?”79
Madea is not your ordinary elderly grandmother. She is a wise, caring, community- oriented, and family-centered woman. She is also the gun toting, no-nonsense elder who is ready to use violence, if necessary, to get her point across. What the larger culture may see as deviant and problematic, Perry sees as respectable and responsible. Madea symbolizes women who are committed to the survival of their people and communities, and those who may be ignored or silenced. In this way, she reflects womanist thought.
While she may not be perfect, her full and flawed love for humanity is on display.
Madea’s outrageous, audacious, willful behavior is how she applies her wisdom to achieve the desired results she needs for her family, community, and others.
78. Tamaura A Lomax, “Mad Black Bitches and LadyLike Saints” in Womanist and Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry Productions eds. LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, Tamura A. Lomas, and Carol B. Duncan, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 145.
79. Ronald L. Jackson II and Jamel S. Cruze-Bell, “Introduction,” in Interpreting Tyler Perry: Perspectives on Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality, eds. Ronald L. Jackson II and Jamel S. Cruze-Bell (New York: Routledge, 2014), 4.
31 Joanne Banks-Wallace avers that many African-American women view experience as a distinguishing feature that separates knowledge from wisdom.80 Wisdom is how you apply what you’ve learned in life to any situation. Wisdom is gained from life experiences and it is critical knowledge for survival in oppressive environments.
Individuals who lived through the experiences can claim to be experts that are more believable and credible than those who have merely read or thought about such experiences.81 Madea uses what she knows about life to help others live in ways that allow them to claim their own sense of self-agency and self-determination. She embraces a womanist agenda in her own way. Madea as the loving and tough-talking grandmother who exposes and puts an end to problems such as abuse, domestic violence, and unruly children is someone that resonates with her audiences. She renders the invisible visible, the unheard audible, the invisible audible, and the unheard visible.82 Therefore, some of the criticism of Madea may appear like an elitist endeavor that is disconnected from
Black life as it is experienced by the majority of Black people and Black women.
Who is Miss Shirleen?
Miss Shirleen is the creation of comedian Christianee Porter. Ms. Shirleen is one of Porter’s standout characters, the ultimate church mother who has not always been saved. Miss Shirleen’s antics remind her fans of older, truth-telling church women. Her character is reminiscent of Kim Wayans’s character, Benita Butrell, from the television
80. Banks-Wallace, Womanist Ways, 37.
81. Ibid., 38.
82. Rashida Z. Shaw, From the Margins to Center Stage: Tyler Perry’s Popular African American Theatre, in From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry, eds. TreAndrea Russworm, Samantha N. Sheppard, and Karen M. Bowdre (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2016), 48.
32 show, In Living Color, and some compare Miss Shirleen to Perry’s Madea.83 The inspiration for Miss Shirleen came from Porter’s stepfather and uncles. Miss Shirleen’s personality incorporates how they bragged about successes that one ever witnessed or heard of or acquired things that no one ever saw.84 What was comedic gold to Porter was that no one could vouch for any of her stepfather’s and uncles’ accomplishments.
Porter, a native of Little Rock, Arkansas, began singing and performing at an early age. She fell in love with the art of acting in middle school. While growing up she created comedic roles, designed an outfit for the day around the narrative arc, and went to school in character.85 She moved to Atlanta to pursue a career in music and attended the
Art Institute of Atlanta for Audio Production. When her music career did not takeoff, she became a preschool teacher; however, she missed the stage and started doing comedy again. By January 2016, she started creating videos and Miss Shirleen was her first character.86 In July 2016, Miss Shirleen went viral and Porter began doing clean comedy tours because she wanted to create content for families. She does not curse in any of her videos or stand up performances. According to Porter, Miss Shirleen is someone people
83. Marlon A. Walker, Social Media Star Draws Lots of laughs and fans with colorful comedy. January 11, 2017 Atlanta Journal- Constitution https://www.ajc.com/lifestyles/social-media-star-draws- lots-laughs-and-fans-with-colorful-comedy/D4ezgeu6iB8m1.zmBgwLCIJ/ (Accessed December 1, 2018).
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid.
86. Eddie Lamarre, Christianee Porter aka Ms. Shirleen, on Clean Comedy and Tyler Perry https://rollingout.com/201.8/05/07/christianee-porter-aka-ms-shirleen-on-clean-comedy-and-tyler-perry (Accessed November 30, 2018).
33 gravitate to because she reminds them of someone they know or knew from church.87
Miss Shirleen’s is successful because she draws on familiarity connects with people.
Miss Shirleen’s breakthrough connection was the video, Waist Trainer, which went viral on Instagram, a social media platform. In the video she warns against the dangers of young women wearing modern-day corsets. Dressed in sleeveless orange short suit, pearls, white shoes, and a gray wig, Miss Shirleen uses her hands and body to emphasize how dangerous it is to wear waist trainers in 130-degree weather:
Understand these waist trainers are killing yall. My niece just fell out down here at the Red Lobster on Candler Road. She was wearing a waist trainer in 130-degree weather. Having happy hour at the Red Lobster. These waist trainers you don’t realize take 30 percent of your oxygen to your brain. Yall want to make it out here through the summer? Stop killing yourselves. Stop training your waists. You calling up the mainline with that kind of foolishness. You living reckless out here. And on top of that you ain’t wearing no deodorant. That ain’t the work of the Lord.88
The waist trainer video garnered over a million views and launched Porter’s career. Her brand of comedy falls within the lineage of Black women who embody and parody older
Black women both inside and outside of the church. These women are Moms Mabley,
LaWanda Page as Aunt Esther, Trina Jeffrie as Sister Cantaloupe, and Lexi Allen as
Mother Teresa Walker.
Loretta Mary Aiken, better known as Moms Mabley, performed on the Chitlin
Circuit and her character was based on her great-grandmother. Mabley states that her great-grandmother was the source of what she called her hipness, her great grandmother’s
87. Ibid.
88. Christianee Porter, Waist Trainer, https://youtu.be/75J2XQwqj90 (Accessed November 30, 2018).
34 sexual interest in younger men at the age of 106. Her great grandmother taught Mabley that one’s sexuality is not limited to the early years of their lives.89
During the early to late 1970s, LaWanda Page played Aunt Esther on the show
Sanford and Son. Page was a veteran of the Chitlin Circuit and performed as a dancer and fire-swallower before gradually moving into skit and stand-up comedy.90 Aunt Esther was the church going sister-in-law of Fred Sanford, the owner of a junkyard. She often chided Sanford for what she called, “His heathen ways.” They engaged in verbal sparring matches that would often end with Aunt Esther threatening Sanford with her bible, calling him a heathen among other names, or hitting him with her purse.
In the mid 1980s, Trine Jeffrie began what became to be known as Christian comedy through her character Sister Cantaloupe. Jeffrie wanted to offer audiences mainstream, clean, Christian comedy. Her character was inspired by Carol Burnett’s Bag
Lady character.91 Sister Cantaloupe is a chatty, elderly, gossipy church lady. In playing
Sister Cantaloupe, Jeffrie dons a gray wig, wears an ample bust and rear end enhancer underneath a flowered housedress, and tube socks with sneakers. She flirts with men and makes fun of neighborhood children. As Jeffrie does stand-up comedy in churches and travels around the country, her routine often parodies major tropes within church culture.
89. Trudier Harris, “Moms Mabley: A Study in Humor, Role Playing and the Violation of Taboo,” The Southern Review 24 iss.4 (Fall 1988): 769.
90. Mel Watkins, LaWanda Page, 81, The Aunt on TV’s Sanford and Son, September 18, 2002 https://nytimes.com/2002/09/1.8/arts/lawanda-page-81.-the-aunt-on-tv-s-sanford-and-son.html (Accessed December 1, 2018).
91. Lexi Allen, https://www.allmusic.com/artist/lexi-mn000082481.5/biography, (Accessed December 1, 2018).
35 Following in a similar vein is singer and comedian Lexi Allen, who satirizes church mothers and church culture. Lexi Allen was born in Columbus, Ohio and was a talk show host on the Word Network. She has several albums and recently signed under the Motown label. She built a social media following with several videos parodying the behavior of Black church people like Things Black Folks Say at Weddings and Things
Black Folks Say at Funerals. Her web series on YouTube, Holy Ghost Enforcers features two church mothers who critique other church mothers for their lack of holiness. Lexi
Allen created the character of Mother Walker on a dare and she proved successful.
Allen mimics the church mothers as she dresses in the classic usher outfit, white nurse uniform, white knee-high hose, and a doily head covering. She adds an eyelash for a mustache to Mother Teresa Walker’s appearance. As Mother Walker, she admonishes young women about the necessity of wearing a “gir-tle,” not wearing makeup, and covering their cleavage all while screaming “holy ghoss” to affirm her own holiness and righteousness. In the video Dance Ministry, The Movie,92 Mother Walker accepts a large cash donation from a stripper after she initially judged the young woman after she attended church. Mother Walker misses the young woman’s reference to it “raining” at the night before at the strip club and accepts the money for the women’s board. She prays for the young woman and hypocritically asks that others not misunderstand and judge her. Mother Walker is a contradictory figure; she openly expresses her disapproval while acting contrary to the expectations of the same culture she seeks to uphold.
92. Holy Ghost Enforcers Episode 5: Dance Ministry The Movie https://youtu.be/otlwggvGO9g (Accessed December 15, 2018).
36 Women like Mabley, Page, Jeffrie, Allen, and Porter, parody church culture without intending malice. They parody the culture that they love and find problematic.
Because they are the insiders, they are intimately aware of its flaws and can take some privilege with their depictions. They are doing more than telling jokes, they are offering interpretation. Constance Bailey asserts that their comedic performances yield insightful commentary about race, class, gender, sexuality, and a host of other conditions endemic to life in America.93 Their comedic performances offer insight into the lives of ordinary
Black women and extends an opportunity to reread their strategies of resistance. These performances highlight Black women’s voices, experiences, and values. Porter follows in this tradition with Miss Shirleen.
The stories of Black women’s lives matter. These are the narratives of a community women who work to ensure that poor children are fed and that drug dealers are not allowed to flourish and thrive in their neighborhoods; they raise grandchildren to keep them out of the foster care system. Their stories offer wisdom, teach us about life, survival, thriving, and reflect the collective body of wisdom created by Black women.
This form of knowledge, motherwit, is the collective body of female wisdom – formal and informal, oral and written, sacred and secular – passed on by generations of Black women. Concerning motherwit, Jacqueline Carr-Hamilton observes that:
It is a force rooted in the cultural . . . and religious traditions of African American women, but it transcends the barriers of any set social or religious principles. It is instead the strength of the total experience of Black females, which has helped them survive their diaspora experience in the Western world…motherwit is matrifocal (mother and grandmother
93. Constance Bailey, “Fight the Power: African American Humor as Discourse of Resistance,” Western Journal of Black Studies 36. No. 4 (Winter 2012): 254.
37 focused) it is a pan-Africanist spirit binding women of African ancestry together in a way that they are not linked to other peoples.94
Motherwit represents the wisdom and skill of African-American women and it focuses on their experiences as the basis of their knowledge. The use of motherwit is a womanist act of survival that Black women use to confront political, socio-economic, and political obstacles.
Womanism and motherwit offer a critique against those who would silence the stories of women who may fall outside of what is considered respectable within the Black community; the stories often deemed unworthy of being told or represented. Madea’s and
Miss Shirleen’s acts of outrageousness calls attention to the margins where Black women solve problems and stand on the front lines for their communities and families. Madea refuses to let women buckle under the weight of a racist, sexist system that was never designed to support them. Miss Shirleen rejects any attempt to silence her choices or what she sees as the right thing to do. They rebuff the cloak invisibility draped onto
Black women and centers their narratives. By eradicating this invisibility, Madea and
Miss Shirleen move as a counter to the traditional Western epistemologies that silence
Black women’s intellectual traditions and voices. Every time they speak or help someone else speak their truth, Madea and Miss Shirleen provide space for others exercise agency and to claim their humanity.
94. Jacqueline Carr-Hamilton, “Motherwit in Southern Religion: A Womanist Perspective,” in Ain’t Gonna Lay My ‘Ligion Down: African American Religion in the South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 72.
38 Womanism Defined
In 1983, writer Alice Walker coined the term “womanist” in her book, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. In her book, she captures the ways that marginalized women focus on self-determination and self-advocacy as central to their survival. For Walker, the term womanist originates from a Black folk expression of “you acting womanish,” which usually refers to outrageous, audacious, courageous, or willful behavior.95 She maintains that being womanish means that one:
1. From womanish. (Opp. of “girlish,” i.e. frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A Black feminist or feminist of color. From the Black folk expression of other to female children, “You acting womanish,” i.e. like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered “good” for one. Interested in grown-up doings. Acting grown up. Being gown up. Interchangeable with another Black folk expression:” You trying to be grown.” Responsible. In charge. Serious. 2. Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or non- sexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotionally flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter), and women’s strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually ad/or non-sexually. Committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically for health. Traditionally, universalist, as in: “Mama, why are we brown, pink, and yellow, and our cousins are white, beige, and Black?” And:” Well, you know colored race is just like a flower garden, with every color flower represented.” Traditionally capable, as in: “Mama, I’m walking to Canada and I’m taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.” Reply: “It wouldn’t be the first time.” 3. Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless. 4. Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.96
95. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, (New York: Harcourt, 1983), xi.
96. Ibid., xi-xii.
39
Walker’s womanism allows space for women who desire to address the race problem within the feminist movement as well as the gender issue within the Black nationalist movement. Moreover, womanism provides room for stronger relationships between
Black women and men. This is a very important issue for African-American women regardless of political perspective and womanism provides a way to address gender oppression without attacking Black men.97
Inherent in Walker’s definition of womanism is a connection to the racial and gender tyranny experienced by Black women. Jacqueline Grant, a womanist theologian, defines a womanist as a strong Black woman who has been mislabeled a domineering matriarch because she developed strategies for survival in spite of racial and sexual oppression to save her family and people.98 Womanism speaks to the liberative work done by Black women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Ida B. Wells, and Sojourner Truth who were audacious and courageous enough to demand the right to be seen as fully human and entitled to equality. For Grant, the experience of being a Black woman is so different that another word is needed to describe their work on behalf of themselves and their communities.99 In this way, womanism has the audacity to claim and reclaim individual and communal “herstories.” It assumes authority for Black women’s voices and the voices of their communities; womanism creates a space for Black women to learn from
97. Patricia Hill-Collins, “Sisters and Brothers: Black Feminists on Womanism” in The Womanist Reader, ed. Layli Phillips (New York: Routledge, 2006), 60.
98. Jacqueline Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 205.
99. Ibid., 204.
40 the experiences of their ancestors to improve the overall quality of life for future generations. By grounding womanism in the experiences of African-American women and the potential for realizing a humanist vision of community through the experiences of
Black women, Walker depicts the potential for oppressed people to possess a moral vision on society that grows out of oppression.100
Patricia Hill-Collins asserts that by using the term “womanish,” Walker suggests that Black women’s history fosters a womanist worldview accessible primarily and, perhaps, exclusively to Black women.101 Because womanish girls and women acted in ways that were outside the norms of conventional behavior, they were free from societal restrictions that limited the scope of their actions. Womanish resistance is possible when one desires to know more than one should and acts in a courageous, willful manner. Hill-
Collins believes that Walker’s definition places Black women in a superior position to white women because of this Black folk tradition.102 Womanism regards Black women as more responsible and committed to the eradication of the tyranny of oppression and a commitment to social justice. Womanism arises from the community, specifically from
Black women’s epistemic spaces and wisdom. It is based on their experiences and places them at the center. Womanism takes place within the daily cycle of experience and relies on common solutions to problems. It is this understanding of womanism that guides this research.
100. Hill-Collins, Sisters and Brothers, 61.
101. Ibid., 59.
102. Ibid.
41 Womanism and the Politics of Respectability
It is Black women’s acts of boldness, audaciousness, and courageousness, also called acting “womanish,” that frees them from the politics of respectability.103 The politics of respectability also known as “respectability politics” developed as a way to counter the stereotypical images of Black people as lazy, violent, and depraved. These images were prevalent within 19th century popular culture and the politics of respectability seeks to reform the behavior of individuals and shifts the emphasis away from structural forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, and poverty.104
Respectability politics advances the idea that if Black people became respectable, they would erase the rationale for racial oppression from white minds. Moreover, Black people who were unable or unwilling to conform were responsible for preventing all
Black people from being fully accepted into American culture. Behaviors violative of the strictures of the politics of respectability included the way men and women dress and the cleanliness of their homes. Evelyn Brooks-Higgenbotham argues that the politics of respectability equated non-conformity with the cause of racial prejudice and inequality.
Additionally, respectability politics promotes the idea that if Black people could comport themselves properly in public, they would be worthy of the rights and privileges of
American citizenship.
103. Marcia A. Dawkins and Ulli K. Ryder, Passing as a Woman(ist)?: A Look at Black Women’s Narratives in Tyler Perry Films in Interpreting Tyler Perry: Perspectives on Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Jamel S. Cruze Bell and Ronald L. Jackson (New York: Routledge, 2014), 259.
104. Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Black Feminists and DuBois: Respectability, Protection, and Beyond,” American Academy of Political and Social Science. v. 568 (March 2000): 34.
42 One of the goals of practicing respectability politics is to help poor and working- class Black people save, sacrifice, and pool their resources to support Black-owned institutions. It was about forging communities that would command the respect of white people.105 It was an attempt to transform the conduct of problematic, poor Black people into reflections of the behaviors of the larger white culture. The Black women of Baptist church who spearheaded the respectability politics movement worked diligently to help
Black people distance themselves from images perpetuated by racist stereotypes. Their adherence and concession to hegemonic values served to reinforce their moral superiority to whites.106 Moreover, respectability politics offered Black women a defense against racist notions about their sexual identity; it provided an avenue for Black women to create a safe space for self-definition. Respectability politics furnished the ability for
Black women to redefine their sense of self and humanity. They were able to define themselves outside of the prevailing discourses and parameters about their sexuality and cleanliness by claiming respectability: a sense of morals and good manners.107
One of the critiques of respectability politics is that it places a heavy weight on the oppressed to prove their humanity and worthiness to their oppressors. This ideology does not require the oppressor to question the ways that their actions render others powerless and impedes their access to resources. It is as if the problem of white supremacy is the burden of Black people rather than the culture which generated and
105. Evelyn Brooks-Higgenbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 15.
106. Ibid., 193.
107. Ibid., 190.
43 sustained racist and sexist practices. The politics of respectability is firmly entrenched in the desire for white approval by reflecting white middle-class values. It fails to recognize the power of racism to enforce itself upon the most respectable and well-behaved Black people.108 Becoming embedded in a system of tyranny is not a part of womanist thought and action.
Womanism symbolizes Black women’s resistance to their multi-dimensional oppression experienced by being Black and female in the United States. Womanism gives
Black women space to move beyond the ways that the politics of respectability has narrowed Black women’s ways of being. The full complexity of Black women’s humanity resists the confines of the politics of respectability and is visible in expressions of Black popular culture.109 Madea and Miss Shirleen reflect the ways that Black women’s experiences are undervalued in media by failing to seriously address the negative impact of systematic oppression on their lives. In the same way that womanism is rooted in Black folk expression and fosters resistance, the idea of the ratchet functions in the same venue.
Ratchet
The Black folk expression “ratchet” can be traced to the Cedar Grove neighborhood in Shreveport, Louisiana.110 The term originally came into vogue in 1999 by Anthony Mandingo when he released his song “Do the Ratchet” on his album, Ratchet
108. Griffin, Black Feminists, 34.
109. Ibid.
110. John Ortved, “Ratchet: The Rap Insult that Became a Compliment,” The Cut (April, 11, 2013): https://www.thecut.com/201.3/04/ratchet-the-rap-insult-that-became-a-compliment.html (Accessed May 12, 2018).
44 Fight in the Ghetto. Mandingo attributes the term to his grandmother. Lil Boosie popularized the term ratchet in 2004 with his song, Do Da Ratchet:
'Cause everybody got some ratchet in 'em. Everybody everybody got some ratchet in 'em ratchet in 'em. everybody got some ratchet in 'em. Everybody everybody got some ratchet in 'em, ratchet in 'em. everybody got some ratchet in 'em, everybody everybody got some ratchet in 'em. Ratchet, Nurses Be Getting Ratchet, Lawyers, D.A. And Judges the Whole Jury Getting Ratchet Swanging In Up In The Wagon On.111
Ratchet, in its original conception, was neither gendered, classed nor raced. LaMonda H.
Stallings asserts that ratchet has been defined as foolish, ignorant, ho’ishness, ghetto, and a dance. It is the performance of the failure to be respectable, uplifting, and a credit to the race, as opposed to the promotion of failure of respectability.112 Ratchet is also acting in a dysfunctional or out-of-pocket manner, unruly, someone whose actions could be considered as severely undistinguishable, possessing little or no class.113 Anyone can be ratchet. Over time ratchet became associated with Black bodies, often queer, female, and deviant. The word ratchet is messy. By defining ratchet as acts that exceed the limits of acceptable behavior, or doing the most, Cooper asserts that ratchet is the way women in hip hop culture facilitate survival. They break away from remixed of Black respectability
111. Lil Boosie. 2004. “Do Da Ratchet,” Lava House and Lil Boosie, Click Clack Connection (2004). Lyrics https://www.lyricsondemand.com/l/lilboosielyrics/ratchetlyrics.html. (Accessed May 12, 2018).
112. LaMonda H. Stallings, “Hip Hop and the Black Ratchet Imagination,” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 2, no. 2 (2013): 136.
113. Ratchet, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ratchet&page2. (Accessed April 5, 2018).
45 politics, which is not working.114 Montinique McEachern maintains that ratchet is the embodiment of Black female liberatory consciousness.
Ratchet behavior gives Black women and girls room to subvert the politics of respectability and express themselves in ways that honor their experiences and use what works for them in liberating ways. It is a cultural knowledge, performance, and awareness of an anti-respectability that can be shared across Black communities and is not bound by geography, social class, or level of traditional education. 115 For
McEachern, ratchetness allows Black women to use their cultural knowledge to maneuver through oppression by allowing creativity in self-expression. Ratchet is a way of being; it is a way of expressing authenticity.
Ratchetness is a revolutionary space that it does not pander to the politics of respectability because it does not tailor behavior to be acceptable to whiteness. It is a space to question power structures and who dictates behavior, as well as how one should act and perform. Moreover, ratchet behavior is a liberatory consciousness that undermines misogynistic, heteronormative, and anti-Black societal messages that challenge and prevent the well-being of Black people.116 Cooper locates ratchetness and ratchet acts squarely in a defiant southern, working-class behavior; however; it is not limited to that space. For Cooper the ratchet presumes an unapologetic right to speak and resist.
114. Brittney C. Cooper, “(Un) Clutching My Mother’s Pearls, or Ratchetness and the Residue of Respectability,” in The Crunk Feminist Collective (New York: Feminist Press, 2017), 220.
115. Montinique D. McEachern, Respect My Ratchet: The Liberatory Consciousness of Ratchetness, Departures in Qualitative Research 6, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 79.
116. Ibid., 80.
46 Cultural critic and founder of MAD Free, Michaela Angela Davis, has led a campaign to “Bury the Ratchet,” an inspirational and aspirational movement that it draws attention to the frequent, negative depictions of Black women in the media.117 According to Davis, ratchet has an emotional violence and meanness attached to it. She directs her attention to reality TV shows such as The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Basketball Wives, and other such shows. She points to Black women fighting each other in public, the meanness demonstrated toward one another, and the ugliness that is displayed. Davis’ desire is to elevate positive images of Black women over negative ones, the ratchet ones.
Cooper counters Davis’ argument seeing that by embracing the term ratchet there is an opportunity to de-pathologize it. There is space to celebrate the edginess of the term as well as its roots in the southern working-class.118 Ratchet can be seen as all the negative controlling images of Black women rolled into one.
However, ratchetness provides a pliable framework to challenge the politics of respectability that shames Black women for their economic status, being single mothers, their sexual choices, and acting on their desires. Additionally, this kind of shaming extends to the ways in which Black women reject and challenge dominant norms concerning style of dress, hair, femininity, and body movement.119
Ratchetness provides a way to speak one’s truth to power based on cultural knowledge and language.
117. Michaela Angela Davis Gives Us “Bury the Ratchet, May 7, 2013 http://theworthcampaign.com/michaela-angela-davis-gives-us-bury-the-ratchet/ (Accessed July 15, 2018).
118. Ortved, Ratchet.
119. Bettina Love, “A Ratchet Lens: Black Queer Youth, Agency, Hip Hop, and the Black Ratchet Imagination,” Educational Researcher 46, no.9 (December 2017): 540.
47 Significance of the Study
The significance of this study demonstrates the relevance and importance of
Madea and Miss Shirleen in African-American popular culture and the ways these characters brings awareness to the diversity of Black women’s experiences. This study brings to the fore the oral cultures bequeathed to the African-American tradition or persons hounded into silence or rendered invisible.120 There has been an aversion within the African-American community to air “dirty laundry” in public. Some of the concerns center on publicly discussing physical abuse, drug use, sexual abuse, and other problems that plague families and communities. There is a significant silence surrounding these problems in an effort to maintain an air of respectability despite the damage occurring behind closed doors. Madea and Miss Shirleen rip off the veil of secrecy and expose problematic behaviors that oppress individuals and communities so that difficult dialogues can occur and healing can begin. Moreover, womanism encourages the use of confrontation, communication, and reconciliation as mechanisms to uncovering sites of oppression. 121
Madea and Miss Shirleen’s womanist-centered perspective require full disclosure and direct action against domination for healing to begin. By uncovering these stories in and using humor to addresses the problems through cinema and vignettes, both characters illustrate the womanist commitment to confronting important issues impacting the whole community. Nothing is healed unless it is uncovered and exposed. By centering
120. Katie Cannon, Alison Gise Johnson, Angela Sims, “Living Out Loud: Womanist Works in Work,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 138.
121. Dawkins and Ryder, Passing as a Womanist, 260.
48 narratives of abuse and neglect experienced by Black women, stories often been relegated to the margins, in the films, and perhaps those watching can speak the truth as they know it.122
First, there is something endearing about the elderly grandmother who serves as the matriarch of her family. Second, Madea and Miss Shirleen provide wisdom for daily living that mirrors the teachings of the biblical texts and her own experience, although
Madea regularly reveals her lack of interest in attending church. Third, an important and positive aspect of their characters is how they challenge the community’s notions of who and what is valuable, who is worth saving, and who deserves of support. They realign perspectives and function as a unifiers. As elders in the community, they provide a vision that is necessary for Black people to maintain a hopeful demeanor and existence.
As an avenue toward resistance, Madea and Miss Shirleen emphasize the importance of self-definition and self-identity for Black women as key components of wellness. These are places of resistance where Black women no longer have to acquiesce to the triple oppression of racism, sexism, and classism. In these new spaces, Black women are no longer victims of oppression. They can begin to form levels of consciousness that allows them to overcome the intersecting oppressions so that they can live fulfilling lives. This is an act of self-revelation, the act of resisting oppression by using one’s voice is a dangerous but necessary act. Resisting oppression leads to self- definition, which assists in self-valuation and respect. Both are necessary for embracing a spirit of independence that is critical for facing difficult situations. Madea and Miss
122. Cannon et al., Living Out Loud, 142.
49 Shirleen are central to awakening and affirming a new consciousness that has its genesis in various modes of resistance for Black women.
Research Questions
Scholars and theater critics have not always noted the liberative practices and agentive capacities of characters like Madea and Miss Shirleen. It is important to see the positive aspects of these characters while critiquing where the characters fall short in their representations of Black women’s narratives, images, and agency. What is important to note is that characters like Madea and Miss Shirleen work because they are recognizable and relatable. Their actions reflect what Black people may want to do or say but do not; however, they are able to experience the possibilities through these characters.
The arts, literature, and film have always functioned as a way for creative individuals to express controversial ideas, concepts, and thoughts. The arts always provide an avenue to express different ways regardless of how others may perceive it. Their works are open to continuous interpretation and it makes them a living, breathing artifact of the larger culture.
Conceivably, the characters of Madea and Miss Shirleen also work because they are the truth-telling warrior women that individuals and communities need on the front lines of the liberation movement. Using the lenses of ratchetness and womanism offers a different perspective analyze their actions and interpret new meanings. Based on these ideas, this research asks the following questions: first, what actions of Madea are ratchet and what are womanist? How are these actions agentive? Madea is known for her outrageous, over the top responses to many situations. Why does she engage in these
50 behaviors and why does she encourage others to do so? Are her actions contributing to a dismantling of oppressive systems and do they aid in building community?
The second question guiding this study is what actions of Miss Shirleen are ratchet and womanist? Miss Shirleen’s excessive responses to problematic behaviors looks at ratchet and womanist behaviors from inside the church. The Black Baptist church is the birthplace of respectability politics and its dictates on how Black women should comport themselves. Miss Shirleen embodies a disrespectability politic that embraces ratchetness and a womanist agenda. What actions of Miss Shirleen are ratchet and what actions are womanist. How are her actions agentive and work to dismantle oppressive systems within churches?
Methodology
Qualitative research focuses on phenomena that occurs in particular settings and it involves studying those phenomena in their complexity. Qualitative researchers recognize the issue they are researching is multilayered and multifaceted and they work to portray their issue in all its forms. One forms of qualitative research is content analysis.
Content analysis is a detailed and systematic examination of a particular body of material for the purposes of identifying patterns, themes of biases. Additionally, content analysis is performed on forms of human communication including books, newspapers, films, television, art, music, videotapes of human interaction. The focus is on any verbal, visual, or behavioral form of communication.123
123. Paul D. Leedy and Jeanne E. Ormond, Practical Research: Planning and Design (Columbus: Merrill Prentice Hall, 2005), 135.
51 Content analysis helps to establish the existence and frequency of concepts and ideas within a text and helps to interpret the text. Content analysis aids in understanding a wide range of ideas like social themes, cultural symbols, and interpreting social change.124
Visual rhetoric is a form of content analysis. The methodology for this study is visual rhetoric. The methodology is adapted from the works of Roland Barthes and Sonya
Foss. Visual rhetoric aids in extracting meaning from the cinematic images and cultural cues within the two films that speak to the distinct ways that Black women exist in society through the ratchet and womanist acts of Madea and Miss Shirleen. Visual rhetoric provides the investigator with a useful system for uncovering layers of narrative within a film. For Barthes, visual rhetoric helps with understanding the ways in which visual images communicate meaning. It describes how images reflect, communicate, and even shape cultural meaning. According to Barthes, scenes in films communicate several meanings:
An informational level, which gathers together everything I can learn from the setting, the costumes, the characters, their relations, their insertion in an anecdote…this level is that of communication. The symbolic level…its mode of analysis would be a semiotics more highly developed than the first…open no longer to the science of the message, but to the science of the symbol (psychoanalysis, economics, dramaturgy).125
For Barthes, films as narratives engage in conversational discourse acts that engage in rhetoric. There is an overall picture presented and visual rhetoric assists with uncovering the underlying narratives within the film. Visual rhetoric helps to illustrate what the casual viewer overlooks. It illuminates the surface and submerged narratives contained in
124. Ibid.
125. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 52-53.
52 the film. Foss explains that a theoretical perspective like visual rhetoric involves the analysis of the symbolic and communicative aspects of visual images. It is a critical- analytical tool or a way of approaching and analyzing visual data because it highlights the communicative dimension of images or objects.126 Visual rhetoric examines and explains how the sounds and images presented in the narrative of a film communicate meaning through framing, camera movement, sound, and other technical elements that often go unnoticed by the viewers who are looking only for the plot of the storyline.
Visual rhetoric analyzes the impact of visual symbols on what Foss calls “lay viewers.” She defines lay viewers as those who are not trained in the areas of technical design, art history, art education, or aesthetics.127 These viewers bring their lived experience and knowledge to the narrative of the film. Visual rhetoric provides a path of inquiry into films and analysis of the effects that visual images may have on the audience.
This provides the researcher more insight into the messages being communicated by the images. Both Barthes and Foss are critical to this study because their theories assist with dissecting rhetoric and offer tools for analysis and interpretation.
In a phenomenological study, the researcher studies the perspectives of multiple participants and how they experience a particular phenomenon. Then generalizations are drawn based on the how a particular phenomenon are perceived or explained. It is interested in the life experiences of human beings and of those living a particular experience. The scope of this study does not involve in-depth conversations with
126. Sonya Foss, Framing the Study of Visual Rhetoric: Toward a Transformation of Rhetorical Theory in Defining Visual Rhetorics, ed. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003), 305-306.
127. Ibid., 306.
53 individuals, interviews, or draw on data from diaries or observations. A case study asks the researcher to focus on a person or event over a defined period of time. It is meant to examine a phenomena in a real-life context. The goal of a case study is to examine how an individual or program changes over time, perhaps as the result of certain circumstances or interventions.128 This research focuses two fictional characters rather than on a one particular person or event. The focus is on the uncovering the layers of narrative within the films and videos that are central to this study.
Perry has produced twenty films. His film credits include the Diary of a Mad
Black Woman (2005), Madea’s Family Reunion (2006), Daddy’s Little Girls (2007), Why
Did I Get Married (2007), Meet the Browns (2008), The Family That Preys (2008),
Madea Goes to Jail (2009), I Can do Bad All By Myself (2009), Why Did I Get Married
Too (2010), For Colored Girls (2010), Madea’s Big Happy Family (2011), Good Deeds
(2012), Madea’s Witness Protection (2012), Temptation: Confession of a Marriage
Counselor (2013), A Madea Christmas (2013), Peeples (2013), Single Mom’s Club
(2014), Boo: A Madea Halloween (2016), Boo 2: A Madea Halloween (2017), Acrimony
(2018), and Nobody’s Fool (2018).129
Out of the twenty films, there are nine where Madea is the star. According to imbd.com130 these films are the Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005), Madea’s Family
Reunion (2006), Madea Goes to Jail (2009), Madea’s Big Happy Family (2011),
128. Leedy and Ormond, Practical Research, 135.
129. Tyler Perry, https://www.imdb.com/find?q=tyler%20perry&s=tt&ttype=ft&ref_=fn_ft. (Accessed October 8, 2018).
130.Tyler Perry: Filmography, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1.3471.53/ (Accessed December 18, 2018).
54 Madea’s Witness Protection (2012), A Madea Christmas (2013), Boo: A Madea
Halloween (2016), Boo 2: A Madea Halloween (2017), and A Madea Family Funeral
(2019).131 Madea has cameo appearances in Meet the Browns (2008) and I Can do Bad
All By Myself (2009). The two films that were chosen for this study are Diary of a Mad
Black Woman and Madea’s Family Reunion. These films were selected because Madea was established as a character in these films made in 2005 and 2006. The third film was a non-Madea film titled, Meet the Browns. The next Madea film, Madea Goes to Jail, was made in 2009.
Films were chosen instead of plays because they are unvarying. Perry’s plays and the messages they contain may change depending on the city where the play is touring.
Perry uses this strategy to make the plays more relatable to his audience. For example, if his play were in Atlanta, Georgia, he may refer to particular events, landmarks, or people that the audience knows or understands. Some of the lines in the play may shift to address a current situation, and Madea may offer her insight on that issue, whereas the message may shift when the play is in New Orleans, Louisiana. This practice is not employed in film. Once the films are completed, the lines in the films are fixed no matter where they are shown.
Porter, Miss Shirleen’s creator, has uploaded 213 videos to her YouTube page,
The Christi Show. Eight-four of the videos feature Miss Shirleen. The other videos are of her other three characters Yung Vulveeta, a local Atlanta trap star and single father;
Karen Dontcare, a local journalist; and Dr. Jennastacia, a holistic doctor who spends her
131. Tyler Perry, https://www.imdb.com/find?q=tyler%20perry&s=tt&ttype=ft&ref_=fn_ft. (Accessed October 18, 2018).
55 time educating her patients on the importance of self-care.132 Two of her videos featuring
Miss Shirleen, Dump Trump and Waist Trainers, went viral and helped her gain popularity within social media circles. These two videos built the foundation for the character. The five Miss Shirleen videos that are chosen for this study are Pineapples,
Hershel Out my Face, Sounds Like A Question from Your Grandma, You Done Let the
Devil Use You, and Shirleen Would Rather Go Hungry. These videos were chosen for this study because they are among the most viewed and most popular on The Christi Show
YouTube page.
Theoretical Framework
The theoretical frameworks for this study are based on the concepts of womanism and ratchetness. These lenses prioritize the experiences and voices of Black women to de- pathologize behaviors that are liberative, agentive, and perhaps culturally affirming.
Using these two frameworks helps to reestablish and redefine ways that Black women exist and advocate for themselves.
Womanism is a culturally derived concept that affirms Black women’s self- agency and their struggle to resist all forms of oppression by freely asserting themselves with confidence and creativity.133 Being bold, authentic, courageous, and outrageous demonstrates Black women’s ability to survive and thrive despite race, gender, and class subjugation. The work of womanist scholars provides a significant impetus and
132. The Christi Show, http://thechristishow.com/characters/ (Accessed December 19, 2018).
133. Dorothy R. Tsuruta, “The Womanish Roots of Womanism: A Culturally Derived and African Centered Ideal,” Western Journal of Black Studies 36 No. 1(2012): 3.
56 background for this study. Walker’s womanist definition aids in capturing the stories of
Black women who have gone unnoticed and unheard.
For the purpose of this research, Walker’s definition of womanism will be used to examine the ways that Perry’s Madea and Porter’s Miss Shirleen character reflect womanist thought and values. Madea’s and Miss Shirleen’s embodiment of womanism prioritizes Black joy and Black women’s fight for freedom against all forms of oppression. This project specifically focuses on three parts of Walker’s definition: Madea and Shirleen’s outrageous, audacious, and willful behavior as an agentive practice.
As a theoretical framework, ratchetness demands that women to use their agency and power to engage in radical subjectivity, a challenge to subvert oppressive structures by taking their personal and communal agency seriously. Ratchetness is a liberatory form of consciousness that gives one the tools necessary to exist and perhaps thrive in oppressive circumstances with intentionality and awareness rather than internalize the socialization that these institutions impose.134 Bettina Love maintains that ratchetness is a liberatory, excessive, and healing way of being that represents the ways Black girls and women push back against racism, sexism, and poverty. Ratchetness engages in innovative practices that affirm one’s humanity and provides the tools necessary to survive and resist. It engages the multiple ways that Black women create spaces to challenge those who feel the need to silence them because they feel threatened by their presence and voices.
134. McEachern, Respect My Ratchet, 81.
57 Dissertation Organization
This research is structured according to the following chapter arrangement:
Chapter I presents the Introduction that highlights the purpose of the research, presents background information on Tyler Perry and the development of Madea, and background information on Christianee Porter and the development of Miss Shirleen, womanism, the politics of respectability, the meaning of ratchet, the statement of the problem, the significance of the research, the research methodology and theoretical framework.
Chapter II comprises the literature review outlining research relevant to this study. The literature review incorporates scholarly work that has been written relevant to womanism, the politics of respectability, ratchetness, and critiques of Perry’s work.
Chapters III identifies acts that can be classified as ratchet womanist in the Diary of a Mad Black Woman and Madea’s Family Reunion. Chapter IV examines actions of
Miss Shirleen that can be seen as ratchet and womanist in five videos. Chapter V concludes with the implications of a possible ratchet womanist agency as a healthy response to the limits of the politics of respectability and how this manifests in everyday contexts.
CHAPTER II
LITERATURE REVIEW
The purpose of this chapter is to review the available literature on the politics of respectability, the subject of ratchetness, and the evolution of womanism. This literature review highlights major scholars who have examined the ways in which Black women have resisted the hegemonic forces around race, class, gender, and representation. These are the Black women whose religious and cultural traditions have helped them survive their diaspora experience in the western world.1 Black women are not a monolithic group.
There are several factors such as age, region, skin tone, sexual orientation, and class that differentiate Black women from one another. Even if there is no single, universal Black female experience, there are enough shared identities, beliefs, and experiences to offer insight into African American women as a group.2
Black women’s subjectivity and agency emerge out of a tradition of resistance.
Since their arrival on American shores as enslaved people, Black women have endured centuries of being presented and treated as ugly beasts, mammies, whores, jezebels, and superwomen.
1. Jacqueline Carr-Hamilton, “Motherwit in Southern Religion: A Womanist Perspective,” in Ain’t Gonna Lay My “Ligion Down: African American Religion in the South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 72.
2. Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 47. 58 59 The dominant ideology of the slave era fostered the creation of several interrelated, socially constructed, controlling images of Black women, each reflecting the dominant group’s interest in maintaining Black women’s subordination.3 These controlling images are that of the welfare queen, Jezebel, mammies, and inadequate mothers. The Black matriarch was considered a mammy, a woman who was unable to demonstrate appropriate feminine qualities and behavior, deeming her less than human and less than a woman. Black women’s failure to conform to the cult of true womanhood which emphasized domesticity, purity, submissiveness, and piety, was seen as a fundamental source of Black cultural deficiency,4 and an inability to model appropriate feminine behavior. She was unfeminine, emasculated her husbands and lovers, and contributed toward the pathology of Black families and communities.5 Misogynoir,6 defined as racialized sexism toward Black women, implies that Black women are unable to contribute to their families in ways that conform to the expectations deemed acceptable by the larger white culture. According to this line of reasoning they are responsible for the failure of Black civil society.7
3. Patricia Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 72.
4. Ibid., 77.
5. Daniel Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, U.S. Department of Labor, https://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/webid-meynihan.htm (Accessed October 2, 2018).
6. Misogynoir is a term created by Dr. Moya Bailey to address the unique hatred that Black women and girl experience in American visual and popular culture. Bailey cites how racism and anti- Blackness alter the experience of misogyny for Black women, specifically. For more information see http://www.gradientliar.com/post/841.07309247/define-misogynoir-anti-Black-misogyny-moya-bailey- coined and www.crunkfeministcollective.com/201.0/03/1.4/they-arent-talking-about/me/.
7. Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 73.
60 In contrast to the matriarchal mammy, another detrimental image is that of the jezebel. As Black women were auctioned and sold on the slave blocks based upon their ability to reproduce, they were oftentimes violently coerced into sexual relationships with their masters or other male slaves. This form of sexual objectification branded Black women as sexually promiscuous and immoral and this outlook was used to rationalize the sexual atrocities visited upon their bodies. This ideology provided a powerful rationale for the widespread sexual assault of slave women by white men.8 According to this line of reasoning by white slave owners, Black women could not be raped because they always desired sex. Hill-Collins asserts that portraying Black women as having excessive sexual appetites justified the economic exploitation of their bodies to fuel the institution of slavery.9 This denigration of Black womanhood provided the necessary scaffolding for the exploitative plantation system to prosper and its concomitant rampant Black disenfranchisement.
Regardless of how Black women were viewed, their bodies were not considered worthy of protection. White women are seen as privileged whereas Black women are defined as other. These diametrically opposed images of women and womanhood have been used for the political, social, and economic exploitation of Black women. Black women have resisted and challenged the oppression, but they learned to feign conformity without denying their own power of self-definition in what has also been called the culture of dissemblance. The culture of dissemblance, or the cult of secrecy, was created
8. Ibid., 81-82.
9. Ibid.
61 by Black women to protect the sanctity of their inner lives.10 This culture embodies protest and resistance for Black women. It gave them space to create alternative identities for themselves that allowed them to survive in a racially and sexually hostile world.
Sojourner Truth’s “And Ain’t I A Woman” speech is an example of how Black women constructed their own identities from their lived experiences. 11 Her speech reified her dignity as a Black woman and her humanity. Numerous Black women continue this fight every day to claim their own subjectivity and identity. Black slave women undermined the system of slavery by aborting their pregnancies or removing their offspring from the devastating effects of slavery.12 Black women such as Representative Maxine Waters claim their right to speak and be heard in the midst of racist and sexist rhetoric. In this way they resist the politics of prejudice and oppression.
Professor and cultural critic Jacqueline Bobo asserts that Black women are not the acquiescent martyrs of the popular imagination but women who meet repressive challenges of mainstream society.13 Black women utilize tools available to them to develop oppositional ideologies and stances to disrupt the impact of white, racist culture on their lives. Black women’s ability to claim their own identity and to name themselves has been central in that process. This is the hallmark of self-identity. Their collective
10. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” Signs 14, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 915.
11. Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 99.
12. Jacqueline Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 25.
13. Ibid., 37.
62 action and defiance to domination became part of a sustained movement. Out of this spirit of resistance, the necessity for self-identity, the politics of respectability was born.
Respectability Politics
The politics of respectability is a set of behaviors and attitudes that reflect and reproduce the norms of the dominant society. The result of these behaviors is to produce a counter-discourse to the negative stereotypes that are placed on subordinated groups and a reformulation of Black womanhood.14 Respectability politics is meant to help marginalized groups survive in hostile environments. Coined by Evelyn Brooks-
Higgenbotham in her book, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black
Baptist Church, 1880-1920, the politics of respectability describes how early 20th century
Black Baptist church women represented themselves as polite, chaste, and thrifty to reject the stereotypes often used to describe them as immoral, childlike, and unworthy of respect and protection.15 The politics emerged as a counter-narrative to the politics of prejudice. Brooks-Higgenbotham discovered how women who were primarily maids and teachers for the most part fought for civil rights, expanded their voices in their communities and especially in their churches.16 She further argues that the politics of respectability for these women was partly a matter of religion. It delivered a message of
14. Paisley J. Harris, Gatekeeping and Remaking: The Politics of Respectability in African American Women’s History and Black Feminism. Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 1 (2003): 218.
15. Ibid., 191.
16. Kimberly Foster, For Harriet, Wrestling with Respectability in the Age of #Blacklivesmatter: A Dialogue, http://www.forharriet.com/201.5/1.0/wrestling-with-respectability-in-age-of.html. (Accessed November 12, 2018).
63 character and on some levels, dovetails with what society considers proper behavior.17
There was a moral authority within this politics that claimed respect for these Black church women and their communities. In an interview Brooks-Higgenbotham argues that the politics of respectability communicates a particular message:
The politics of respectability, and this is the key thing about it, it gives you a moral authority to say to the outside world, “I am worthy of respect. You don’t treat me like an equal person, and, because I am an equal person I am going to fight for my rights, I’m going to demand equality, I’m not going to let you treat me like a second-class citizen.” It’s about standing on moral authority to fight for your rights. That’s the way they interpreted it.18
These were women whose representational strategies had the goal of facilitating political victories and advances in policies that would positively affect the lives of African-
Americans. It is an avenue to gain respect, hence its name. Every individual was responsible for behavioral self-regulation and self-improvement in public and private spaces. Brooks-Higgenbotham asserts that, in the end, the politics of respectability afforded Black church women a powerful weapon of resistance to race and gender subordination. It provided the very groundwork for protest, voting, and other traditionally recognized forms of political activity.19 By insisting upon conforming to larger societal norms these women subverted the logic of white supremacy and challenged white
America’s failure to live up to its own ideals of equality and justice.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Evelyn Brooks-Higgenbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1881-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 227.
64 Respectability politics also encompassed connotations about class status and access to privilege through the ways people dressed, spoke and behaved or the organizations they joined. These church women and other elite Black women waged war against gum chewing, loud talking, jazz music, and other perceived improprieties.20
Consequently, respectability represents a set of behaviors and attitudes embodied by white middle-class people that appealed to Black women reformers. While respectability held a central place in the ideology of racial uplift and self-help it also created additional problems. One of the products of this kind of politics was that it created and reinforced class tensions among African Americans. One group is acceptable and the other is unacceptable and shameful. Women who do not follow proper decorum for the way they dress or Black men who dip snuff were seen as those who transgressed norms of racial propriety.21
University of Buffalo history professor Victoria Walcott observes that respectability politics incorporated values such as hard work functioned as a route toward social uplift.22 Walcott argues that respectability had two iterations. The first was a bottom up, working-class respectability that emphasized religious piety, cleanliness, hard work, and thrift; while a top-down bourgeois respectability emphasized public displays of decorum, sexual restraint, and deportment.23 Women’s studies professor Paisley Harris
20. Ibid., 95.
21. Ibid., 15.
22. Victoria W. Walcott, “Remaking Respectability: African American Women and the Politics of Identity in Interwar Detroit” (diss. University of Michigan, 1995), 4, http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/104886.
23. Ibid.
65 maintains that respectability had two audiences, African-Americans, who were encourage to be respectable, and white people, who needed to be shown that African-Americans could be respectable.24
Africana and women and gender studies professor Brittney Cooper contends that respectability politics pathologizes Black people and compels a level of emotional investment into a way of being that does not necessarily garner the results intended. She rejects respectability politics because, as a project, it fails to combat white supremacy and mitigate the impact that racism has on vulnerable Black people. The respectability project reinforced the idea of Black exceptionalism as the antidote to anti-Blackness.25 There is an assumption within respectability that white supremacy can be reasoned with and is reasonable. Cooper rejects that presumption. In her book Eloquent Rage: A Black
Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Cooper argues that the entire respectability formula for raising the socioeconomic status of Black people is a failure. Going to college, raising children in a two-parent home, working full time, and spending less does not necessarily make it possible for Black people to close the wealth gap. White people have more money because their ancestors made money from owning Black bodies.26
Nadine Brown and Lisa Young in their article, Ratchet Politics: Moving Beyond
Black Women’s Bodies to Indict Institutions and Structures, agree with Cooper. White supremacy allowed Black bodies to be sold for a profit and their labor to be owned and
24. Harris, Gatekeeping and Remaking, 213.
25. Randall Kennedy, Brittney Cooper, Khalil Gilbran Mohammad, Mychal Denzel Smith, Stage for Debate: Respectability and Activism Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture New York, New York February 2, 2016.
26. Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers her Superpower (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 265.
66 exercised for the enrichment of others.27 The government’s commitment to racial hierarchies and class divisions renders the impact of respectability politics nearly impotent.
While respectability politics promotes values that contradict racist and sexist stereotypes, such as presenting Black women as modest, it also reinforces discriminatory narratives. For example, it focuses on Black women’s alleged lack of sexual restraint rather than addressing the problem of sexual assault faced by Black women. In addition, respectability promotes the idea that modestly dressed women, depending on whose definition was being employed, are more respectable and worthier of protection. This idea reinforces sexist notions about women and it fails to respond to the persistent trauma of racist and sexist acts experienced by African-Americans. Lee and Hicken argue that respectability politics fails to consider the impact of systemic racism on the lives of Black people.28 Furthermore, forcing individuals or communities into proscribed roles dictated by these politics replicates the behaviors of the status quo and has the potential to marginalize individuals from the resources needed to gain upward mobility.
Maria del Guadalupe Davidson in Black Women, Agency, and the New Black
Feminism avers that there is a failure within respectability politics to acknowledge that people come from different backgrounds and that socio-economic status affects access to
27. Nadia E. Brown and Linda Young, “Ratchet Politics: Moving Beyond Black Women’s Bodies to Indict Institutions and Structures,” Broadening the Contours in the Study of Black Politics: Citizenship and Popular Culture 17, no. 2 (December 2015): 49.
28. Hedwig Lee and Margaret T. Hicken, “Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Health Implications of Black Respectability Politics”, Souls 16, no. 2-4 (December 2016): 426.
67 education, resources, employment, and other opportunities.29 Furthermore, these ideas require that marginalized people accept and embrace white supremacist ideas about themselves thereby feigning empowerment. For Guadalupe-Davidson, it is a form of internalized oppression. The psychological state of mind induced by respectability politics impedes individuals and communities of the ability to challenge the systems of oppression marginalizing the community.
Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy argues that respectability politics is a tactic of public relations that is not necessarily good or bad. Kennedy believes that respectability politics is about putting your best foot forward in an effort to gain allies, inspire converts, and gain political access.30 He argues that respectability politics is about taking care in presenting oneself publicly and the desire strongly to avoid saying or doing anything that will reflect badly on Blacks, reinforce negative racial stereotypes, or needlessly alienate potential allies.31 For those who embarrass the race, Kennedy agrees with deploying a politics of exclusion that isolates those who refuse to put their best foot forward.
Author Mychal Denzel Smith retorts Kennedy’s politics of exclusion based on respectability politics because it is, by necessity, a politics of exclusion. Since the basis of the definition was constructed by white supremacy, it will constantly be redefined to keep
African-Americans outside the notion of respectability and they will never be able to
29. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Black Women, Agency, and the New Black Feminism (New York: Routledge, 2017), 132.
30. Kennedy et al., Stage for Debate.
31. Ibid.
68 reach it.32 Even with his support of respectability politics, Kennedy acknowledges that it does have challenges.
The misapplication of respectability politics causes deep wounds and divisions within the Black community, it utilizes biases as a way to exclude people and deem particular behaviors as problematic and disreputable, and it has served as a way to harbor bigotry or the complacent acceptance of racism. 33 Cooper agrees with Kennedy in that respectability and comportment with white racist standards of behavior does not dismantle anti-Blackness. She argues that respectability promotes narrow interpretations of gender and sexual identities, its emphasis on individual behavior blames Blacks for their victimization, and it places an inordinate amount of blame on Black women.34
Frederick Harris, Columbia University Professor of Political Science and Dean for Social Sciences, argues that this kind of politics neglects important discussions around the structural forces that hinder the upward mobility and progress of the Black working-class people. In his article, The Rise of Respectability Politics, Harris posits that uplifting stories about Blacks who have made it out of poverty overlook the structural barriers, the political advocacy to correct those barriers, and the enormous challenges that the poor face to overcome them in an era marked by downward mobility.35
For Harris, the politics of respectability, long heralded as an emancipatory strategy, neglects discussions about structural forces such as race, class, and gender
32. Kennedy, et al., Stage for Debate.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Frederick Harris, The Rise of Respectability Politics, Dissent Magazine Winter 2014: 36.
69 discrimination, that hinder the upward mobility of Black and brown working-class people. He calls attention to several incidences of politicians who brow beat Black youth about their appearance, the way they wear their hair, and the fact that they do not wear belts as the reason for declining Black educational achievement and increased criminality.36 Khalil Mohammad argues in his book, The Condemnation of Blackness, that elite Blacks employed the language racial uplift and respectability to describe criminality in terms of class and culture.37 Many advocates of the respectability agenda, like Kennedy, claim that these individuals bring shame to the Black race. This is the same language used by the originators of the respectability argument. Harris critiques Black millionaires like Magic Johnson and Oprah Winfrey for writing off the folks in the village that raised them and contributed to their success. Additionally, he criticizes former President Barack H. Obama for advancing the politics of respectability by excoriating Blacks for stalling their own progress as he stated in the following speech:
If we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit, during the course of fifty years, there were times when some of us, claiming to push for change lost our way. The urban unrest that erupted across the nation following King’s assassination in 1968 and in the years after was composed not of act of rebellion but in self-defeating riots. Constant concerns regarding police brutality – though legitimate – had become over the years excuses for criminal behavior.38
For Harris, Obama’s language of recrimination of Black and brown bodies, the shaming of poverty, and believing that poor people did not raise their children “right”, instead of
36. Ibid., 35.
37. Khalil Mohammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 9-10.
38. Harris, The Rise of Respectability Politics, 37.
70 the racism of others, particularly those in law enforcement and government, was the real reason for the problem. Harris believes that America has much more work to do in overcoming systemic racism, white supremacy, and oppression. To expect Black and brown people to constantly reach for the politics of respectability as an emancipatory framework ignores the problems of inequality and racist notions of the inherent criminality of Black people.
More recently, respectability politics has been critiqued for its inability to deliver on the promises of respect and protection. Cultural critic Jamilah Lemieux and Cooper argue that being college-educated, well-spoken, employed, and law abiding may take you to the middle-class dream, but it will not protect you from the impact of white supremacy.39 Cooper further asserts employment for Black people are employed that does not mean they earn living wage allowing attainment of the middle-class dream. She argues that those who created respectability politics actively and viciously rejected these very people as less than.40
Lemieux and Cooper refer to white supremacy as America’s greatest national accomplishment. Lemieux contends that we cannot make white people love, respect, or honor the humanity of Black folks by being good and respectable in our resistance to racist oppression. For Cooper, everyday acts of resistance by which Black people assert their humanity constitutes a liberation plan that frees them from the limitations and restrictions of respectability.
39. Jamilah Lemieux, It’s time for Black folks to stop trying to be “good” in the face of our Oppression, June 30, 2015 http://www.forharriet.com/201.5/06/its-time-for-Black-folks-to-stop-trying.html (Accessed November 12, 2018).
40. Kennedy et al., Stage for Debate.
71 Many activists and scholars like Mychal Denzel Smith have looked at respectability politics as erasing understandable Black rage. When Smith wrote about the death of an unarmed Black man, Jonathan Ferrell, who sought help after a car accident in
Charlotte, North Carolina he said:
Jonathan Ferrell did everything right, He got an education. He worked hard. He was engaged to be married. His crime was being in a car crash and seeking help. In the process, he was profiled as a burglar, shot and killed, No one sought to protect, serve, or even listen to him. He had his humanity erased even after doing it all the “right” way. As long as you are Black you are subject to white supremacy. You will constantly have to answer questions about your existence and prove that you belong. And in some instances, like that of Jonathan Ferrell, you may not even be given the opportunity to explain.41
For Smith, Jonathan Ferrell is one name in a long line of Black people whose lives were taken while being respectable. Even in death, Black people have to continue to prove their humanity.
Adhering to respectability politics requires people of color perform as defined by structures of whiteness before they are deemed worthy of exclusion from racial violence.42 Ratchet behavior rejects the politics of respectability and is a creative space for Black women to engage in a disrespectability politic that can be shared across race, class, and gender lines. A disrespectability politic resists the performance of a femininity based on whiteness and is simultaneously restrictive and conformist. Ratchet behaviors and actions encourage Black women to utilize their own homegrown wisdom traditions,
41. Mychal Denzel Smith, The Nation, Respectability Politics Won’t Save Us: On the Death of Jonathan Ferrell, September 16, 2013 https://www.thenation.com/article/respectability-politics-wont-save- us-death-jonathan-ferrell/ (Accessed October 24, 2018).
42. Mikaela Pitcan, Alice E. Marwick, and Dannah Boyd, “Performing the Vanilla Self: Respectability Politics, Social Class, and the Digital World,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 23, iss. 2 (May 2018): 165.
72 language, actions, and methods to challenge racist, sexist, and classist systems to create liberative spaces for themselves.
The Idea of Ratchetness
The term ratchet has been circulated, shaped, constructed, and reconstructed in
Black environments since 1999. The particularities of the term stem from the experiences, lifestyles, and realities of working-class Blacks in the American south.43 In the article, Ratchet Politics: Moving Beyond Black Women’s Bodies to Indict Institutions and Structures, Brown and Young utilize a ratchet framework to critique institutions such as the government as well as racist societal structures. They move beyond ratchet as a term to refer to people of color; they use it to call attention to the ways that white supremacy, capitalism, and respectability politics are, in and of themselves, ratchet. All three systems are based on the politics of exclusion where one group is deemed worthy of acceptance and respect and another is not. This is the same politics of exclusion advanced by Kennedy. For Brown and Young, engaging in ratchet acts make Black women’s lives and bodies visible and reshapes the lenses that seek to render them as disobedient and unruly.
Ratchet acts include everyday acts of resistance such as Black women letting loose and enjoying themselves to speaking truth to power in a culture that tends to read
Black women as angry and; therefore, less credible. To reduce it to such a binary of demeaning and acceptable behavior, ratchetness loses it liberative edge. Ratchet is not necessarily undignified behavior. Rendering ratchet acts as both demeaning and
43. Brown and Young, Ratchet Politics, 45.
73 performed solely by lower-class Black women erases the experiences of others.44 Brown and Young acknowledge the ways that the ratchet designation is used to police Black women’s sexuality and behaviors because it attempts to reinscribe negative, stereotypical images of Black women. However, Brown and Young use ratchet as a framework to critique oppressive systems that seek to read Black bodies as problematic and needing to be controlled. Ratchetness calls for an examination of how race, class, and gender impact
Black women’s lives and how these structures enact violence on their lives. For Brown and Young ratchet acts and its disrespectability politics acknowledge the tensions of living in a racist, sexist, and patriarchal society that looks to silence Black women’s experiences and pain.45 It is a space to question power structures, who gets to dictate behavior, and how one should act and perform. Moreover, ratchet behavior is a liberatory consciousness that undermines misogynistic, heteronormative, and anti-Black societal messages that challenge and prevent the well-being of Black people.46
In Montinique McEachern’s article, Respect My Ratchet: The Liberatory
Consciousness of Ratchetness, she argues that ratchet behavior honors Black women’s experience and knowledge. For McEachern ratchetness provides a revolutionary lens to view women like former First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, and rapper and reality television star, Cardi B, as equally influential and revolutionary. Cardi B reflects women who embrace their sexuality, their experiences, and the ways that women participate in the economy and support themselves. She embodies ratchet action and
44. Ibid., 47.
45. Ibid., 50.
46. McEachern, Respect My Ratchet, 80.
74 empowers everyday women to accomplish things that society tells them they cannot.47
Women like Cardi B dismiss respectability, embrace other forms of empowerment, and utilize their social media platforms to advocate for regular Black girls that the larger culture wishes to shame and silence.
A ratchet framework does not include space for shaming the different ways Black women exist in the world. McEachern maintains that a ratchet form of consciousness provides a familiar context of resistance for Black girls and women to push back against racism, sexism, and misogyny both inside and outside of the community.48 This kind of consciousness is a counternarrative that advocates for the healing and preservation for
Black girls and women who consistently resist the destructive narrative of white hegemony.
For McEachern ratchetness embodies five elements of a liberatory consciousness: awareness, analysis, action, allyship, and accountability. For her these allow for Black girl survival. Awareness is the ability to notice, to pay attention to our language. Ratchet embraces the art of throwing shade, a good read, and all the other nuanced ways Black folks communicate.49 It allows Black women to draw upon their own language to push back against the micro- and macroaggressions they experience. It values Black vernacular language and makes space for Black people to express themselves in ways that reflect their authenticity. Analysis accommodates the ways Black women show up authentically and gives them the freedom to express themselves. These spaces are critical because they
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 81.
49. Ibid., 83.
75 are where Black women create the discourse and dialogue about their experiences and collectively decide how to respond.
An important element of liberatory consciousness is action, garnering solutions for problematic societal conditions and making change possible.50 McEachern looks at women like Fannie Lou Hamer and Taraji P. Henson who take ratchet action by speaking up and celebrating themselves regardless of the approval of the larger culture. In terms of allyship and accountability, McEachern sees two these actions as how we understand and use the role of subordination to hold those in the dominant groups accountable.51 In other words, ratchetness speaks truth to power utilizing its indigenous knowledge and experience. McEachern appreciates the ways that ratchetness frees all Black women, regardless of class, to love themselves, affirm their experiences, and utilize their knowledge as power to fight back against systemic oppression.
Like McEachern, Cooper affirms the ways that ratchetness is defiant and unapologetic. Cooper locates ratchetness and ratchet acts squarely in an audacious southern working-class culture; however, it is not limited to that space. Ratchetness emerges under these conditions as a kind of habitus through which some working-class folks and people with working-class roots interact with every aspect of their lives, from entertainment to family to government.52 For Cooper, ratchetness presumes a right to speak, resist, and it is unapologetic. It is a dismissal of respectability and it is about
50. Ibid., 85.
51. Ibid., 87.
52. Brittney Cooper, (Un)Clutching My Mothers Pearls, or Ratchetness and the Residue of Respectability in The Crunk Feminist Collection, eds. Cooper, Morris, Bylorn (New York: The Feminist Press, 2017), 217.
76 embracing a disrespectability politics. Ratchetness is so over the top and outrageous that it is meant to catch people’s attention.
In The Crunk Feminist Collection, Cooper argues that disrespectability politics is an act of transgression that Black women can use to push back against expectations of acceptable Black womanhood that are too rigid.53 It urges Black women to claim agency in their race and gender performances while offering a critique of whitewashed identity politics.54 Disrespectability politics works because it fights back against an identity politics that calls Black women to adhere to a way of performing femininity that is restrictive and conformist. Respectability politics inhibits Black women’s ability to fully represent their truest selves and be authentic. Moreover, it limits an ability to use non- traditional actions as resistance. Ratchetness and ratchet acts call for an interrogation of the ways Black bodies and actions are scrutinized.
Cooper embraces a concept called “ratchet respectability” that advocates for reading women of color as complex characters with inevitable influences from their cultural and social standpoints. She further asserts that ratchet respectability allows Black women to combine ratchet behavior (often linked to race and class) and politics of respectability (often linked to race and gender), claiming that one can be ratchet and respectable at the same time.55 According to Cooper, the dismissal of respectability and
53. Brittney Cooper, Susanna Morris, Robin Bylorn, The Crunk Feminist Collection (New York: The Feminist Press, 2017), 213.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
77 the embracing of ratchetness speaks to the ways in which the respectability project has failed Black women.
Cultural critic and founder of MAD Free, Michaela Angela Davis has led a campaign to “Bury the Ratchet.” Bury the Ratchet is an inspirational and aspirational movement that draws attention to the fact that Black women are often depicted negatively.56 According to Davis the term has an emotional violence and meanness attached to it, particularly for women of color. For her the term ratchet speaks to a larger problem of how Black women are portrayed in the media, particularly reality TV shows such as The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Basketball Wives, and other such programming.
She points to Black women fighting each other in public, the meanness demonstrated toward one another, and the ugliness that is displayed. Davis’ desire is to elevate positive images of Black women over negative ones. Cooper counters Davis by embracing the term ratchet there is an opportunity to de-pathologize it.57 Ratchet can be seen as all the negative controlling images of Black women rolled into one, which can be both negative and positive. Bettina Love, an associate professor in the department of educational theory and practice at the University of Georgia, notes:
However, ratchetness provides a pliable framework to challenge the politics of respectability that shames Black women for their economic status, being single mothers, their sexual choices, and acting on their desires. Additionally, this kind of shaming extends to the ways in which
56. Michaela Angela Davis Gives Us “Bury the Ratchet, May 7, 2013 http://theworthcampaign.com/michaela-angela-davis-gives-us-bury-the-ratchet/ Accessed August 29, 2018.
57. John Ortved, “Ratchet: The Rap Insult that Became a Compliment,” The Cut (April, 11, 2013): https://www.thecut.com/201.3/04/ratchet-the-rap-insult-that-became-a-compliment.html (Accessed May 12, 2018).
78 Black women reject and challenge dominant norms concerning style of dress, hair, femininity, and body movement.58
Ratchetness provides a way for Black women to speak one’s own truth to power with their own cultural knowledge and language. Ratchetness is radical and creative. It allows
Black women to bring their whole selves into any particular moment.59 It resists any politics that imposes restrictive standards of behaviors and intercultural policing. In the same way that ratchet emerged out of a specific cultural context from everyday folks, womanism emerged as a response from Black women to the oppression they face and the ordinary solutions they devised and utilized to solve problems.
The Relevance of Womanism
A common feminist saying asserts that “the personal is political.” The expression was the title given to a memo written by white feminist Carol Hanisch as she responded to a question about the consciousness raising activities of the women’s movement. The original title given to her response was, “Some Thoughts in Response to Dottie’s
Thoughts on a Women’s Liberation Movement.”60 For Hanisch, the problems that women were experiencing were the result of gender-based oppression. This oppression had real life consequences in the lives of women in terms of childcare, equality in the workplace, and equity in the home in terms of men helping with childcare and housework.61
Hanisch’s response emphasized the idea that women do not suffer oppression in isolation,
58. Bettina Love, “A Ratchet Lens: Black Queer Youth, Agency, Hip Hop, and the Black Ratchet Imagination,” Educational Researcher 46, no.9 (December 2017): 540.
59. McEachern, Respect My Ratchet, 82.
60. Carol Hanisch, The Personal is Political, www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html (Accessed September 26, 2018).
61. Ibid.
79 but as the result of wider oppressive political and social systems. These words for many women speak to their reality of living in a patriarchal society. These events and circumstances that women experience in their life – the choices about pregnancy and childbirth; the fear of sexual violence or intimidation; the longing for equal pay for equal work – are not the idiosyncrasies of a few angry women, as some critics might claim, but are products of the institutions, systems, and ideologies that govern their lives.
To recognize that the personal is political is for women to engage in feminist theory. To fight patriarchy is to be a feminist; however, it is more complicated than railing against male supremacy. If feminism desires to address the needs of all women, it must be nuanced in its theory and practice. In other words, feminism must attend also to issues involving race, class, sexuality, and nationality. Feminism, Black feminism, womanism and Africana womanism, attend to these intersecting oppressions in distinct and, at times, overlapping ways.
Feminism emerged as a social movement seeking to end sexism, exploitation, and oppression against women through its advocacy of equal rights for women. Feminists united around the idea that women’s position in society is unequal to men and society is structured in such a way to benefit men to the political, social, and economic detriment of women. In this way feminism ascended as a social critique of American society and its failure to address and eliminate institutionalized sexism.
Mary Wollstonecraft in her 1792 work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, argued against the way women were treated in the late 18th century London. This publication was the first expression of the rights of women. She questioned women’s
80 willingness to remain confined in cages like the feathered race.62 These women were well taken care of, but they wanted more. She encouraged women to pursue the serious privileges of wisdom and rationality over against pursuing beauty. Moreover,
Wollstonecraft wanted women to seriously examine the patriarchal system that kept them in subordination. She asserted women should be properly educated, trained to think critically, grow and develop spiritually, and work towards eliminating the immorality of men.
The impact of her early feminist work was the revelation of the strives and struggles of white bourgeoisie women. She notes how these women sacrificed their health, beauty and virtue for whatever prestige, power and pleasure a husband could provide for them. While she advocated for women to be economically independent from their men, Wollstonecraft did not provide a rubric on how to achieve it. Women have personhood, an individual self who has the power to decide who they are and their future.
Her work is considered as part of the first wave of feminism where women sought equal standing with men as citizens in public life and equality within the private sphere.
Feminism in the United States was earlier called the Women’s Suffragist
Movement, and it started when a group of white women, whose concerns then were for the abolition of slavery and the equal rights for all people regardless of race, class and sex, dominated the political agenda among women on the national level during the early
62. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, (Utah: Quiet Vision Publishing, 2000), 42.
81 to mid-nineteenth century.63 The women believed that by campaigning on the platform of equality that they somehow may be given equal rights, equal access, and the right to vote.
When this did not happen, because Black men were given the right to vote under the
Fifteenth Amendment before white women, there was a racist reaction to the amendment.
Clenora Hudson-Weems argues that feminism has never fully addressed the historical realities of Black women and that true feminism and its racist history makes it incompatible for Black women.64 For Hudson-Weems, this troubling history cannot be easily dismissed.
From the 1880s forward, the movement shifted to a radically conservative posture. White women initially emphasized the equality of all felt that women’s right to vote could be used to aid their husbands in preserving the virtues of the Republic from the threat of unqualified and biological inferiors who, with the power of the vote, could gain a political foothold in the American system.65 Furthermore, these same women used their influence to deny Black women the right to vote, gain equitable treatment in the justice system, and disenfranchisement in the educational system. Even though Black women intellectuals have long expressed the ways in which race, class, and gender intersect Western feminisms were not concerned about Black women’s concerns.66
63. Clenora Hudson Weems, “Africana Womanism” in The Womanist Reader, ed. Layli Phillips (New York: Routledge, 2006), 46.
64. Ibid., 20.
65. Ibid., 46.
66. Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 5.
82 White feminist’s attempts to gain equality with their male counterparts continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The second wave or the women’s liberation movement emerged from the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements of the 1960s. White women learned much of their activist knowledge from working alongside African-
Americans; yet, when it came time to include the Black experience within the discussion of women’s liberation, many white women of the second wave were conspicuously silent.
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is an apt example. This classic feminist text is often credited with launching the second wave of feminism. In it Friedan attempts to help women name “the problem that has no name,” a problem faced by white middle-class housewives whose identities were confined to their roles as mothers and wives.
That the core of the problem for women is not sexual but a problem of identity – a stunting or evasion of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine mystique. It is her thesis that the Victorian culture did not permit women to accept of gratify their basic sexual needs, our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities and human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role. 67
As a result, these women forsook career and educational aspiration in exchange for the
American dream–a home in the suburbs, a successful husband, and thriving children. The
Feminine Mystique is also a classic for its exclusion of other women’s life experiences.
The feminist theory that it espoused focused on women who were trapped in restricted capacities by traditional male and female roles and institutional gender discrimination.
However, Friedan failed to critique the trappings of white privilege and class privilege. bell hooks argues that feminism in the United States never emerged from the women who
67. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 77.
83 are most victimized by sexist oppression, women who are daily beaten down mentally, physically, and spiritually—women who are powerless to change the condition of their life.68 This is why Hudson-Weems cannot understand why Black women can identify with feminism. For her, adding the word “Black” to it does not separate it from its problematic ideological and theoretical roots.
Mainstream and some forms of academic feminism remain trapped in limited conceptualizations of gender discrimination and feminism. For many white women, feminism is only about sharing power with white men, working outside of the home, or dismantling sexist stereotypes and images of (white) women in popular culture.
The feminism inherited from Stanton, Anthony, and Friedan struggles to critique what it really means to be a middle-class white woman and how their various degrees of privilege work against women of color. hooks argues that in their eagerness to point out sexism and gain power, feminists have worked against their own goals by perceiving males as the enemy. Some feminists argued for separating themselves from men altogether. This kind of antagonism seemed to counter the notion of liberation within the
Black community that understood that racist and sexist domination had to be fought simultaneously. Moreover, the voices and concerns of poor, non-white, and exploited women were ignored as the movement forged ahead. hooks argues that women need to know that they can reject the definition of their reality by the powerful class—that they can do so even if they are poor, exploited or trapped in oppressive circumstances. They
68. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 2000), 1.
84 need to know that their exercise of this basic personal power is an act of resistance and strength.69
As a response to mainstream feminism and the emergent academic version of it that privileged white women, African-American women began to describe their experiences not only through sexism but also through racism and class oppression. It is important to note, however, that African-American women have been fighting and writing against racism and sexism since the nineteenth century, although their voices are usually muted in the discussions of feminist foremothers.
Black women’s voices raised in protest of their treatment has often been misread and misinterpreted as problematic rather than a demand for respect. The term ratchetness did not exist as a way to classify the ways that Black women spoke back to powerful and oppressive structures. Instead, Black women and their resistance was mislabeled in racist terms such as aggressive, emasculating, ghetto, and deviant. Black women who created self-defined standpoints about themselves employed strategies of empowerment.
Resisting by doing something that is not expected could not have occurred without Black women’s long-standing rejection of mammies, matriarchs, and other controlling images.70
Black women’s critiques of sexism and patriarchy is ratchet because it pushes back against respectability politics, the ways that Black women are expected to perform femininity, and how Black womanhood was externally defined. Additionally, Black
69. Ibid., 94.
70. Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 98.
85 women’s ratchet resistance challenges the systems that continue to marginalize those who are not white, male, and heterosexual.
Black feminism eventually had to evolve to combat Black women’s invisibility, their refusal to comply with patriarchy, and the silencing of their experiences. Women like Sojourner Truth, Maria W. Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper and others called for a re- examination of what it means to be a woman, specifically a Black woman, living in
America. In 1883, Maria Stewart challenged Black women to reject the prominent negative images of Black womanhood and pointing out that race, gender, and class oppression were the fundamental causes of Black women’s poverty.71 She urged Black women to define who they are because this was essential for their survival. Given their roles as mothers they have the ability to cultivate their children’s minds to desire education that would lead to activism. Furthermore, according to Hill-Collins, Black women can work together with one another to provide a community for their activism and self-determination.72
Because feminism failed to address the problems of race, class, and gender that negatively impacted the lives of Black women, it was seen as incompatible with Black women’s lived experiences. While feminism stimulated the spirit of resistance among white women and focused on gender justice, it failed to address additional factors that led to the suppression of all women’s rights; specifically, it ignored the intersection of race, class, and sex on the lives of Black women. Once privileged white women began to gain
71. Ibid., 1.
72. Ibid., 2.
86 economic power, social, and political mobility within the existing patriarchal and sexist system, they contributed to the subordination of working class and poor women.
Unfortunately, these working class and poor women were overwhelmingly Black and they were fighting against sexual and racial marginalization in liberation movements.
In 1973, a group of Black women organized the National Black Feminist
Organization. As a result, Black feminism arose as a theory created by Black women and for Black women. Black feminism emerged out of resistance to the exclusion of race issues from the modern women’s movement. The architects of Black feminism sought to design a feminism that would speak to the experiences of Black women. The foundation of this theory was the result of a personal and political awareness of how race, class, and gender work together as tridimensional oppressors. Black feminism created a space for
Black women to express their concerns in surroundings that validated their claims. Black feminist thought addressed issues that have been excluded from within the feminist movement and links them to their personal experience of being a Black female in
America. For example, Toni Morrison explained in “What the Black Woman Thinks of
Women’s Lib”:
What do Black women think of Women’s Lib? Distrust. It is white, therefore, suspect. In spite of the fact that liberating movements in the Black world have been catalysts for white feminism, too many movements and organizations have made deliberate overtures to enroll Black ad have ended up by rolling over them.73
73. Toni Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks of Women’s Lib,” in Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary of American Feminism, Volume III, 1.960-Present (Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 72.
87 The Combahee River Collective was instrumental in working on issues that were of a central concern to Black women. The Combahee River Collective was a Boston-based
Black feminist organization that whose stated purpose is to be actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression. This group of Black women developed an integrated analysis and practice to guide Black feminists in combating the interlocking systems of oppression that determined the conditions of Black women’s lives.74 Specific issues revolved around health care, violence against women, lesbian and gay rights, reproductive rights and sterilization. Their work represented the issues pervasive in the Black community and it reflected the extensiveness of oppression in their lives. The women who were a part of this collective no longer wanted to trade their silence for the opportunity to engage in political action and resistance. Black women and their experiences are often left out of analysis of either gender oppression or racism.
Gender analysis often focused on the narratives of white women and racist oppression focused on stories of Black men. The Combahee River Collective addressed the invisibility of Black women’s concerns by analyzing its impact on their lives.
hooks’ critique of this Feminine Mystique is that Friedan identified the “problem that has no name” as the dissatisfaction that women had about being confined and subordinated as housewives. For hooks this was only a crisis for a small group of well educated, middle class white women. She further maintains that:
These women were housewives not because sexism would have prevented them from being in the paid labor force, but because they had willingly embraced the notion that it was better to be a housewife than to be a
74. Barbara Smith, All the Women are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us are Brave, eds. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith, (New York: The Feminist Press, 1993), 272.
88 worker. In such discussions, it was the middle-class housewife who was depicted as the victim of sexist oppression and not the poor Black and non-Black women who are most exploited by American economics.75
Black feminism served as a significant form of resistance that consistently rallied against the tridimensional oppression of race, sex and class. Black women sought to focus on factors that contributed to their oppression in order to develop ways to liberate themselves from political and economic systems such as patriarchy and capitalism that works to silence them. For Black women, answering the question of “who am I” means walking down a difficult road that is filled with wounds that have resulted from their history in America. At the end of this road, Black women can arrive at a new definition that sheds the negative historical images and speaks to their new reality. Self-definition as an act of resistance is critically important for Black women. Evidence of this resistance can be found in Sojourner Truth’s speech, And Ain’t I A Woman, given at the 1851
Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. Her speech contrasted the nature of oppression between white and Black women. White women were treated as people who needed protection while Black women were subject to abuse based on their race. Truth’s speech began to unpack the notions that contributed to the cult of true womanhood as well as the racism and misogyny that constructed it. Black women continue to struggle with the issue of self-identification while resisting the lager culture’s racist and sexist stereotypes about them over 150 years after Truth’s speech.
For Black women who were unable to identify with the white feminist or Black feminist movement and who desired a redefinition of themselves and their cause,
75. bell hooks, Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 146.
89 womanism emerged as an alternative theory and movement. For many Black women, the feminist movement continues to co-opt Black women’s bodies and ideas and refuses to dismantle the racism and patriarchy within the feminist movement because it serves the needs of white women. Black feminism continues to evolve to represent Black women from various walks of life. Cooper embraces a ratchet feminism that dismisses respectability politics and critiques sexism and racism in ways that embraces working class women. It is a Black feminism that is unapologetic about showing or containing its anger. However, a ratchet Black feminist scope lacks a distinctive focus on the centrality of community. The ability to see the connections between diverse groups and to work towards eliminating all forms of oppression and a spiritual focus are defining attributes of womanist thought.76 Womanism’s particular significance for this study is the importance and centrality of community, kinship, spirituality, are critical factors for the survival of the entire race.
The term womanist was created by author and theorist Alice Walker who defines womanism thusly:
1. From womanish. (Opp. of “girlish,” i.e. frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A Black feminist or feminist of color. From the Black folk expression of other to female children, “You acting womanish,” i.e. like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered “good” for one. Interested in grown-up doings. Acting grown up. Being gown up. Interchangeable with another Black folk expression:” You trying to be grown.” Responsible. In charge. Serious. 2. Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or non-sexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotionally
76. Joanne Banks Wallace, “Womanist Ways of Knowing: Theoretical Considerations for Research with African American Women,” Advances in Nursing Science, Vol. 22 No. 3 (March 2000): 316.
90 flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter), and women’s strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually ad/or non-sexually. Committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically for health. Traditionally, universalist, as in: “Mama, why are we brown, pink, and yellow, and our cousins are white, beige, and Black?” And:” Well, you know colored race is just like a flower garden, with every color flower represented.” Traditionally capable, as in: “Mama, I’m walking to Canada and I’m taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.” Reply: “It wouldn’t be the first time.” 3. Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless. 4. Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.77
Womanism is interested in the real lives of Black women. It is a lens that examines the underlying power dynamics that lead to Black women being perceived as object rather than subject in a white patriarchal culture. Professor Emerita of Systematic Theology at
Georgetown University, Diana L. Hayes argues that womanism helps to provide the framework for Black women to name and affirm themselves as women of African descent who have been denied their rightful place in the history of humanity.78
The framework of womanism is very much relevant to the present study. It provides a space for Black women who are unwilling or unable to identify with either white feminism or Black feminism. It is pro-woman and has strong roots in Black women’s culture.79 Hayes contends that Walker’s womanist definition is a woman who is
77. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose, (San Francisco: Harcourt Brace, 1983), xi-xii.
78. Diana L. Hayes, Standing in the Shoes My Mother Made; A Womanist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), 3.
79. Layli Phillips, The Womanist Idea (New York: Routledge, 2012), 17.
91 grown-up, daring, responsible, and self-reliant.80 Moreover, a womanist is someone who seeks to survive in a masculine and patriarchal world that misrecognizes or ignores women of color and their experiences. As other scholars concur, womanism recognizes
Black women’s voices and validates their experiences. It forces the hearer of women’s stories to get to know them, aid in reducing the “us and them” binaries,81 and work towards a more universalist concept of humanity that rejects the cold language of sterility, negativity, separation, subordination, and alienation.82
Stacey Floyd-Thomas, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair in Ethics and
Society at Vanderbilt University, asserts that a womanist is a Black woman who is committed to defying the compounded forces of oppression (namely, racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism) that threatens her self-actualization as well as the survival of her community.83 Floyd-Thomas adds to Walker’s definition by adding that womanism is:
A homegrown discourse deeply rooted in the concerns and realities of women of African descent. To be a womanist, in turn, is to be a “Blackwoman” – one among the dispossessed, no matter whose house one may work or visit. In particular womanism is concerned with the theoretical insights and identity politics concerning the life and work of Black women to facilitate liberationist scholarship and anti-oppressive social praxis. Womanist knowledge grants epistemological privilege to the lived everyday realities of Black women and the difficult, often marginated, issues they confront.84
80. Hayes, Standing in the Shoes, 5.
81. Ibid., 10.
82. Ibid.
83. Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Society and Religion, ed. Stacy Floyd-Thomas (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 4.
84. Ibid., 6.
92 For Floyd-Thomas, beyond questioning Black women’s rightful place in society, womanist thought affirms Black women’s voices in all spheres of life. Moreover, it investigates the impact of various cultural forces on the construction or deconstruction of
Black womanhood. Womanism allows Black women space for dialogue and an opportunity to name themselves and their movement. It speaks in terms rooted in the culture of Black women including the specific history of racial and gender oppression.
Womanism affirms the voices and gifts of Black women and is an option for those concerned about impact of social oppression and politics. Womanist thought consciously engages the negativity and dehumanization imposed on Black women. Additionally, womanism recognizes the intersection and interdependence of male and female, race and sex, community and family, Black and female. Womanist thought encourages Black women to take seriously their experiences as “data” for their relationships with themselves, the Black community, and the larger society. This is authentic knowledge that challenges the discourses of oppressing power and sustains and empowers Black people, especially Black women in their daily struggles.85
Melissa Harris-Perry, the Maya Angelou Presidential Chair at Wake Forest
University, has argued for a womanist rubric in examining the lives of everyday Black women. In her text, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, she discusses how womanist theologians have fought to highlight the narratives of
85. Kelly Brown Douglas, “Twenty Years a Womanist: An Affirming Challenge,” in Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Society and Religion, ed. Stacy Floyd-Thomas (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 148.
93 survival and triumph, often building on the legacy of extraordinary Black women whose faith commitments led to courageous acts of resistance.
While these stories are important they encourage a false belief that Black women always face adversity with strength and that their strength is always victorious. But for every Harriet Tubman there are hundreds of thousands who were never able to speak publicly about their experiences. For every Black woman who remains an independent moral agent in the face of crushing oppression, there are many who in fact, are crushed. The efforts of womanist scholars to create space within Black liberationist theology for Black women’s experiences and concerns are emblematic of how ordinary Black women have had to struggle for voice, opportunity, leadership within Black religious communities. Far too frequently, the ideas, beliefs, concerns, and viewpoints, Black men are assumed to represent the entire race.86
Womanism works as an agentive practice for Black women because it opposes oppression for those who find themselves on the underside of white, heterosexual, patriarchal domination. Womanists are moved to act beyond paradigms of race and gender. They are committed to advancing the dignity of all people.
In her article, What’s in a Name: Womanism, Black Feminism and Beyond, Hill-
Collins asserts that Walker’s multiple definitions of womanism sheds some light on why many African-American women choose the term womanism over Black feminism. For
Hill-Collins, Walker undoubtedly sees womanism as rooted in Black women’s distinct history in racial and gender oppression. By her use of the Black folk expression of mothers to female children, “you acting womanish,” Walker suggests that Black women’s concrete history fosters a womanist worldview accessible primarily and perhaps
86. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen, 230-231.
94 exclusively to Black women.87 Moreover, by her use of the Black folk tradition, Walker elevates the experiences of Black women alongside those of white women. Specifically, with her much-cited phrase, “womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender,” Walker clearly seems designed to set up this type of comparison–Black women are “womanist” while white women remain “feminist.”88
Womanism’s global focus and advocacy for justice and inclusion of communities who have fallen under the tyranny of oppression are among the reasons why many Black women identify themselves as womanists. Kelly Brown-Douglas, Dean of the Episcopal
Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary, asserts that womanism embraces Black women’s resistance to the multidimensional oppression based on being Black and female in the United States without the privileges afforded to white women.89 While feminism had traditionally focused on the social, political and economic equality of the sexes, womanism has excelled where feminism has failed in addressing the multidimensional factors that contribute to the oppression of Black women.
Layli Phillips-Maparyan, professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College, believes that womanists embrace five overarching characteristics: antioppressionist, vernacular, being nonideological, commonweal, and spiritual.90 The first characteristic is
87. Patricia Hill-Collins, “What’s in a Name?: Womanism, Black Feminism and Beyond.” The Black Scholar, Winter/Spring (1996):9.
88. Ibid.
89. Kelly Brown Douglas, “God is as Christ Does: Toward a Womanist Theology,” Journal of Religious Thought 46:1 (1989): 7-17. Kelly Brown Douglas, The Black Christ (Maryknoll: Orbis Books 1994), 104-116.
90. Layli Phillips, The Womanist Reader (New York: Routledge, 1996), xxiv.
95 that womanists are anti-oppressionist.91 Womanists seek to dismantle subjugation in all forms and fight for liberation. Womanists recognize that people and communities cannot be empowered as long as they exist and function under the tyranny of oppression. The second characteristic is that womanists identify with ordinary people. The language of womanism, its vernacular, reflects that of the folk and identifies with the masses of humanity. Womanism is non-ideological, and it relies on dialogue to establish relationships and connections in order to resolve conflicts. Womanists work to be inclusive and build positive relationships. Commonweal, which also means community well-being, is the fourth goal of womanist thinkers. Womanism emphasizes the importance of the health and healing of Black women, Black communities, and other marginalized identities. There is a connection between all living beings and the role that women of color play in reconciling relationships between people, the environment, and the spiritual realm. This is what makes womanism unique. The final characteristic of womanism for Phillips is its theory of spirituality. Womanism recognizes a spiritual realm that connects all livingkind with the transcendental.92 It proposes spirituality as a means of healing and promoting community through accessing the divine realm. Phillips maintains that womanists desire to make life better for everyone. Womanism circulates in the real world in ways that functions for women inside and outside of the academy, and it transforms everyday settings and the political consciousness of everyday people in line with a particular vision of human well-being, social justice, and commonweal.93
92. Phillips, The Womanist Reader, xxiv.
93. Phillips, Womanist Ideal, 32.
96 Beyond questioning Black women’s rightful place in society, womanist thought affirms Black women’s voices in all spheres of life. Moreover, womanism investigates the impact of various cultural forces on the construction or deconstruction of Black womanhood. Womanism allows Black women space for dialogue, an opportunity to name themselves and their own movement. Womanism speaks in terms rooted in the culture of Black women including the specific history of racial and gender oppression.
Womanism affirms the voices and contributions of Black women. It has positioned itself as a serious option for those concerned about the impact of oppression and politics.
Womanist thought provides a rubric for discovering the cultural resources within the Black community in a way that helps the community as a whole overcome subordination. In this way, womanist thought reclaims individual and communal histories, narratives, and ratchet resistance. This form of resistance works to demolish hierarchies between people. Walker’s womanism allows room for the varied ways Black women exist and fight back against oppression. Any pro-Black woman movement must include the everyday folks in order for it to be inclusive. This includes Black women who are ratchet. Womanism disregards ideas on respectability because there is an assumption that everyone deserves respect and is respectable. These critical perspectives shed light on the failure of the Black church to proclaim explicitly the liberation of Black women.94
Black female theologians began to reflect critically on Black women’s experiences and that are human beings created in God’s image. Womanist theologians have related to
Walker’s definition of womanism, expanded it, and have not been confined to her
94. Jacqueline Grant, “Black Theology and the Black Woman,” in The Black Studies Reader, eds. Jacqueline Bobo, Cynthia Hudley, and Claudine Michel (New York: Routledge, 2004), 427.
97 parameters.95 Their scholarship gives voice to Black women’s traditions as a source of
God-talk on the Black experience.
Womanist theology emerged as a response to the racism of feminist theology and the sexism of Black liberation theology. Linda E. Thomas asserts that womanist theology unearths ethnographic sources within the Black community in order to reconstruct knowledge and overcome subordination.96 Womanist scholars take Black women’s lived experiences as their primary source; they identify Black women’s narratives, such as their fiction, poetry, and personal narratives, to examine the revelation of God in the lives of
Black women. They read and interpret the bible in light of the experiences of Black women and locate their stories inside of the text. Womanist theology emphasizes that
God, revealed through Jesus Christ, is present with people who are suffering under the tyranny of racist, sexist, and classist domination. More importantly, the resurrection of the Jesus Christ brings with it the promise of liberation from oppression. Jesus Christ thus represents a three-fold significance: first, he identifies with the “little people” like Black women where they are; second, he affirms the basic humanity of the “little people;” and third, Jesus Christ inspires an activist hope in the struggle for resurrected liberated existence.97
95. Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, “Womanist Theology As a Corrective to African American Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of African American Theology, eds. Katie Cannon and Anthony Pinn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 268.
96. Linda E. Thomas, “Womanist Theology, Epistemology, and a New Anthropological Paradigm,” Cross Currents 48, no 4 (Summer 1998): 489.
97. Grant, White Women’s Christ, 217.
98 Womanist theologians view Jesus as an equalizing presence in the biblical text.
This is a powerful stance for womanist theologians; they identify Jesus Christ in the midst of Black women, affirming and understanding their suffering means that he identifies with their experiences and realities. Jesus Christ’s suffering can be found among those Black women with his final, public act suffering on the cross. Similarly, visibility of Black women’s suffering remains constant in their lives as they continue to endure race, class, and gender discrimination as well as persistent acts of dehumanization from the larger culture. As they embrace Jesus Christ as liberator and resistor to hegemonic empires, Black women are emboldened to embrace the message of liberation and hope contained in the gospel message. Womanist theology works to weave the past, present, and future to create a multivocal dynamic tapestry of Black women’s experiences intergenerationally.98
Womanism has become an interdisciplinary influence in several academic fields.
However, it has not gone without criticism. Clenora Hudson-Weems, Professor of
English at the University of Missouri, argues that womanism, like feminism and Black feminism, continues to privilege gender over race while key issues for people of African descent begin as racism, with classism intertwined.99 One of the latest contributions to womanist thought emerges from Hudson-Weems. Mary Modupe Kolawole, Professor of
African Literature and Culture at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile Ife Nigeria, asserts that Hudson-Weems’ scholarship comes as a relief to many African women who are not
98. Thomas, Womanist Theology, 491.
99. Clenora Hudson-Weems, Africana Womanist Literary Theory. (Troy: African World Press, 2004), 30.
99 at ease with feminism in its diverse shades of definition.100 She appreciates Hudson
Weems’ focus on the need for self-naming. For Hudson-Weems and Kolawole, the
Africana woman must identify, assess, and properly name herself and her movement. In this way, she is better able to concentrate her efforts on fighting racism, classism and sexism.
Africana womanism is a term coined by Hudson-Weems after several years of publicly debating the importance of self-naming for Africana women. She concluded that the term Black womanism was not quite the terminology to capture the total meaning she desired for a new concept.101 Hudson Weems chose the term Africana Womanism for two specific reasons. Africana identifies the ethnicity of the woman being considered and this reference to her ethnicity, establishing her cultural identity, relates directly to her ancestry and land base of Africa. Womanism recalls Sojourner Truth’s powerful impromptu speech, “And Ain’t I A Woman,” one in which she battles with the dominant alienating forces in her life as a struggling Africana woman, questioning the accepted idea of womanhood.102
Africana womanism is an ideology designed for all women of African descent. It is grounded in African culture and focuses on the unique experiences, struggles, needs and desires of Africana women. Africana womanism critically addresses the dynamics of the conflict between the mainstream feminist, the Black feminist, the Africana feminist,
100. Mary Modupe Kolawole, Womanism in African Consciousness (Trenton: African World Press, Inc., 1997), 24.
101. Hudson-Weems, Literary Theory, 47.
102. Ibid.
100 and the Africana womanist. 103 In the struggle against oppression, the Africana woman and man realize that they must join together against the forces that oppress Black women, men and children. Hudson-Weems argues that since Black women have never been the property of Black men in the same ways that white women have, they cannot sign onto the feminist agenda. For her this is an intrafamily fight between white women and men regarding patriarchy excludes Black people. In this way, Africana Womanism separates itself from feminism, Black feminism, and Walker’s definition of womanism. Inasmuch as Africana Womanism seeks to unite people of African descent under a unifying theory, there are certain communities that are not welcome within this system.
Africana Womanism leaves out certain segments of the African-American community, for example the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer communities, as well as Black women who may not want to be married. Hudson-Weems assumes that all
Black women want male partnership and children. When certain segments of the community are excluded their voices are left out of important conversations regarding race, class, gender, and sexuality. This construct infers that certain individuals are valued and other are not; thus, Hudson-Weems creates an Africanized respectability politics.
This Africanized respectability politics utilizes African ideologies and cosmologies to decide who and what is beneficial for the survival of the community. Individuals and communities that utilize ratchet language and actions as valid acts of resistance would fall outside of the rubric set by an Africana Womanism.
Womanism is rooted in and concerned with the realities of life for Black women.
103. Clenora Hudson-Weems, Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves. (Troy: Bedford Publishing Company, 1993), 24.
101 It privileges the knowledge, expertise, and experiences of ordinary Black women and validates the difficult issues they face. Womanism calls on Black women to speak their truth, to resist subordination, and redefine themselves in ways that are affirming not limiting. Respectability politics called on Black women to embrace ways of being that did not garner the levels of respect they deserved. It is something Black people had to wear in order to enter into public spaces and be respected. Black women developed other strategies to maintain a sense of self in the midst of subjugation. Ratchetness provides a language and action for womanism to manifest itself in ways that provide Black women additional agency that looks and sounds familiar to them. As Black women have participated in freedom movements they have consistently developed ways to express their authentic selves that are unique to their experiences. Ratchet acts are in that same vain. Resistance to the multiple oppressions facing Black women takes creativity and ingenuity grounded in traditions that have sustained them for centuries.
CHAPTER III
MADEA’S RATCHET AND WOMANIST ACTS
The purpose of this chapter to is identify three acts by Madea that are ratchet and three acts are womanist in two films by Tyler Perry: Diary of a Mad Black Woman and
Madea’s Family Reunion. This chapter argues that Madea embraces ratchetness and womanism as liberatory frameworks that resists oppression, builds community, and engenders agentive capacities with women under her care.
Madea’s ratchet and womanist actions, are often misread as negative when in fact they are part of Black women’s every day agency and resistance tactics. Given the nature of Black women’s oppression, Madea’s over the top, excessive responses to the politics of disrespect are necessary to affirm the audacious, courageous forms of liberation that are accessible for Black women across socio-economic class. She resists the politics of respectability and the politics of exclusion it engenders and elevates voices and experiences of the marginalized.
Perry’s Madea is a mainstay character that his fans look forward to seeing in his films. As a popular culture icon, Madea as the truth-telling, no nonsense, wise old-school
102 103 grandmother who resonates with audiences. The over $150 million a year he earned prior to the launch of his film career is evidence of Madea’s relatability.1 However, critics and academicians assert that Madea is a sacred cultural figure within the African-American community that Perry misuses.
Oh No He Didn’t: Critiques of Perry and His Work
For many of Perry’s critics Madea’s actions are a problematic image of the Black grandmother, which is a figure that is held as sacrosanct within the Black community.
Perry’s misappropriation this particular image, resinscribes harmful and conservative narratives of Black womanhood. Cultural critics and academicians have focused on
Madea’s failures as a troubling resurrection of old, dying tropes of Black womanhood.
Specifically, those of Black women as loud, rude, and violent.
Professor Brittney Cooper, one of Perry’s critics, initially found Madea’s acerbic wit, combative posturing, and fiercely protective devotion to her family a welcoming narrative invoking thoughts of the women in her own life.2 However, she takes Perry to task and challenges his inhabiting Black women’s epistemic spaces, retelling their stories, and reinscribing patriarchal norms that are dangerous and unproductive. For Cooper,
Perry plows the depths of Black women’s cultural and religious knowledge, but he does not use his platform to cultivate a counternarrative to the patriarchy that harms Black
1. TreaAndrea M. Russworm, “Media Studies Has Ninety-Nine Problems…But Tyler Perry Ain’t One of Them?” in From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry eds. TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Samantha N. Sheppard, and Karen M. Bowdre (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), xv.
2. Brittney Cooper, “Talking Back and Taking My “Amens” with Me: Tyler Perry and the Narrative Colonization of Black Women’s Stories,” in Womanist and Black Feminist Reponses to Tyler Perry’s Productions (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 235.
104 women; rather, he delegitimizes their stories. In essence, he comes a narrative colonizer and a cultural batterer.3
In terms of Perry plowing the depths of Black women’s cultural knowledge, he is walking in familiar spaces. He is clear about the ways in which patriarchy abuses and subjugates bodies that lack power. Perry’s life and childhood experiences are the soundtrack to the scripts for his films. His storylines, while predictable, offer a glimpse into an aspect of Black life that is extremely problematic. It seems that his fans can identify with, and understand, what it means to be abused and lack the agency to shift your circumstances. Perry does not colonize these spaces, he lives there as well. 4 He is not telling someone else’s story, he is telling his own. The practice of addressing issues of pain and providing medicinal solutions are a vital component of his artistic energy as a means of self-therapy, as a professional tool in his own theatrical productions, and later in his film production.5 Perry works out his childhood pain on the stage and screen in ways that offers his fans pragmatic advice on how to negotiate their own hurts and trauma.
Perry’s embodiment of Madea serves as a space of resistance on several levels.
Her ratchet, over the top responses embrace and share Black women’s knowledge and makes it available to anyone who desires liberation from the confining restrictions of respectability and its dictates. In this way, there is a disclaiming of patriarchal notions of
3. Brittney Cooper, Tyler Perry Hates Black Women: Five Thoughts on The Haves and the Have Nots in The Crunk Feminist Collective, eds. Brittney C. Cooper, Susana M. Morris, and Robin M. Bylorn (New York: Feminist Press, 2017): 243.
4. Tyler Perry discusses the physical abuse he at the hands of his father and sexual abuse from four adults as a child. The Oprah Winfrey Show, http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/tyler-perry-speaks-out- about-being-molested-and-the-aftermath/all#.XCd2POWxoYw.email (Accessed September 11, 2018).
5. Shayne Lee, Tyler Perry’s America: Inside His Films (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2015), 3-4.
105 how Black personhood should appear. Madea’s actions claim a pedagogy that is rooted in an audacious womanist ideology of being committed to the liberation of all people against all forms of domination even if the instructor comes in the form of a six-foot grandmother with a penchant towards pistols. Perry’s characters address realities that resonate in the lives of his fans. Perry uses his art to join a necessary conversation about narratives of abuse that are often denied access to the public realm. Perry’s work attempts to inspire his fans to translate their struggles with abuse, racism, sexism, and the politics of exclusion into acts of resistance and truth-telling.
Author and cultural critic Touré accuses Perry of promoting a culture of that celebrates victimhood among Black women. In a 2011 CNN interview, Touré states that
Perry’s tells Black women that it is okay to be a victim and to wallow in the pain of your life.6 He refers to Perry’s work as cinematic malt liquor for the masses. In other words, he is an embarrassment to the race; however, Touré woefully misses the essence of Perry’s work.
First, there is the assumption that Perry’s fan base lacks the ability to discern what works for them in Perry’s films and that they need protection from the messaging on the screen. When Touré exposes his own class biases and patriarchal prejudices when he states that, “I understand why my grandmother, my mother, and my aunts love this stuff, and my family down south, they love this stuff. I just can’t watch without cringing because I’ve seen good movies and I know that these are poorly made films.”7 He
6. CNN, Buffoonery or Opportunity?. https://www.cnn.com/videos/showbiz/2011/09/20/nr-tyler- perry-pro-con.cnn (Accessed December 28, 2018).
7. Ibid.
106 instantaneously distances and, perhaps unintentionally, shames his maternal ancestry for their appreciation of Perry’s work. Furthermore, he dismisses the ways that poor and working-class Black folks voice their preferences by how they spend their money on entertainment. Journalists and scholars often insinuate that the millions of African-
Americans who enjoy Perry’s movies suffer from poor aesthetic judgment and are in need of intellectual or activist guides to introduce them to acceptable forms of Black representation.8 Touré’s comments classify Perry’s work as a form of low-brow entertainment. This engages in a politics of exclusion that decides which stories worth being told. The spaces where Perry’s fan enjoy his work serve as a retreat from the ideological policing and judgment of Black intellectual elites. The class and patriarchal biases espoused by Touré prove to be a far more problematic on the cultural landscape than the real characters upon which Perry’s characters are based.
Robert J. Patterson believes that Perry’s films and plays fail to address the structures that contribute to Black women’s oppression. In his article, Woman Thou Art
Bound, he argues that Perry operates in a patriarchy-affirmation-critique dyad. This means that Perry’s work struggles to critique patriarchy as a system and only identifies its most egregious manifestations such as physical abuse, sexual abuse and child molestation as problematic.9 Perry betrays his fan base by not addressing the problems inherent with heteronormativity and abuse thereby making Black women responsible for the violence they endure. Moreover, given Perry’s experience with childhood abuse, he fails to
8. Lee, Tyler Perry’s America, 10.
9. Robert J. Patterson, Woman Thou Art Bound: Critical Spectatorship, Black Masculine Gazes and Gender Problems in Tyler Perry Movies, Black Camera 3 no. 1. (Winter 2011):11.
107 acknowledge the ways that the nuclear family operates as a site of oppression for Black women and children.10 In many ways Patterson is correct that in that Perry only acknowledges the most extreme forms of violence and fails to recognize its subtler manifestations.
In Madea’s Big Happy Family, Madea is the central figure in an extended family.
This becomes most apparent in the marriage between Tammy and Harold. Tammy constantly berates Harold and he is the sex starved, hen pecked husband. At a family dinner Madea offers counsel to Tammy and Harold about their marriage. She tells
Tammy to stop speaking disrespectfully to her husband. She reminds Tammy about how much she loved and could not wait to be with him. Madea tells them to go into the kitchen to talk and as Harold leaves Madea tells him to “be a man.” As Harold bangs on the kitchen counter and speaks forcefully to Tammy he looks back to Madea for confirmation on how he asserts his patriarchal privilege. Although Tammy apologizes for the way she treated him, he follows up by telling her to go “sit her ass down. Sit.”
Harold asserts his patriarchal privilege by bullying and intimidating his wife into submission. Being a man means asserting your control and dominance over your household. Given Perry’s childhood trauma, this seems to be a disservice to his own history and to that of other survivors. The violence is subtle; however, it places blame on
Tammy for the violent response she receives. What is even more difficult is Madea as the instigator of the response. This is a space where Madea’s actions lean towards trifling.
Her advice does not produce liberation for anyone; rather it reinforces patriarchy and the
10. Ibid., 14.
108 violence it engenders. What complicates this scene even more is that Tammy is portrayed as the stereotypical “angry bitch” and, as such, she deserves the treatment she receives from Harold. Advancing this stereotype about Black women subverts the power of her voice to change and call attention to problematic circumstances.
As Perry’s main character, Madea serves as the conduit through which terrifying questions about and narrative about incest, addiction, and domestic violence surface and are addressed. Perry navigates spaces that many filmmakers have not been willing to address. As an adult survivor of physical and sexual abuse, Perry’s narratives broach difficult subjects. Perry’s fans can identify with his narratives about hardship and healing through popular kinds of narratives about working class communities that rarely have happy endings.11 To some extent Perry inhabits those spaces. These are his stories to tell as well.
Madea’s Ratchet and Womanist Liberative Power
Madea’s ratchet and womanist acts work to craft and reformulate an identity that empowers Black women. Her acts demonstrate the ways that Black women can fight back, talk back, and reclaim their identity in a society that demands their silence and complicity in their oppression. A shift in semantics points to the accuracy of Madea’s presentation as her loud is read intense, her rude is read straightforward, and her violence is read survivalist. Her strengths have been misread as weaknesses like those of many
Black women. By labeling Black women’s strengths as weaknesses they are rendered as
11. Rachel Jessica Daniel, “Who I Am Is Conflicting With This Dress I Got On: Madea’s Intimate Public and the Possibilities and Limitations of False Disguise,” in From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry eds. TreaAndrea Russworm, Samantha N. Sheppard, and Karen M. Bowdre (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2016), 124.
109 unfeminine and too strong, which works to undercut the positive role of their assertiveness.12 Categorizing Black women as matriarchs seeks to regulate their behavior and attitudes to make them more in line with white women’s gendered identities13 instead of embracing their self-defined identities. Additionally, by reading Black women’s strengths as negative, they continue to be read as problematic, dangerous, and in need of being controlled. By controlling the nomenclature that the larger culture utilizes to oppress them, Black women work to unpack and deconstruct harmful narratives and move toward more empowering language. Womanism provides one such framework.
Womanism is situated in the resistance of ordinary Black women. Alice Walker’s definition of womanism provides a new way of talking not only about women’s relationships with one another but also about their struggle against oppression, their fight for social change, and for the full recognition of their humanity. Walker’s womanism is rooted in Black women’s and other women of color’s daily experiences and methods of problem-solving in everyday spaces.14 Womanism recognizes the audacious, outrageous, courageous, and willful ways that Black women resist dehumanization, oppression, deprivation. Black women’s historical legacy of economic deprivation and their genius of
“making a way out of no way” that contributed to their survival wisdom.15 This is one of the ways Black women construct knowledge outside of traditional methods. They
12. Patricia Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, (New York: Routledge, 2000), 76-77.
13. Ibid.
14. Layli Phillips, The Womanist Reader, (New York: Routledge, 2006), xx.
15. Ibid., xl.
110 deemed themselves as capable generators and interpreters of knowledge based on their own experiences and interactions with the larger culture. It is from the margins that Black women construct a counternarrative that validates their existence and humanity. The subsequent actions they take to affirm this knowledge and gain their liberation creates sites for them to enact their freedom in tangible ways. The goal of womanist thought includes stimulating resistance and empowering African-American women and others to actualize a humanistic vision of society.16 Ratchetness is a space to actualize that vision.
Ratchetness is the space for Black women to claim their voices and survival methods. Cooper defines ratchet as acts that exceeds the limits of what are considered acceptable or doing the most.17 For Cooper, ratchet is an avenue for Black women to cultivate ways of survival that break away from respectability politics. From her perspective, the respectability project has failed Black women in its current context. The politics of respectability is firmly entrenched in white approval and this has not worked for Black people. Revealing deep-seated issues would impede the community’s ability to fully integrate in American society and culture. Dawkins and Ryder contend that the
Black working-class took a different view regarding respectability than their Black middle-class counterparts. They understood that by refusing to discuss serious issues facing the Black community such as child sexual abuse and domestic violence, its victims
16. JoAnn Banks Wallace, “Womanist Ways of Knowing: Theoretical Considerations for Research with African American Women,” in The Womanist Reader ed. Layli Phillips (New York: Routledge, 2006), 317.
17. Brittney Cooper, “(Un)clutching My Pearls, or Ratchetness and the Residue of Respectability,” in The Crunk Feminist Collective, eds. Brittney C. Cooper, Susana M. Morris, and Robin M. Bylorn (New York: Feminist Press, 2017): 204.
111 were harassed into a perpetual silencing in order to portray the most positive image to a white public audience.18
Afro-Latina rapper Cardi B became a stripper earlier in her life in order to escape a physically abusive relationship. She could have taken a job paying minimum wage but that would not have provided her with the financial means to escape. She used the resource at her disposal, her body, to build the financial resources she needed to remove herself from harm. Her use of her body could be seen as reinforcing the Jezebel trope.19
However, ratchet acts are not concerned with respectability politics; rather, it is about how the individual act will contribute to one’s own uplift. Womanism also recognizes that self-care is just as important as taking care of others. In a sense, her actions allow
Cardi B to articulate herself against the structure that silence her in particular20 and demonstrate agency in how she changed her life circumstances without regard to respectability.
As Brittney McEachern conveys in her article, Respect My Ratchet, Cardi B did not do the respectable thing by getting minimum-wage job. In sharing her story, Cardi B applied ratchetness to demolish the box that confines strippers and used her unforgettable personality to sell merchandise, release music, and become a social media expert. Cardi B is able to reconfigure herself and reframe her life. Moreover, she exemplifies ratchet as
18. Marcia A. Dawkins and Ulli K. Ryder, “Passing as a Womanist: a Look at Black Women’s Narratives in Tyler Perry’s Films,” in Interpreting Tyler Perry: Perspectives on Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality eds. Jamel S. Cruze Bell and Ronald L. Jackson II (New York: Routledge, 2014), 260.
19. Theri A. Pickens, Shoving Aside the Politics of Respectability: Black Women, Reality TV, and the Ratchet Performance, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 25, vol. 1 (March 2015): 47.
20. Ibid.
112 liberatory device for Black girls and women through her Instagram posts. She is making political statements that refute attempts to silence the political voice of Black women.21
Cardi B and other Black women who engage in ratchet acts and behaviors remind us that is necessary for every kind of Black woman to be represented in a collective fight for liberation.
Ratchetness presents the potential for Black women to reclaim their humanity from oppressive, stereotypical, and externally defined images. It is a response to being disrespected, ignored, and silenced. The ability to define and validate oneself replaces the idea of one being the object to becoming the subject. As the subject, Black women become intimately involved in the process of defining self and community, and they determine what the content of those definitions. Distorted definitions and images are dismantled and rebuilt with more accurate renderings of the self. This form of Black female power can be seen as most threatening because it challenges white patriarchal notions of femininity, familial power relations, and Black female behavior.22 Self- definition and self-valuation are necessary tools for Black women’s survival and for dismantling the interlocking racist, classist, and sexist oppression they confront.
For Madea, it only takes one act of disrespect or injustice for her to respond with retribution. Her actions reject male dominance, strike back against bullies, and frees
Black women from the limitations of the politics of respectability. By reimagining
Madea’s over the top response to abuse as a heightened sense of agency, her ratchet
21. Brittney McEachern, “Respect My Ratchet: The Liberatory Consciousness of Ratchetness,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 6, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 81.
22. Patricia Hill-Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Social Problems 33, no. 6 (October – December 1986): s17.
113 actions can be reimagined as a source of strength that Black women can model and access regardless of class. In her first film Diary of a Mad Black Woman and in her second, Madea’s Family Reunion, Madea demonstrates how her ratchet acts provide an interstitial space for other women to get ratchet and free themselves. Her ratchet approach to problem-solving demonstrates her ability to claim her agency and inspires others to do the same. In each film three scenes are analyzed for Madea’s ratchet and womanist acts.
Diary of a Mad Black Woman Film Summary
Diary of A Mad Black Woman takes place in Atlanta, Georgia, where the character Helen McCarter discovers that her lawyer husband, Charles McCarter, of eighteen years has not only had an affair, but he has had two children outside of their marriage. He has come home to tell Helen that their marriage is over. In addition to announcing the end of the marriage, Helen is unceremoniously thrown out of their mansion. Charles hires a moving van and a mover to take Helen where ever she wants to go. Charles leaves Helen homeless, without access to their money or the resources to care for herself.
Helen arrives at her grandmother Madea’s home with her belongings. Madea initially questions Helen’s presence at her home and reminds her that she lives in a mansion on the other side of town. She asks why she is now in the “ghetto.” After determining that something other than Helen missing her grandmother, Madea let’s Helen move in. Helen’s conversations with Madea reveal that she has endured physical and emotional abuse. Madea’s witnesses this abuse when she takes Helen back to the mansion to claim her belongings and get some money that Charles has hidden away to take care of
114 herself. Madea displays her gun to demonstrate her vested interest in protecting her granddaughter from any further abuse from Charles.
As Helen begins to rebuild her life she learns that Charles’ client shot him in the courtroom and is left temporarily paralyzed. Charles’ new fiancée Brenda opts to have the doctors follow a “do not resuscitate” order in case things do not turn out well after surgery. However, Helen who is still legally his wife and she tells the doctors to do all they can to help him stay alive. Helen abandons her new relationship with Orlando, the mover, to take care of Charles. His continued verbal abuse triggers Helen’s sense of ratchet retributive justice. Eventually, Charles apologizes for his abusive actions and deceptive behavior. Helen forgives Charles, herself, and signs the final divorce papers at the family dinner. She returns to Orlando accepting his marriage proposal. At the conclusion of the film, Helen who arrived at Madea’s a broken woman is now ready to make choices and decisions for herself including deciding to marry Orlando. It seems that
Madea’s ratchet mentoring has helped Helen redefine herself in ways she did not think was possible.
Diary of A Mad Black Woman: Scene One – Rip It
In this scene Madea and Helen return to Helen’s former home. They go up to her old closet so Helen can gather anything that may have been left. The scene unfolds:
Madea: Lord have mercy. Get your stuff. What the hell wrong with you? These your clothes? Helen: They’re hers. Madea: Oh, they’re here hers? Who is uh, Dol-say and Gabanna? Who is that is? Helen: Dolce and Gabanna. They’re designers. Madea: Oh, she a label ho. Seven hundred. Seven hundred dollars for a
115 damn rag. This a rag. (rubs blouse on mirror) Helen: Madea, no, no, no. Don’t do that. Madea: This man left you for some old floozy. (sees wire hanger) Helen: Madea, what’s wrong? Madea: A wire hanger! (Madea goes mad) Rip it! Helen: Rip it? Madea: Rip it! Helen: No, no. Madea: Rip it! Helen: Rip it? Madea: Rip it! Helen: Rip it! (grunting) Madea: What the hell you doing? Rip it like this. Get mad at it. It’ll make you feel better. Rip it. Helen: Rip it! Madea: Rip Something. Helen: Rip it! Madea: Rip it! Helen: Rip it! Madea: Rip it real good. Rip it. Helen: Wait a minute. What’s this gonna solve? Madea: Nothing. Just gonna make you feel better. Rip it! Ha ha ha! Helen: Rip it.23
In this scene, Madea encourages Helen to get ratchet after helping her see that she was forcibly removed from her home and replaced by a “floozy.” Madea encourages Helen to destroy Brenda’s clothing in a ratchet act of retribution. While Madea is able to destroy a gown with one try, Helen cannot. Madea’s accessibility to her ratchetness is because of her desire to mete out justice and assert her will in any situation. Helen has not tapped into her ratchet possibilities and she has to rely on Madea’s ratchetness after being kicked out of her home.
Madea’s actions ask the viewer to reconsider how Black women perceive and understand what empowerment and resistance looks like on several levels. Ratchet acts
23. Diary of a Mad Black Woman, directed by Darren Grant. DVD (Lions Gate Films and The Tyler Perry Company, Inc., 2005).
116 reject the idea policing of Black women’s behaviors and bodies, and it makes room for the expression of their anger without judgment. These acts are deliberately inappropriate and the anger they convey are impossible to ignore. Bettina Love argues that while ratchet acts can be seen as all of the negative controlling images of Black women all rolled into one, it actually offers a pliable framework to challenge the respectability politics that shame Black women for their choices,24 and the ways that they choose to express themselves. By ripping the clothes of Charles’ fiancée, Madea defies patriarchy’s ability to displace and render women invisible. This is a radical, creative act of self- preservation and visibility.
Ensuring that her granddaughter’s protest to the treatment she received is heard is part of Madea’s womanist sensibility. Madea’s encouragement of audacious, outrageous, and willful behavior affirms a womanist commitment to ensuring that Helen becomes actively engaged in her own empowerment. Individual empowerment combined with collective action leads to transformation. Helen and Madea’s collective action against patriarchal domination, abuse, and economic disenfranchisement provides a template for healing. Madea’s own form of caring rests in the lineage of caring Black women who have an explicit focus on helping other women survive the degradations of physical, economic and political enslavement.25
24. Bettina Love, “A Ratchet Lens: Black Queer Youth, Agency, Hip Hop, and the Black Ratchet Imagination,” Educational Researcher 46, no.9 (December 2017): 540.
25. Tamara Beauboeuf-LaFontant, “A Womanist Experience of Caring: Understanding the Pedagogy of Exemplary Black Women Teachers,” in The Womanist Reader ed. Layli Phillips (New York: Routledge, 2006), 285.
117 Madea exhibits Black women’s ability to fight back. Madea asserting her ratchet, womanist will into the situation is a powerful lesson for Helen. She shows Helen that she can fight back, that her will does not have to be in concert with Charles’s will, and if the momentarily loses her mind in order to gain agentive power that it is not the end of the world.26 However, Madea’s actions are not without risk. Her actions are meant to be comedic, but they have very real consequences for Black women. Oftentimes there is a cost that comes with agency. For many Black women, this may mean embracing an ethic of risk.
An ethic of risk understands the consequences that come with struggling against injustice. In A Feminist Ethic of Risk, Sharon Welch argues that an ethic of risk is characterized by three elements each of which is essential to maintaining resistance in the face of overwhelming odds. These three elements are: a redefinition of responsible action, grounding in community, and strategic risk taking.27 Redefining responsible action means creating the condition for change that might look different from what may have been previously imagined. For Welch, this leaves space for others to develop their own strategies for resistance and this leads them to find their own power.28 Madea tearing the clothes in the closet reimagines what justice looks like when attempting to gain equity, even if it is temporary. It is not necessarily a path that someone else would take but it opens up the possibility for the creation of alternative paths toward resistance and personal power.
26. Lee, Tyler Perry’s America, 81.
27. Sharon D. Welch, A Feminist Ethic of Risk (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 46.
28. Ibid., 47.
118 As a part of the ethic of risk, Madea’s outrage and deep love for Helen moves her to action. Their engagement in ratchet acts are in response to an overwhelming loss suffered by Helen. The disintegration of her marriage yields a loss in economic security, social connections, her home, her dignity, and it is discovered that she had two miscarriages as a result of Charles’ infidelity. In the face of her overwhelming loss, Helen and Madea utilize ratchet acts as a way to celebrate a defiant survival in response to extreme cruelty. Madea’s extreme actions link her to the generations of Black women who have taken extraordinary actions in their efforts toward liberation.
Jacqueline Bobo and other scholars contend that Black women’s legacy of resistance formed a foundation for the oppositional stance that a number of Black women use to fight the insidious nature of repression that impacts many areas of their lives.29
Congresswoman Maxine Waters is well known her use of language as an oppositional stance to counter the racist, sexist, rhetoric and insults used by political pundits including
Donald Trump, the President of the United States. When he questioned her intellect,
Congresswoman Waters responded on Twitter by stating, “for a president whose own staff and appointees have referred to him as ignorant, stupid, and whose own Secretary of
State Tillerson has not denied calling him a moron, Trump needs to get out of the name calling game.”30 Congresswoman Waters’ response to the President stands in the tradition of Black women who will not be insulted, minimized, or silenced. Congresswoman
29. Jacqueline Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 136.
30. Clarissa Hamlin, “Auntie Maxine Claps Back Again! Trump Dragged for Saying She Needs An IQ Test” https://newsone.com/3778856/maxine-waters-trump-twitter-iq-test-gridiron-dinner-remarks/ Newsone.com March 4, 2018. (Accessed August 7, 2018).
119 Waters is backed by communities of Black women who will not allow her to be reduced to stereotypes. Being ratchet or offering a ratchet response does not make Black women unworthy of being heard. This is particularly important in spaces where Black women’s voices, bodies, and intellect have not always been welcomed.
Strategic risk taking is about acknowledging the willingness to risk physical harm and even death as sometimes necessary.31 Black women engaged in the civil rights struggle literally shed blood, sweat, and tears for liberation. Bernice McNair Barnett affirms the contributions of ordinary women, sisters in the struggle – sharecroppers, domestic servants, housewives, students, and office secretaries – that shed blood during the Civil Rights Movement out of a common desire for freedom from oppression.32
Moreover, Black women continue to take to the streets to protest police brutality and scream “Black women’s lives matter” to a world that shouts messages to the contrary.
These women use their voices and their bodies, understanding that the cost may be state- sanctioned violence committed against them. Madea demonstrates how to become an empowered subject and an agentive force. An ethic of risk reimagines responsible action within a matrix of actions that resists oppression.33
Helen and Madea’s attempt to gain equity may look like destruction for its own sake. However, what looks like destruction on one level can also be recognized as a way
31. Welch, A Feminist Ethic, 47.
32. Bernice McNair Barnett, “Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, Race, and Class,” Gender and Society 7, no. 2 (June 1993): 163.
33. Beauboeuf-LaFontant, A Womanist Experience of Caring, 285.
120 to maneuver through pain and intentionally subverting oppression without succumbing to feelings of dejectedness.34 This is about survival. Madea’s encouragement to “rip it” is her way of helping Helen work through the trauma she has just experienced. Ripping the dress is symbolic of Helen severing her ties to her former life with Charles’ life, respectability politics, and life as a disempowered woman. This instance of Madea’s ratchet mentoring provides Helen with some of the visibility she was denied in her marriage. She is making her presence known in a space where respectability and privilege render her invisible.
Ratchetness is part of a cultural tradition of freedom for Black women. It is a reminder of Black women’s ability to reinvent themselves. Despite misogynoir and the mythic lies about who Black women are, there is the shared experience of oppression as well as their appreciation for the fierce, fantastic, and magical that Black women navigate a terrain that does not leave room for them at the table.35 Ula Y. Taylor argues that Black women’s cultural traditions provide fertile ground for resistance to oppression because it encourages them to value love of self regardless of outsider perceptions.36 Ratchet behavior is the space to be free, to laugh out loud, and to act in way that allows women to bring their entire selves into a particular moment. Ratchet acts and behavior does not allow Black women to be silent about their trauma and refuses the invisibility of
34. McEachern, Respect My Ratchet, 79.
35. Brittney Cooper, Susana Morris, and Robin Bylorn, “Introduction Girls Studies: Black Girls are Magic,” in The Crunk Feminist Collective, eds. Brittney Cooper, Susana Morris, and Robin Bylorn (New York: The Feminist Press, 2017), 108-109.
36. Ula Y. Taylor, “Making Waves: The Theory and Practice of Black Feminism.” The Black Scholar 28, no2 (Summer 1998): 25.
121 situations that negatively impacts their lives. As Cooper richly suggests, ratchet behavior facilitates survival for Black women by breaking away from remixes of Black respectability politics. It presumes the right to talk back, to act defiantly, to recenter one’s own story and community, and take back one’s subjectivity. Madea embodies these characteristics of ratchetness. In the second scene, Madea’s ratchet actions continue as an example of subjective empowerment.
Diary of A Mad Black Woman: Scene Two - Please Hit Her
In this scene Madea rushes downstairs from the closet after hearing Helen and
Charles arguing.
Charles: Charles, what, now you asking me questions? You begging now? Madea: (busts in room brandishing gun) Oh please do it. Please hit her. Please. I want to see you do it. The hell wrong with you. Hit her you bastard. Put your hands on her! Brenda: Oh my god, don’t hurt him. Madea: Oh, I’m not gonna hurt him I’m gonna kill him puttin his hands on my granddaughter! Brenda: I’ll call the police. Charles: No, just get out! Madea: Yeah you call the police so they can see how you done hit her! Charles: Just get out!37
Madea, once again, shows the usefulness of ratchetness in action. She enters the room with her gun drawn, ready to confront and even kill Charles. She enters a space that is not about preserving Helen but is about further disenfranchising her economically and emotionally. Helen appears as a disempowered subject and Madea asserts her will as a powerful lesson about claiming agency and fighting back. Madea is meeting ratchet with ratchet. Patriarchy provides space for men to abuse and enact violence toward Black
37. Diary of A Mad Black Woman.
122 women. It is a ratchet system within itself. Embracing ratchet responses to ratchet institutions and ideologies is a way to center the agentive and creative heritage of Black women, affirm their humanity, and encourages self-determination, and finds organic ways to resist oppressive spaces.
Some may question the value of Madea embracing what can be called the normative behavior of patriarchy. What makes her actions valuable beyond mimicking patriarchal men is that Madea undertakes the dual role of nurturer and protector. This is not a new or foreign role for Black women. While the role of protector has been generally ascribed to men and the role of nurturer generally ascribed to women, Madea’s actions demonstrate that the two are not mutually exclusive. Both can function simultaneously and it is not outside of women’s character to be both. Her actions are not violent just to be violent. There are instances of Black women who have done whatever they needed to do to protect themselves and their families from those who would cause harm.
Black women have fought for themselves and their families using any means necessary. Fannie Lou Hamer’s mother, Lou Ella Townsend was one of those women.
She carried a 9mm Luger with her into the fields everyday hidden in a basket. Fannie Lou
Hamer would tell the story of her mother who would fight to protect her children from whites who were looking to attack them. In Chana Kai Lee’s book about Hamer entitled,
For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, she tells a story about how Lou Ella
Townsend, Hamer’s mother used violence when needed.
One day when the “bossman” on the plantation hit her youngest son in the face, Townsend responded by warning him not to do it again. Amused by the warnings of this lowly woman sharecropper, he burst out in laughter and proceeded to swing her around. She responded in like measure by
123 holding his arm while they wrestled to the ground. In spite of the danger involved, she had apparently gotten her point across, for after their duel this man ever again bothered the Townsend children.38
Black women are clear about the impact of violence and the impact of vulnerability on the lives of those who are unprotected. So, women like Madea fight back because perhaps they are tired of their anger not being taken seriously and the reductive ways they have historically been viewed. Black women use the tools at their disposal to fight back against the systemic racism, classism, sexism that buttress social inequities.39
Charles’ physical abuse comes to an end when he is confronted with Madea’s threat of his immediate death. Madea pushes back against abuse that Helen has suffered at his hands. She demonstrates her willingness to use violence to preserve Helen’s well- being at all costs. As McEachern asserts, ratchetness gives Black women the freedom to express themselves in ways that feel organic. It subverts spaces that are abusive towards
Black women and directly challenges behaviors that damage them.40
Ratchet behaviors and actions simultaneously and intentionally defy gender, class, and respectability norms. Madea is not interested nor is she invested in the norms of respectability. She moves and acts in a consciousness that recognizes when something needs to be done and moves on it. Ratchet action provides space for Black folks to celebrate themselves and each other in ways that are not supported by the larger society.41
38. Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 11.
39. Tamara Winfrey-Harris, The Sisters are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America (Oakland: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2015), 11.
40. McEachern, Respect My Ratchet, 84.
41. Ibid., 86.
124 Moreover, it celebrates and acknowledges the diverse ways that Black women exist and operate in Black cultural spaces. Ratchet spaces allow women like Madea to exist as a 6- foot tall, large, take no mess Black woman who defies white cultural standards of size and beauty. In these spaces Black women can be themselves. These spaces matter because Black women have traditionally been criticized for transgressing the so called gendered and racialized behavioral boundaries established by respectability politics.
Black women in hip hop exist in this space.
In hip hop culture, Black women openly challenge attempts to police their images, respectability politics, and narratives that attempt to deny their humanity. Artists such as
Queen Latifah, L’il Kim, Nikki Minaj embrace notions of sexual agency and woman- centered worldviews.42 Queen Latifah, considered one of hip hop’s first ladies of rap, has gone on to have a powerful presence in music, fashion, film, television, and cosmetics.
Her song U.N.I.T.Y on her 1993 Black Reign album, which is considered a rap classic, embraces themes of confidence and self-empowerment regardless of age, ethnicity, or size.43 In this song she transgresses respectability politics and embraces a kind of ratchet respectability by physically fighting back against disrespect, sexism, and sexual assault by men in her neighborhood. In poetic fashion she states:
That's why I'm talking, one day I was walking down the block I had my cutoff shorts on right cause it was crazy hot I walked past these dudes when they passed me
42. Mark Anthony Neal, “Foreword: A Few Words on Hip Hop Feminism,” in Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology, eds. Gwendolyn D. Pough, Elaine Richardson, Aisha Durham, and Rachel Raimist (Mira Loma: Parker Publishing, 2007), ii.
43. Richard Harrington, The Washington Post, “The Empowered Queen Latifah” October 17, 2007. Washingtonpost.com http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2007/1.0/1.1./AR20071.01.1.00635.html (Accessed August 9, 2018).
125 One of 'em felt my booty, he was nasty I turned around red, somebody was catching the wrath Then the little one said (Yeah me bitch) and laughed Since he was with his boys he tried to break fly Huh, I punched him dead in his eye and said "Who you calling a bitch?"44 Queen Latifah makes is clear that a ratchet response is sometimes necessary when combating systems that seek to render Black women powerless. How she chooses to dress and move is not subject to critique or judgment by anyone but herself. She is not interested in being palatable to whiteness or respectability politics. In the same way,
Madea demonstrates that ratchetness as an acceptable response when confronting oppressive, repressive systems that interfere with the well-being of Black women. Both women, Queen Latifah and Madea, love themselves, encourage others to do the same, and feel good about it. In the third scene, Madea manifests ratchet behavior in response to a denial of equity and fair treatment.
Madea reflects womanism in the way that she address the oppression faced by
Black women, particularly that of domestic violence. Cheryl A. Kirk Duggan asserts that womanism focuses on exposing, analyzing, and transforming social and personal injustices affecting the marginalized, symbolized by poor Black women.45 Madea’s response to Charles makes it clear that his behavior will no longer be tolerated; she, in fact, interrupts his cycle of abuse. Violence against Black women and other women of color is normalized. It becomes a way to preserve dominance and power over women
44. Songwriters: D. Owens / J. Sample U.N.I.T.Y. lyrics © BMG Rights Management US, LLC.
45. Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, “Signifying Love and Embodies Relationality: Toward A Womanist Theological Anthropology,” in Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry Productions eds. LeRhonda A. Manigault-Bryant, Tamura A. Lomax, and Carol B. Duncan (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 43.
126 who are often constructed as the other.46 The removal of their humanity makes violence possible. Violence becomes rationalized and normalized in ways that blames the victims and excuses the perpetrators. However, Madea names the violence that oppresses women, responds in the midst of it, and refuses to keep silent in order to keep the peace in the family.
Diary Of A Mad Black Woman: Scene Three - Which Half Do You Want?
In this scene Madea tells Charles that Helen is entitled to half of the money and property earned during the marriage. Charles has no intention of sharing any of his wealth with her.
Helen: Charles, I have been nothing but a good woman and wife to you. I don’t deserve this. You will reap what you sow. Keep your money. (throws money at his face) Madea: You crazy as hell. Helen: Just leave it! Madea: I might leave some of it. Helen: It was this that made you the evil bastard that you are Charles: Get out! Madea: Hell no. The way I see it half of everything in this house belongs to her and I ain’t leaving here until she get it. Charles: Well she’ll never see it. Madea: What he say? Helen: Come on Madea, let’s go. Brenda: That’s right, go! Madea: Give me five minutes with her in the bathroom Helen: Madea let’s go. Madea: Okay. (cocks gun) Oh yeah, I’ll leave. Helen: It’s just a matter of time before he does the same thing to you. Brenda: Never. I could never be you. I’m a woman who knows how to get and keep her man! Madea: You think I believe in (sic) I don’t know what the hell wrong with you. Charles: What’s that? (hears chainsaw) Helen: Madea.
46. Mitzi J. Smith, Womanist Sass and Talk Back: Social (In)Justice, Intersectionality, and Biblical Interpretation (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2018), 116.
127 Madea: Nah, I say half of everything in here belong to her. Which half do you want? Do you want this half you want this half? (revs up chains saw and laughs). Helen: Madea! (Madea saws sofa in half)47
In this third scene Madea’s ratchet act of resistance leads to her use a chainsaw to divide the furniture in half because Charles refuses to equally share the marital assets.
While Helen is willing to walk away, Madea refuses to let that happen. This is about more than just the material assets. This is about Helen being denied access to the resources she needs to survive and her eighteen-year contribution to their marriage.
Madea’s response is another example of everyday resistance, an oppositional practice that demonstrates how oppressed individuals gain agency. Ratchetness is used as a tool to disrupt and defy social structures and institutions that are determined to ignore, exclude, or disadvantage women.
Madea reflects womanism in her concern about justice and an egalitarian resolution to Charles’ and Helen’s divorce. Helen’s economic disenfranchisement and homelessness are the result of Charles’ actions. While the physical violence ends, Charles imposes a form of economic violence by denying Helen access to the financial resources acquired during their marriage. Womanists view gross differentials in power and resources as highly problematic because they contribute to dehumanization and interfere with individual and collective well-being.48 Charles’ actions interfere with Helen’s well- being and Madea immediately acts with a problem-solving solution that exists in her
47. Diary of A Mad Black Woman.
48. Phillips, The Womanist Reader, xxiv.
128 everyday vernacular. Her over the top audacious and willful response can overshadow the deeper meaning of her actions.
Madea never intends to physically harm Charles although she threatens him with violence. She boldly confronts and exposes his exploitative behavior. Womanists are concerned about the relationships between people, not things. Madea does the unexpected with a grand gesture of defiance and resistance. By literally severing the relationship
Charles has with his material possessions, Madea engages in antioppressionist 49work as a way to achieve justice for Helen. Hers is a language that opposes marginalization and the silencing of Black women’s voices.
Black women’s signs of strength and agency have historically been viewed as manipulative, controlling, and aggressive. Madea actions challenge these assumptions about Black women’s capabilities in spaces where outsiders may underestimate them.
Her actions command respect not only for her but for those under her care. She is not afraid of allowing her anger to be seen. Black women have the right to be angry and outspoken when they are subjected to marginalization and abuse. However, to limit
Madea and other Black women to the angry Black woman stereotype renders their voices and protests invisible because the larger culture is accustomed to ignoring their claims.
Melissa Harris-Perry contends that the angry Black women myth renders sisters both invisible and mute. Furthermore, it is emblematic of the misrecognition of African
American women because they do not conform to limited, binary conceptions of Black
49. Antioppressionist conveys that womanism is identified with liberationist projects of all sorts and that womanism supports the liberation of all humankind from all forms of oppression. Indeed, womanism seeks to enable people to transcend the relations of domination and oppression altogether. For more information see The Womanist Reader, Layli Phillips.
129 womanhood and the substantive political claims these women make.50 There are other ways that Black women express their displeasure that are brilliantly subversive and not invoke violence. Strategic use of language is one way to be instructive and restorative.
When Helen and her mother Myrtle are in Madea’s kitchen they become engaged in a discussion about the biblical passage, peace be still. Myrtle was referring to Joe because she wanted him to be quiet. However, Madea refers to her gun, a piece of steel.
Madea says, “peace is always still around me causer I keeps me what they call a piece of steel.” For her, having a piece of steel ensured that she would have peace and quiet all the time as no one would bother her. In the same way that Christians have to nurture and cultivate peace within themselves and with those around them, Madea acquires this same peace with her gun. In her own ratchet way, Madea will have peace by any means necessary. Madea suggests that sometimes God takes too long and that sometimes enemies need to get got right away. Shayne Lee suggests that:
Madea deems herself better at securing revenge in a timely matter than God and claims more confidence in her Glock than God to deal with enemies. She subverts the traditional Christian language with regard to divine action and allowing God to handle problems and takes charge for herself. Her secular intuition upstages the expressed Christian sentiment.51
What’s even more instructive is how she shares with Helen how she’ll know if she’s achieved peace within herself and those around her. She tells Helen that if she has the opportunity to “beat the hell out of someone who has done her wrong,” which is a ratchet action. However, if the ratchet act happens, then she has more work to do on herself. The
50. Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 89.
51. Lee, Tyler Perry’s America, 130.
130 expression of her displeasure and anger indicate that something is wrong and there is restorative work to be done. Madea is clear that Helen has been getting back at Charles for the harm he has caused her although she is not initially willing to discuss it. Madea’s ratchet mentoring has inspired Helen’s ratchet retribution against Charles by torturing him. Madea’s use of comedy helps to diffuse a difficult situation and it is enough to help people laugh to keep from crying. Madea’s ratchet acts are a counterbalance to narratives that place women as the victims in their own stories and allows them to be instrumental agents of change and subversion of social norms.52 In Madea’s Family Reunion, Madea’s ratchet acts continue to demonstrate a defiant stance against abuse and the silencing of
Black women.
Madea’s Family Reunion Film Summary
Perry’s Madea’s Family Reunion takes place in Atlanta, Georgia. The film opens with Lisa, one of the films main characters, waking up in bed. She is surrounded by roses leading to a bathroom, where there is a small orchestra playing music. Her fiancée
Carlos, an investment banker, has run her a bath to help with her soreness. The soreness is a result of a beating that she has endured from him. The film tells the story of Lisa and
Vanessa, two sisters, and their plight with abuse. Lisa deals with her fiancée Carlos’ physical abuse. Vanessa deals with their mother’s verbal and emotional abuse as well as the fact that her mother allowed her to be sexually abused by her stepfather. As a survivor of childhood rape and trauma, Vanessa struggles with accepting love from a new love interest Frankie, a bus driver on her daily route. He is a single father and an artist.
52. Catherine Lee and Anne Logan, Women’s Agency, Activism, and Organisation, Women’s History Review, DOI: 1.0.1.080/0961.2025.201.7.1.346880.
131 Vanessa and her two children are living with Madea. The fathers of her children are not paying child support and she cannot afford a place of her own. She is a working single mother and poet.
Lisa’s mother Victoria encourages her to stay in her violent and abusive relationship with Carlos. Her reasoning is because women have to endure things in order to be comfortable. We later learn that Victoria was also a victim of abuse by her mother who was a drug addict and a street worker. There is a cycle of abuse and childhood victimization in the family.
Another character in the film is Nikki Grady, a foster child who was caught stealing food. Madea appears in court for removing her house arrest bracelet. Since
Madea is someone who cares for children, family members, and others in the community the judge places Nikki in her care. The judge believes that Nikki would be a good fit in
Madea’s home since Madea cares for people in need. The judge also feels that caring for
Nikki will keep Madea out of trouble. Initially, Madea refuses to care for Nikki, she eventually does take Nikki under her care. She defends Nikki from bullies on the school bus and even fights back against a boy who is rude to her.
Throughout the film, Madea helps Nikki evolve from a rude, angry foster child with low self-esteem to someone who believes in herself. Madea teaches Nikki how to stand up to bullies, ask for help, and understand that she has a loving community surrounding her. Additionally, Madea helps Lisa claim her voice and sense of self. She teaches Lisa and Vanessa about “grit ball” as a way to fight back against abuse revealing her own battle against domestic abuse. Grit ball involves throwing a pot of hot grits on
132 your abuser and then hitting him with pots and pans. Eventually, Lisa does leave her abusive relationship with Carlos in a dramatic end by throwing hot grits on him in
Madea’s kitchen. Lisa speaks the truth about her abusive situation at the church. Vanessa and Frankie end up with the fairy-tale wedding that was supposed to be Lisa’s.
In this second film, Madea’s act of ratchet mentoring continues as she helps her great nieces and a foster child find their authentic voices and use truth-telling as a way to redefine themselves. In the first two scenes, we see Madea releasing her ratchet action as a way to resist being disrespected as well as a way to demonstrate the ways that women stand together to support one another. Since the two scenes involved children they were taken and analyzed together.
Madea’s Family Reunion Scene One: Foster Mother - Stop Popping That Gum
Nikki: This a Benz, what kind of drugs you sell? Brian: (laughs) I don’t sell drugs. I’m a lawyer. Nikki: Oh, you get the drug dealers off. Madea: Lil girl, that ain’t no way to talk to a grown person. And stop popping that gum. Nikki: You don’t tell me what to do. Brian: Madea. Madea: You betta get her. She don’t know who the hell she talkin’ to. You betta ask somebody honey. Brian: Uh, you know the kids are doing well. Madea: Yeah, and Debra, how she doing? Brian: Uh, she’s doing well. 15 months clean. Madea: Good, hell I thought I was gonna have to hide my purse at the family reunion. Cause you know she used to steal. Nikki: (pops gum) Brian: No, you don’t have to do that. Madea: (laughs) Nikki: (pops gum) Brian: So, where’s it gonna be this year? Madea: It’s gonna be at Aunt Ruby’s. Lil girl, I’m gonna ask you one
133 more time to stop popping that gum. Nikki: Whatever. Brian: Uh, um Madea, you going to Lisa’s wedding? Madea: (chuckles) Yeah, I’m going. I’ll tell you that Vanessa’s been wearing me out asking me about I’m going, yeah I’m going. Lil girl if you don’t stop popping that gum! Nikki: Look! If you touch me I’m gonna call 911. Madea: My daughter tried that. I hit her so hard she dialed 919. Nikki: Look you don’t know me I’ll whup an old woman (removes her earrings). Madea: What, uh, what? Who the hell you talking to? Nikki: I’m talking to you. You think I’m playing? Madea: (removes seat belt and start hitting Nikki) Sit back there like you ain’t got no sense! Brian: Madea, Madea! Madea: Shut the hell up! Shut up! Now sit in the seat and put that seat belt on. You better put that seat belt on right now! What the hell wrong with these children but oh I’ll set them straight. You know I’m from the old school honey I will beat the hell outta you first and ask questions later. If you don’t know how to get in line I will get you in line. Brian: Remind me to never leave my kids with you again.53
In this second scene, Madea confronts a bully on the school bus as well as the other children who are harassing Nikki.
Madea’s Family Reunion Scene Two: Foster Mother – School Bus Bully
Nikki: Where you going? Madea: To the bus, come on. I’ll be right back. Yall sit there and eat. Come on. The only way to deal with a bully is to confront them face to face. You understand? Hold on bus driver I need to talk to some of these children on the bus. Come on lil girl. Get on the bus. Listen up. This here’s a friend of mine. And she been telling me that a few of yall been saying some stuff about her. Imma tell you right now if I catch any one of yall saying something it’s gonna be me and you. You hear me. Boy: Shut up old lady! Madea: (grabs boy and starts slapping him) Who the hell you think you
53. Madea’s Family Reunion, directed by Tyler Perry. (DVD) Lions Gate Films and The Tyler Perry Company, Inc., 2006).
134 talking to ?(Kids on bus laugh at him) All my life I had to fight. I loves Harpo but I’ll kill him dead before I let him beat me. Kid: Who’s Harpo? Madea: Go on and go to school. Go on and sit down. I’ll be waiting for you when you get off. Ain’t nobody gonna mess with you. (looks at boy) I’ll see you a three o’clock.54
Madea’s physical attacks against unruly and disrespectful children are well- known. It is no secret that she will dispense discipline in an effort to bring impertinent youth in line. She is old-fashioned in her approach to child rearing and uses what she knows to work despite modern parenting advice that advocates for time outs for unruly children. Shayne Lee maintains that Madea’s threats of physicality to children are almost always disproportionate to their offenses, however, they offer poignant critiques of modern-day parenting skills and demonstrate her care and concern.55
Madea’s tough love and fondness of fisticuffs are demonstrated when she assumes custody of Nikki through the foster care system. Even her violent threats and insistence on following dictates are medicinal in how they offer Nikki the one thing she never received in the care of other foster parents: attention.56 Nikki’s behavior towards
Madea in the car is a manifestation of a survival technique that she developed in order to protect herself from emotional harm. Nikki lashes out first and deals with the questions later much like Madea does. To dismiss Nikki as an indignant, Black teenager would be to ignore the plight of children who languish in foster care. She is back in court because her former foster parents were not caring for her. Moreover, they were not aware that she
54. Madea’s Family Reunion.
55. Lee, Tyler Perry’s America, 87-88.
56. Ibid., 88.
135 was not home and probably not attending school. Madea’s response is more than simply ratchet, it is a critique of the failure of adults to take care of children dependent on them.
Madea expects children to be obedient and follow her instructions. When they fail to do so, she gets ratchet. In Madea’s Family Reunion we see examples of her disciplinary tactics in motion.
Madea’s ratchet responses are powerful and explosive. They are also imaginative, defiant, and have no boundaries. She demonstrates how quickly ratchetness can be embodied as a method of fighting back against disrespect, being ignored, or dismissed.
To view Madea’s reaction as a reflection of the trope of the angry, Black woman rejects the ways that Black women use their knowledge to engage in radical subjectivity. Their knowledge reflects the richness of community-based wisdom production and how Black women express themselves without apology. Black women’s knowledge production has always been motivated by a sense of care for Black communities in a world where non-
Black people did not find the value in the lives and livelihoods of these communities.57
Madea does find value in Black life and her foster daughter Nikki is the first to understand this through Madea’s ratchet actions.
Madea jumps into the back seat and begins spanking Nikki before she can react.
Madea’s ratchet reaction was in response to Nikki’s disrespectful behavior towards her.
Her actions are over the top and dangerous. She demonstrates that at any point she is capable of losing her mind and she is willing to kill everyone in the car to make a point.
Madea leaves an indelible impression on Nikki that she takes being respected seriously,
57. Brittney Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 2.
136 her directives are to be followed, and that correction can happen anywhere. Madea’s ratchet response is evidence of how ratchetness gives Black women the space to talk back, snap back, and literally hit hard58 in response to disrespect and dishonor. Her deployment of a ratchet disrespectability, a homegrown resistance, is a way of pointing out Nikki’s contempt toward her elders. Nikki witnesses this again when Madea boards her school bus to confront the bullies who are harassing her.
Madea’s ratchet actions show Nikki how to fight back against harassment and oppression. Additionally, Madea demonstrates that Nikki has someone in her corner who believes and supports her. Madea helps to create a safe space for her to exist. Bonnie
Ross-Leadbeater argues that:
In the safety of the homeplace care, nurturance, refuge, and truth, Black mothers have learned to skillfully weave lessons of critical consciousness into moments of intimacy between parent and child and to cultivate resistance against beliefs, attitudes, and practices that can erode a Black child’s self-confidence and impair her positive identity development.59
Madea gives Nikki the love and support that has been missing. She shares a critical life lesson with Nikki by telling her that she should not measure her value based on what other people think or say. She should not give credence to those things. Nikki has to be secure in who she is in order to resist the ways the larger culture tried to stigmatize Black girls and women.
Nikki learns that being silent in the midst of oppression and accepting false narratives about yourself interferes with and complicates self-definition. If Nikki is going
58. Robin Bylorn, “Mama’s Feminism,” in The Crunk Feminist Collective, eds. Brittney Cooper, Susana Morris, and Robin Bylorn (New York: The Feminist Press, 2017), 288.
59. Janie V. Ward, “Raising Resisters: The Role of Truth Telling in the Psychological Development of African American Girls,” in Urban Girls: Resisting Stereotyping, Creating Identities, eds. Bonnie J. Ross Leadbeater and Niobe Way (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 85-86.
137 to thrive as a young Black girl she cannot back down from being misnamed and silenced.
She has to speak up for herself. She must confront systems of oppression head on and without apology. What is interesting is that Nikki was willing to back talk Madea initially on her way home from court but unwilling to use her voice to defend herself against her peers on the bus. Nikki seems to have taken safety in the knowledge that the authorities could be called on adults who transgressed boundaries in terms of her personhood.
Alternatively, when there was no one to be relied upon to defend her from the other children she went silent. When Madea becomes her foster mother, Nikki not only finds a home and someone to care for her, but she also finds her voice.
When Madea boards the bus, she tells all of the kids that any more bullying of
Nikki will result in her instant retribution. When the young boy on the bus tell her to shut up Madea immediately demonstrates how she handles bullies and anyone else who bothers Nikki. She shows Nikki that she will stand up for her in the face of harassment.
The young boy in the scene also represents the ways that male domination attempts to mute Black women. The school bus becomes a classroom for Madea’s ratchet mentoring of Nikki. Madea responds not only to bullying but also to the ways that Black women are expected to accept abuse in public spaces. Her reaction signals Black women’s ability to reject behaviors that inhibit their ability to cultivate positive sense of self, resilience, and resistance. Moreover, she demands respect from all corners of the community, both young and old. On the school bus she pushes back against patriarchy and others who choose to hurt and abuse women. Not only does Madea fight back physically, she invokes a part of a speech by the character Sophia in Alice Walker’s, The Color Purple.
138 Sophia is a woman who uses her brain and her fists to combat all forms of violence that family members, her husband, and the larger culture attempt against her body. Sophia is a large, strong-willed, dark-skinned Black woman who is considered attractive according to Jacqueline Bobo. She is considered attractive to the men in her life like her husband Harpo and later Buster Broadnax thereby combating the idea that Black women are not appealing. Madea, according to her history has been attractive to several men, has been married several times, and has a daughter Cora. Madea, like Sophia, is someone who is familiar to Black women and who may not consider her character traits negative.60 Madea’s part of Sophia’s speech announces that although she loves her husband Harpo, she will kill him before she allows him to physically abuse her and reduce her to an object. She refuses to be dominated by an abusive patriarchy and its use of violence to subjugate women, and she refuses to become its victim. Sophia is a woman in control of herself, she is fully self-defined, and she will deploy ratchet acts of violence, if necessary, to protect herself.
Madea’s truth-telling and talking back engages in a legitimate form of womanist agency that reclaims space for Black girls and women to exist. For Black women, talk- back or “sass” has been and remains in some situation so the only means of agency.
Being heard and combating imposed invisibility, it is a resistance language that children,
Black women, people of color, and women speak and embody, inside and outside Black communities and institutions.61 Womanists understand that they must assume
60. Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers, 66.
61. Smith, Womanist Sass, 30.
139 responsibility for their own well-being and are committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people.62 Madea’s form of restoration prioritizes the values, experiences, and wisdom that is important in her community.
Ratchet acts expand what constitutes Black female representation on screen because it broadens the viewer’s horizons about who Black women are and refuses the primacy of respectability politics as the most effective weapon to combat sexism, racism, classism and patriarchy.63 Bobo argues that Sophia is a strong and feisty woman who resists anyone’s attempt to control her. She is eventually jailed and brutally beaten because she hits the mayor after he tries to bully her when his wife asks her to be his maid. Through Sophia’s exhibition of strength, she becomes one of the models of resistance for Celie64 and by proxy Madea. Sophia speaks her mind and advocates that other women use violence, if necessary, to fight back against men who have physically, sexually, emotionally, and financially abused them. Madea, like Sophia, understands the necessity of ratchet action as an apt response to those not concerned about the well-being of Black girls and women.65 The third scene, “Grit Ball”, offers some insight into how ratchet acts work to that end.
Madea’s Family Reunion Scene Three: Grit Ball
Vanessa: Madea.
62. Alice Walker, “Womanist,” in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), xi-xii.
63. Nina Cartier, “Black Women on Screen as Future Tests: A New look at Black Popular Culture Representations,” Cinema Journal 53, no. 4 (Summer 2014): 151.
64. Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers, 63.
65. McEachern, Respect My Ratchet, 82.
140 Lisa: No, no. Vanessa: You're staying here tonight do you hear me. Madea: What's going on? Vanessa: We have a friend and her husband is beating her and we want to know what we should do. Madea: Before or after his funeral? Does she want to get out? Vanessa: Does she Lisa? Lisa: Yes, but he won't let her. Madea: Sit down, let me tell you a story. Can't nobody help your friend until she wanna get help. You can wanna help somebody but until they want help it ain't gonna happen. When you get tired of a man hitting on you honey ain't nothing you can do but cook breakfast for him. Cook breakfast. Bring him into the kitchen and get you a big old pot of grits and when they start to boil like lava after he done got good and comfortable say, good mornting, and throw it right on him. Get you a pot like this. Throw it like this. Throw it and get you a skillet with a nice, good, balanced weight on it you understand? And you throw it, swat. Throw it, swat, throw it, swat. Venus and Serena. It's called grit ball. Ha, ha, ha.66
Madea’s kitchen, in this scene, becomes an epistemic space where the importance and the utility of ratchet action is passed on. The kitchen table becomes a place of renewal and revolution. It is renewing because Lisa receives the love and care she needs from her sister Vanessa and Madea. She is finally heard and both Vanessa and Madea see through her attempt to mask what is happening to her. In this space she can become empowered in a place in her life where she is feeling the most dispossessed. The kitchen table is the place where Black women come are heard. It represents just one locale where
Lisa may begin to thrive again, engage in self-definition, and achieve a clearer understanding of herself.67 Lisa’s muted voice in her relationship and her life can be reclaimed and amplified in the company of other Black women. As Patricia Hill-Collins
66. Madea’s Family Reunion.
67. Tasha Choma Sampson, “Come Dine at My Table: Enacting Safe Space. In the Cookbooks of Mara Angelou,” CLA Journal 58, no. 1-2 (September-December 2014):106.
141 asserts, the conversations around the kitchen table become classrooms of learning about how to deal with and respond to oppression.68 There is an opportunity to nurture and strengthen women’s relationships in a way that can produce liberating results. Alliance building is something else that takes place at the table as Vanessa discovers an ally in her sister and Madea. Madea is someone Lisa can draw strength from. In the midst of these two women she finds a space where she can discover her authentic and not be forced into someone else’s definition her. Madea’s ratchet mentoring is meant to inspire Lisa to find her own strength.
Madea is clear after listening to Lisa and Vanessa talk that this friend they are talking about is sitting at the table. Madea offers her a tool for resisting Carlos’ abuse in the form of “grit ball.” Using her culinary creativity, Madea uses ordinary resources at her disposal and repurposes it as a tool of protection. She teaches Lisa self-defense and encourages her to believe in herself and not allow the abuse.69 Some would critique
Madea’s advocacy of such extreme measures to retaliate against Carlos.
Cheryl Kirk-Duggan maintains that Madea is never pretentious, does not suffer fools, and supports those who have been traumatized.70 Her unorthodox ways may seem problematic; however, they do reflect the complexity that is relatable to many Black women. When Madea shares her wisdom, she imparts intergenerational survival
68. Patricia Hill-Collins, Fighting Words, 49.
69. Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, “Signifying Love and Embodied Rationality: Toward a Womanist Theological Anthropology,” in Womanist and Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions eds. LeRhonda S. Manigault –Bryant, Tamura A. Lomax, and Carol B. Duncan (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 45.
70. Ibid., 47-48.
142 strategies and tactics that have been passed down by generations of Black women in
America. These women have used these skills to navigate the institutions of slavery, segregation, and state-sponsored violence against Black bodies.
Madea’s kitchen becomes a revolutionary space for instruction in the ratchet way of surviving life. The kitchen becomes a space for empowerment, creativity, advocacy, and ratchet action. The instruction around the kitchen table shifts the kitchen from a site of gender oppression to one where women use the space to skillfully and creatively resolve life’s challenges. Madea’s encouragement of ratchet action may empower regular women to accomplish things that they did not think they could. Moreover, her kitchen is a space where Black women can work to heal each other, go off, and vocalize their anger so they can live to fight another day.71
This kitchen scene also reflects a womanist understanding of the importance of community. In the midst of community, the well-being of all members becomes the center of concern. There is room for reconciliation and balancing relationships.
Developing resilient individuals contributes to building resilient, enduring communities.
By aggregating and articulating individual expressions of consciousness, a focused collective consciousness becomes possible.72 Madea’s conversations with her nieces and
Nikki produces a heightened consciousness about the importance of their self-worth, subjectivity, and the power of their voices.
71. Toni C. King, Lenora Barnes-Wright, Nancy E. Gibson, Lakeshia D. Johnson, Valerie Lee, Betty M. Lovelace, Sonya Turner, and Durene I. Wheeler, “Andrea’s Third Shift: The Invisible Work of African American Women in Higher Education,” in This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation eds. Gloria Anzaldua and AnaLouise Keating, (New York: Routledge, 2002), 405.
72. Janice D. Hamlet, “Assessing Womanist Thought: The Rhetoric of Susan L. Taylor,” in The Womanist Reader, ed. Layli Phillips (New York: Routledge, 2006), 226.
143 Ratchet acts work because religious and personal scripts may not always offer the space to step outside of prescribed boundaries of behavior. Religion offers one avenue for redress but Madea mocks it as a remedy for her suffering.73 Ratchetness offers the redemptive clarity to carve out new space, to confront, to protect, and to impose one’s will on the world rather than to acquiesce to the will of others.74 Madea actions represent the lived experiences of some Black women whose performances run counter to what the larger culture may agree with. However, it does not mean that these stories should not be articulated as they reveal vibrant, dynamic subjectivities. Madea’s ratchet actions and their value reveal three important ideas.
First, her ratchet actions allow Black women’s voices, however they present themselves, to be heard. Ratchetness announces that any proscribed ways of being, especially those that are tied to respectability politics, will not be allowed to silence women. Adhering to respectability politics becomes a disempowering discourse that silences individuality, self-expression, and limits Black women’s ways of being to binaries that are more aligned with notions of whiteness. The honesty and clarity that ratchetness communicates prevents Black women from being misread, their displeasure misunderstood, and their joy misinterpreted. These actions are rooted in the ways that give space to act and react again the ingrained attitudes of respectability and erase the binaries that have limited Black women’s possibilities to fully express their humanity.
Thus, Black women resist the politics of containment and reclaim their voices that have
73. Joy James, “Madea v. Medea: Agape and the Militarist or Murderous Maternal,” in Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions, eds. LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, Tamura Lomax, and Carol B. Duncan (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 196.
74. Lee, Tyler Perry’s America, 101.
144 historically been stripped of their oppositional power.75 Ratchet acts are just one avenue for Black women to end the silence around their oppression.
Second, the value of ratchet acts gives Black women hypervisibility. Attempting to assimilate into a white, heterosexual, patriarchal culture leads to invisibility for Black women. Invisibility provides no protection for Black bodies and they remain subject to violence from the larger culture as well as assaults against their collective humanity. The intracultural policing of Black women’s bodies, behaviors, and attitudes stifles creativity, expression, and limits agentive capacities. Ratchet acts reimagines femininity and activism from another perspective and claps back against notions of whiteness as the standard.76 Hypervisibility removes the constraints that have inhibited Black women from confronting racism sexism, and classism because being visible can be dangerous. The dangerous part of visibility is the increased surveillance of Black women’s bodies and the larger cultures need to subdue and control them. However, in discovering one’s voice and power through ratchet acts Black women create new avenues toward wholeness that recognizes the freedom in the rejection of decorum and respectability.
Visibility breaks the silence around the pain that Black women have endured around issues of assault, violence, and abuse. Breaking silence enables individual African
American women to reclaim a humanity in a system that gains part of this strength by rendering them imperceptible. Hypervisibility interrupts all prevailing discourses about
Black women and externally defined perceptions about their experiences.
75. Hill-Collins, Fighting Words, 47.
76. Kristen J. Warner, “They Gon’ Think You Loud Regardless: Ratchetness, Reality Television, and Black Womanhood,” Camera Obscura 88, v. 30, no. 1(May 2015): 144.
145 Finally, ratchet acts command an audience. You can choose to ignore it, but its power is hard to dismiss. Because of the hypervisibility ratchetness engenders, the stories of Black women are heard when ratchet acts are deployed as resistance. Their loudness speaks unapologetically to their joy and pain. It asks that the hearer to be okay with the varied ways in which Black people exist and asks what their stories tell us about ourselves and the larger culture. Ratchet acts are more than just loud, they have agentive and pedagogical capacities. Respectability collapses Black women into a stereotype that does not consider the varied ways Black women exist. It also pathologizes Black women’s ways of being and problematizes their individual and collective strengths when they transgress the boundaries of respectability. Madea employs a cultural knowledge that comes from the practical lived experiences of Black women.77 Madea’s ratchet mentoring and actions aid in articulating aspects of African American identity that bolsters community and the importance of organized resistance in ways that cut across class lines. Claiming ratchet as a valid resistance and empowerment tool recognizes the ways in which Black women have historically claimed authority to challenge oppression.
Moreover, it offers an alternative vision of what resistance strategies can look like for everyday women whose empowerment stances are often disregarded.
77. Toneisha L. Taylor, “Black Women, Thou Art Produced!: A Womanist Critique of Tyler Perry’s Gosperella Productions,” in Interpreting Tyler Perry: Perspectives on Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality, eds. Jamel S. Cruze-Bell and Ronald L. Jackson II (New York: Routledge, 2014), 198.
CHAPTER IV
MISS SHIRLEEN’S RATCHET AND WOMANIST ACTS
The purpose of this chapter is to review five videos that contain three womanist and three ratchet acts by Miss Shirleen. The five videos are Shirleen Would Rather Go
Hungry Before She go gut With Adults With Baby Hair, Sounds Like a Question Straight
From Your Grandmother, Hershel out my Face, Pineapples, You Done Let the Devil Use
You. This chapter argues that Miss Shirleen embraces ratchetness and womanism as a liberatory framework that embodies a disrespectability politic, a call to authenticity, and agency. Shirleen’s ratchet and womanist actions creates space for Black women to claim their most authentic selves and embraces modes of surviving and thriving that transgress acceptable modes of being. Shirleen’s over the top responses to any given situation she confronts displays the power of ratchetness to talk back to cultural norms that deny Black women’s voices, modes of expression, and their humanity. In this way, Shirleen appeals to Walker’s call for self-love as a means of resisting, living, and celebrating in a society hostile to Black women.
Shirleen’s ratchet and womanist acts rejects a conservative respectability politics that reinforces sexist notions of appropriate behavior. This politic asserts the notion that if
Black people acted better, spoke well, and adopted the customs of whites people in the
147 147
United States as normative they would gain allies in the fight against inequality.
However, Black people discovered that this politic does not work. It shifts responsibility of racist actions away from the perpetrators and places blame on the victims. It also asks those who are harmed by these actions to change who they are so they will not be harmed. The respectability project offers a false sense of security for Black women. It does not afford them the same protections that white women receive if they perform femininity in the same way. Race, class, and sex biases conspire against Black women to restrict their agency and regulate their behavior.
Miss Shirleen and Respectability Politics
The character of Miss Shirleen is one who deploys ratchetness as a form of resistance in the same space that birthed respectability politics – the Black church. Born out of a desire to counter the racist and sexist narratives of Black womanhood the practitioners of respectability sought to condemn practices that reflected negatively on
Black people. This meant policing Black people appearance, speech, and the music they enjoyed. For Black Christian women a life worthy of respect is religious, it’s a Christian ideology.1 For these Black women respectability builds on the idea of character and moral authority. This idea of moral superiority is what these women utilized to fight for their rights and campaign against injustice. Higgenbotham argues that moral authority gives you a sense of justice and an avenue to gain respect. You gain respect because you
1. For Harriet, Wrestling with Respectability in the Age of #Blacklivesmatter: A Dialogue, http://www.forharriet.com/201.5/1.0/wrestling-with-respectability-in-age-of.html (Accessed November 12, 2018).
148 carry yourself in a respectful way.2 This standard compartmentalizes Black women into what people believe are exemplary examples of Black womanhood versus those whose shame it. It divides communities in ways that encourages judgment and internalized oppression. It does not address the daily humiliation that Black women endure in a hostile society. Respectability politics removes the power of self-definition and control away from the oppressed and leaves them objectified and perceived as a thing by the oppressor.
Miss Shirleen’s actions carves out space for resistance and self-definition in an area where a lot of Black women have started movements of resistance to oppression, suppression, and silencing – the Black church. It is interesting that in a space where many
Black women are still fighting for recognition, Miss Shirleen audaciously claims the right to express herself and speak her mind. Her actions build a bridge between and connect the church and the larger culture. She mixes her love of the sacred and the secular in ways that centers the voices and experiences those often left outside of the church because of respectability politics. Her deployment a disrespectability politic that embraces trap3 and gospel music, pearls and punches, fashions and faux paus, aids in shaping a more nuanced representation of Black womanhood. By performing outside the
2. Ibid.
3. The term trap refers to a place where drugs are sold. Trap music is derived from this term and was associated with drug dealing and violence. Trap music is a genre of rap music, originating in Atlanta, Georgia, that allows rappers to share their struggles growing up and shine a positive light on their rags to riches narrative. Trap music pioneers are Waka Flocka, Gucci Mane, Three 6 Mafia, Cardi B, and the rap group Migos. There is a genre called trap gospel music that attempts to make gospel music relevant to the culture. Trap gospel makes the gospel message relevant by blending God-centered lyrics over a trap music beat like Erica Campbell’s gospel song, “I Luh God”. For more information see The Influence of Trap Rap on American Culture www.theodysseyonline.com/the-influence-trap-rap-culture. For information on gospel trap music see Kirk Franklin on Trap Gospel and Taking Heat From the Church https://www.npr.org/201.5/04/26/401.9781.56/kirk-franklin-on-trap-gospel-and-taking-heat-from-the- church. (Accessed January 10, 2019).
149 dictates of social propriety, she intentionally fails and performing respectability, disregards the necessity to prove one’s humanity and dignity, and brings her whole self into spaces as an act of bravery and defiance. Womanist theologian Jacquelyn Grant asserts that womanist just means being and acting out who you are.4 Miss Shirleen offers a counter narrative that both embraces and critiques a culture whose focus is the primacy of Black humanity. This serves as a medium and tool to reclaim oneself in a space where people are often not allowed to do so. Shirleen risks identifying with a culture that the church does not want to be a part of and she demonstrates that it already exists within its walls. What Shirleen does is show that who Black women are, however, they show up, is part of their authentic selves and that it is powerful.
Miss Shirleen and Ratchetness
Brittney Cooper and Montinique McEachern’s explanations of ratchetness frame it as spaces where Black women can explore presentations of self, embrace freedom, and construct modes of survival and thriving that are outside of what is considered acceptable. Additionally, ratchetness always includes doing the most, they are acts that exceed what is called for in any given situation. This is the power of ratchetness. It radically and forcefully brings into view those Black women who are shamed for their economic status, sexual choices, and ways of being that stand outside of the status quo.
Moreover, ratchetness is accessible across class lines so it recognizes and mirrors the diversity of Black women’s lives. Ratchetness rests in the intersection of wisdom,
4. Jacquelyn Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Black Women’s Jesus (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 205.
150 liberation, and action.
Shirleen refuses to be ashamed for her ratchetness. She embraces the freedom ratchetness provides for her to speak, resist, and push back against unacceptable standards of Black womanhood. Shirleen takes every opportunity she can to speak truth to power in ways that are radical, creative, and resists the inter and intracultural policing of Black women’s bodies. Shirleen uses the language of everyday Black folks as the site for resistance and problem solving. In her video, On Site Means on Site Period, Shirleen engages in what some may call undignified and less that respectable behavior. However,
Shirleen leveling a critique against a culture that fuels problematic narratives about Black women. She refuses to be silenced about the harm it causes.
I said I wasn't gone say nothin’ but it's a lot of people that don't seem to understand what on site means. On site is action. That means that upon arrival once your presence has been acknowledged that hands will be laid and debts will be paid. If this statement has ever been issued to you that means that person is past the point of reconciliation. That when they see you there will be no more talking but only walking of the dog and we not talking about no pets. That means the day of reckoning is upon you and no man knows the day nor the hour. And it matters not where you are when they see you. You can be coming from taking your grandmother from dialysis. It can be the day you christening your child. It can be your wedding day. Be mindful of what you say cause you just might get that day to get them hands put in your life. Watch your mouth.5
Shirleen demands that Black women confront assaults to their humanity and womanhood immediately. They have the right to question individuals, power structures, and institutions that act treacherously towards Black women. Black women have the right to
5. The Christi Show, On Site Means on Site Period, https://youtu.be/LkqVql5zzXc. (Accessed February 11, 2019).
151 challenge unhealthy problematic systems that conspire against them. She depathologizes the ways in which Black women often have to fight back in order to be heard and seen. Shirleen’s ratchet response reflects the anger and rage of a people who are on the front lines of fighting gender terrorism in the form of sexual assault, economic exploitation in terms of low wage employment, and racial discrimination that blames its victims for their problems. Black women have put their minds, money, bodies, institutional resources, and political capital on the line in order to empower individuals and communities.6 Shirleen’s call for a ratchet resistance that validates Black women’s voices and actions as a way to hold dominant groups accountable as they fight back against systemic oppression.
Miss Shirleen and Womanism
Walker’s womanist definition provides space to recognize the uniqueness of
African American women’s experiences. There are a particular set of historical conditions that contribute to a distinctive experience of Black women in America.
Slavery and servitude characterized the first two and a half centuries of Black presence in the United States.7 Black women were never afforded the same protections that accompanied patriarchy that was offered to white women. Their bodies were read as deviant, over sexual, and in need of policing. Despite the system of race, sex, and class oppression Black women devised modes of survival and resistance. Under the radar and beyond surveillance, everyday Black women and other women and color devised theories
6. Sheila Radford-Hill, Further to Fly: Black Women and The Politics of Empowerment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 7.
7. Grant, White Women’s Christ, 196.
152 and methods of problem solving that is called womanism.8 They reconstructed a womanhood that was outside of what the dominant culture constructed for them. By utilizing the stories and experiences of their foremothers Black women find it critical to:
Demythologize popular conceptions of women’s existence and potential by point to women who have dared to live lives and think thoughts outside the conventional molds society casts for women. It is important to engage in this process for demythologization (1) to expose the truth of women’s nature and potential and (2) to prove the false illusion of isolation and singularity cast on women who break with conventional ideals regarding women’s roles.9 By looking at the actions of the women in their lives they find a community whose lives were and remain challenging and instructive. Even if their historical contexts and methods were different10Black women’s experiences continue to be defined by gender, race, and class oppression. As such, these encounters offer opportunities to develop relevant models for resistance that meets the needs of their current reality.
Walker’s definition captures and emphasized the multigenerational character of
African American women’s lives, communal concerns, empowering vitality, spirituality, and culture sustaining elements.11 Walker’s womanism highlights her concern regarding women of the African descent and the devaluation of their bodies as a result of sexism.
Walker’s womanism is the lens she uses to focus on the complexities that women of deal
9. Karen Baker-Fletcher, A Singing Something: Womanist Reflections on Anna Julia Cooper (New York: Crossroads, 1994), 110.
10. Ibid., 111.
11. A. Elaine Brown-Crawford, A Hope in the Holler: A Womanist Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 91-92.
153 with when facing racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, ageism, and other interrelated oppression simultaneously.12
A defining feature of womanism is its inclusion of spirit into the fabric of her definition. For Walker, a womanist loves the spirit.13 She is a woman who embraces and celebrates life and the spirit. Theologian Emilie Townes points to Walker’s understanding of the spirit in a dialogue between Shug and Celie in The Color Purple as implicit in her definition of a womanist.14 Shug explains to Celie:
God is inside of you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even when you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for.15 Townes points out that Walker recognizes the ways in which spirit is intimately linked to human existence. This understanding of spirit places humanity into relationship with a divine being that connects all humankind with one another. If all humanity is connected then the oppression of one is the oppression of all. The liberation of one will lead to the liberation of all. It challenges African Americans to explore the profundity of the parenthood of God with its promise-invoking images of birthing and nurturing whole
12. Baker-Fletcher, A Singing Something, 77.
13. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), xi-xii.
14. Cheryl J. Sanders, Katie G. Cannon, Emilie M. Townes, M. Shawn Copeland, bell hooks, and Cheryl Townsend-Gilkes, “Roundtable Discussion: Christian Ethics and Theology in Womanist Perspective,” in The Womanist Reader ed. Layli Phillips (New York: Routledge, 2006), 139.
15. Alice Walker, The Color Purple, (New York: Harcourt, 1983), 196.
154 peoples into freedom and wholeness.16 Following a womanist perspective to describe
Black women’s theological work, or their God-talk, is called womanist theology. It calls for Black women to do theology out of their intersectional oppressions of race, class, gender among other experiences.
Womanist Theology
Womanist theologians are clear that in order for Black women to fight back against oppressive systems they must devise strategies to dismantle them.17 Dr. Teresa
Fry-Brown argues that Black women’s implementation of these strategies are particular to their culture and belief systems are essential to lasting, effective transformation.18
Womanist theology emerged in response to the racism of feminist theology and the sexism of Black liberation theology. Dr. Jacqueline Grant was among the earliest to
16. Sanders et al., A Roundtable Discussion, 139.
17. Womanist theology serves as a site of critical reflection of Black women’s place in the world, the church, and the community. Specifically, womanist theology takes seriously Black women’s experiences as central to challenging hegemonic narratives that support their oppression. Moreover, it affirms that Black women are created in the image of God and as such God is with them as they combat racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, homophobia, and ageism. Womanist theology advances a holistic and inclusive God-talk for all oppressed people that brings marginalized voices into the center. It is a theology of inclusiveness. Womanist theology affirms the strong, defiant, outrageous, and responsible nature of Black women as knowledge producers through oral and written traditions. It recognizes the intergenerational wisdom passed down from mothers to daughters that has helped Black women survive and develop spaces to be free, embrace self-naming, and self-determination. For more on womanist theology see Jacqueline Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989); A. Elaine Brown Crawford, Hope in the Holler: A Womanist Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002); Stacy M. Floyd Thomas, Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Karen Baker-Fletcher, A Singing Something: Womanist Reflections on Anna Julia Cooper (New York: Crossroads, 1994; Katie G. Cannon, Katie’s Cannon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (New York: Continuum, 2003).
18. Teresa Fry-Brown, “Avoiding Asphyxiation: A Womanist Perspective on Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Transformation,” in Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspective on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation, ed. Emilie M Townes, (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1997), 74.
155 use womanist in naming her theology. Womanists explore and construct theology through the lens of African American women’s experience of multidimensional oppressions, such as racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism.19 Using the term womanist in relationship to religion gives voice to African American religion scholars who are shaping a distinctive perspective that reflects Black women’s experiences and traditions as a source for theologizing on the Black experience.20
Grant explores and compares Black women’s experiences to that of Jesus Christ and asserts that they have suffered multiple crucifixions. As Jesus was made to suffer undeservedly, so too are Black women. Grant names these crucifixions as rape and their babies being sold.21These crucifixions continues as their families were destroyed, experiences with brutal violence, and the exploitation of their bodies to support and perpetuate slavery. Black women have been the servants of all. The “sin of servanthood” has not only exploited them through excessive physical labor but demonstrated the classism under which Black women live.22 This sin of servanthood has relegated them to jobs with low wages and long work hours. For Black women their service usually means a life of suffering23 not one of healing.
Womanist theologians utilize these narratives to challenge the church and the academy on its neglect and abuse of Black women. Black women’s God-talk provides
19. Brown-Crawford, A Hope in the Holler, 92.
20. Sanders et al., A Roundtable Discussion, 144-145.
21. Grant, White Women’s Christ, 212.
22. Brown-Crawford, A Hope in the Holler, 92.
23. Ibid., 93.
156 insight into the ways in which their experiences raises questions about the biblical witness and what it has to say about who God is in the midst of their hope, loss, resistance, and defiance. Womanist theology challenges all oppressive forces impeding
Black women’s struggle for survival and for the development of a positive, productive quality of life conducive to women’s and the family’s freedom and well-being.24
Womanist scholars take Black women’s lived experiences as their primary source.
They identify Black women’s literary, historical, and narratives to examine to revelation of God in the lives of everyday Black women. They read and interpret the bible in light of the experiences of Black women and locate their stories inside of the text. While it’s aim is discourse and work with Black women in the churches, it also brings Black women’s experiences into the discourse of all Christian theology, from which it has previously been excluded.25
Womanist theologians look to biblical stories that emphasize Black women’s struggle for survival similar to the story Hagar.26 Hagar’s story is analogous to the difficulties encountered by Black women who were enslaved, endured sexual exploitation, and develop survival strategies. To ignore any aspect of this experience is to deny the holistic and integrated reality of Black womanhood.27 Hagar’s story is that of
24. Delores S, Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993), xiv.
25. Ibid.
26. The story of Hagar, a young Egyptian slave girl who was forced to bear a son for Abraham is found in Genesis chapters 16:1-6 and 21:8-21. After giving birth to Abraham’s first son Ishmael Hagar was put out of the home by Abraham’s wife Sarah for fear that Hagar’s son might inherit Abraham’s wealth and perhaps that Sarah never accepted Ishmael as her son.
27. Grant, White Women’s Christ, 209.
157 marginalized Black women whose voices and bodies are used in service to patriarchy and empire. It demonstrates how the intersectionality race, sex, and class conspire to exploit and mistreat the most vulnerable.
Womanist theology emphasizes that God, revealed in Jesus Christ, is present with the least of these. This connects people who are under the tyranny of racist, sexist, and classist domination. More importantly, the resurrection of the Christ brings with it the promise of liberation from oppression. Jesus Christ thus represents a three-fold significance: first he identifies with the “little people,” Black women, where they are; secondly, he affirms the basic humanity of these, “the least,” and thirdly, he inspires active hope in the struggle for resurrected liberated existence.28 This is a powerful move for womanist theologians. Womanist theologians view Jesus as an equalizing presence in the biblical text. To identify Jesus in the midst of Black women, affirming and understanding the suffering of Black women means that he identifies with their experiences and realities. Jesus’ suffering can be found among those Black women.
Jesus’ suffering culminated at the cross. Black women’s suffering remains constant in their lives as they continue to endure race, class, and gender discrimination as well as persistent acts of disrespect from the larger culture. As they embrace Jesus as liberator and resistor to hegemonic empires, Black women are emboldened to embrace the message of liberation and hope contained in the gospel message. This in part inspires their commitment to the struggle for freedom and equality in ways that work for them.
Womanist theologians also look to every day Black women like Fannie Lou Hamer and
28. Ibid., 217.
158 Ida B. Wells who employ a politics of disrespectability in responding to inequality in the larger culture. Their resistance efforts were not only about liberating themselves from oppressive circumstances but also to free entire communities from the politics of exclusion based on race, sex, and class.29 Their liberative efforts are womanist and ratchet. They are womanist because of their embrace of the spirit as part of the motivation of their work and their work on behalf of their people, male and female. These women utilized every day survival strategies and problem-solving tactics to tackle oppression in their communities. Walker’s womanist notion suggests that it is the activity of Black women that makes them who they are.30
The ratchetness of these women reflects an ability to choose what is best for themselves and in doing so they claims her own unique voices in the midst of a hostile world. Their use of the spirit as the impetus for their actions is a check against the institutionalized evils of misogyny, anti-Black rhetoric, and violence that continues to plague Black people and communities in general and Black women in particular.
Additionally, the use of motherwit facilitates the development of self-esteem and provides a language for survival that helps them speak their truth. Womanist ideals of self-love, spirit, and creativity aids in achieving liberation for Black women and communities. Womanists seek to identify relevant issues and resources, uncover discrepancies in treatment, to right the wrongs of gender, class, and race oppression, and
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 205.
159 to make Black women visible.31 Womanism and womanist theology amplifies the voices of every day women often omitted from national and historical narratives from the margins to the center. Their stories demonstrate that the smallest acts of resistance have far reaching consequences that point toward liberation. Shirleen’s small acts of resistance point toward how embracing ratchetness and womanism as a liberative praxis engenders agency, freedom, and risk.
Shirleen’s Ratchet and Womanist Liberative Power
Shirleen’s ratchet and womanist acts work to dismantle superficial binaries around Black women’s identities. These binaries about good/bad or strong/weak Black women are harmful and impede Black women’s self-expression. These create unrealistic and unhealthy expectations of Black women. Her actions reject the idea that Black women always have to embrace narrowly defined modes of being that reflect the social mores of the majority culture – read white, male, patriarchal, and middle class. Black womanhood is often presented as the anti-thesis of white womanhood and as such the experiences of white women are often universalized and normalized.32 Because of Black women’s experiences with intersectional oppression they construct alternative images that interrupt external hegemonic narratives about their identities. It is critical for Black women to disrupt and depathologize discourses that misread their complexity.
Black women have historically been misread as loud, hostile, and irresponsible.
31. Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Exorcising Evil: A Womanist Perspective on the Spirituals (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1997), 139.
32. Heidi Lewis, Exhuming the Ratchet Before It’s Buried https://thefeministwire.com/201.3/01./exhuming-ratchet-before-its-buried (Accessed June 19, 2018).
160 These characteristics led to the development of negative controlling images such as the mammy, sapphire, and jezebel. Portraying Black women under these stereotypical labels has been essential to the political, economy of domination fostering Black women’s oppression.33 These characterizations of Black women’s ways of moving in the world misses their ways of resisting oppression and survival in hostile environments.
Brittney Cooper’s consideration of the term ratchet asks for a reconsideration of Black women’s resistance activities as agency. Moreover, ratchetness is a necessary framework for challenging the respectability politics that often hampers their creative resistance.
Cooper challenges notions of shaming Black women who choose means of economic survival, their style of dress, or how they choose to perform femininity that stands outside of dominant norms. Embracing what Cooper calls a ratchet respectability, Black women resists the very institutions and systems that enact violence and oppression against Black women’s bodies and communities. Enacting a ratchet respectability34 is a womanist act.
It is womanist because it is an audacious, courageous, and willful act of self-definition and self-determination in the midst of living and working in a hostile world.
33. Patricia Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and The Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 147.
34. The term ratchet respectability was coined by Crunk Feminist Collective member Robin Bylorn. It is defined as a hybrid characterization of hegemonic racist, sexist, and classist notions of Black womanhood, Ratchet respectability is a form of resistance popularized by Black women on reality TV shows like The Real Housewives of Atlanta and Love and Hip-Hop Atlanta, wherein Black women simultaneously challenge and accept stereotypic characterizations of race, gender, and class. Ratchet respectability allows Black women to coalesce ratchet behavior (often linked to race and class) and politics of respectability (often linked to race and gender), performing and enacting both ratchetness and respectability at the same time. For more information see The Crunk Feminist Collective, eds, Brittney S. Cooper, Susana M. Morris, and Robin M. Bylorn.
161 A Ratchet and Respectable Language
Black women form their own language, identities, and practices that connect them with that is familiar and communal. It is subversive, imaginative, and produces ideas and a language that counter narrow and deficient narratives about who they are. In this way they are constructing an intergenerational strategy of survival and resistance that will help future generation of Black girls and women not just survive but thrive. Ratchet and womanist responses refuse to speak from a standpoint of victimization but offers a critique of oppression that also calls for social justice for themselves and their communities. As Black women embrace their intersectional identities they form a fuller and more complex reflection of their experiences as Black women. It is a framework to question the rules and hegemonic norms that govern Black women.35 This is what Black women’s agentive practices looks like as they maneuver, negotiate, and speak their way out of oppressive conditions toward liberation. This means Black women actively speaking themselves out of the margins and into the center of their own narratives and in doing so they indict the very institutions that demand their collusion with their own oppression.
Miss Shirleen participates in the life of the church and contributes to the larger community. The church is just one place where she uses her ratchetness as a site of resistance to reject limitations around personal empowerment and self-definition. Her over the top approach to problem solving moves individuals beyond the silences that
35. Nadia E. Brown and Lisa Young, “Ratchet Politics: Moving Beyond Black Women’s Bodies to Indict Institutions and Structures,” in Broadening the Contours in the Study of Black Politics (New York: Routledge, 2017), 48.
162 have exacted a high price in Black communities.36 This is important because it helps to keep the institution relevant and critiques it when it participates in behaviors that disempower, silence, and marginalize. One of the ways in which Miss Shirleen works to be inclusive of the entire community is through her engagement with and blending of sacred and secular music. No one expects a senior member of the church to get loose, get loud, and have fun listening to Cardi B. Moreover, she disregards respectability politics and its dictates on how Black women should behave by remixing trap music into her own version of gospel songs. Miss Shirleen is doing more than simply making new music. She is building a bridge between the church and the community as a way to speak to a generation of people whose voices may feel excluded from the church. There is also a sense in which she is telling the church that they are neglecting a large population of people because of stereotypes about who listens to particular kinds of music. Her actions perhaps offer a challenge to the church about how some individuals are perceived and marginalized based on tropes and the respectability politics that remain in the church. A song that she remixes for the church talent show is Cardi B’s Bodak Yellow. She claims that she heard the song as Cardi B’s testimony and it inspired her to write her own. Miss
Shirleen’s version is called GODak Red, GODak for God and red for the blood:
Little devil you can't mess with me if you wanted to. I got God I got all these saints and I ain't scared of you. Program invite I don't come. That’s cause I don't mess with you. And I'm quick to pop the messenger so don't get comfortable. I get my bible and go. Hell gone be hot like a stove. They want to know where I shop. I tell them pray and ask God. I ain't got to shout I make holy moves. (clap) I ain't got to shout I make holy
36. Johnetta B. Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities (New York: One World, 2003), 127.
163 moves.(clap) I ain't got to shout I make holy moves. (clap) I ain't got to shout I make holy moves.37 Miss Shirleen performs this song in a posh white nightgown ensemble, sunglasses, and fancy slippers. She dances around and raises her arms offering her testimony about her faith in God and she tells people off. This is part of her womanist sass and her ratchetness. Sass refers to verbal and nonverbal behaviors like placing one’s hands on one’s hips, rolling one’s eyes, or talk back without saying a word.38 Miss
Shirleen uses all of these tools as a part of her ratchet and womanist resistance to being policed by the larger culture and other Black people. That is the power of her ratchetness.
There is no singular way of expressing it however its purpose is to liberate the individuals from harmful ideologies around racialized and gendered identities.
At the same time there is a critique of institutions and systems that continue to advance harmful narratives. By reimagining the song Miss Shirleen depathologizes the negativity surrounding ratchet identity and creates something new. She disrupts the normativity and hegemonic discourses around who is welcome in the church. In her own way she builds solidarity across class lines and develops a consciousness that works to empower and change. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes succinctly argues that more than any other ethnic group, Black people have wrestled with class as an ideology and a social problem.39Moreover, her own social location as an older, middle-class, church going
37. The Christi Show, GODak Red, https://youtu.be/xFWcAf66q3s (Accessed January 15, 2019).
38. Mitzi J. Smith, Womanist Sass and Talk Back: Social (In)Justice, Intersectionality, and Biblical Interpretation (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2018), 30-31.
39. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, If It Wasn’t For The Women: Black Women’s Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001), 36.
164 woman reflects the contradictory nature and messiness of ratchet identity. Miss
Shirleen’s creativity embraces a womanist tradition of creative resistance to silencing and neglect. In the context of the church and community she reaffirms that ratchet persons are also created in the image of God thereby liberating others to participate in a resistance language whose starting point is their experience and knowledge. Her actions are a legitimate part of Black women’s every day resistance and agency. Miss Shirleen demonstrates that ratchetness exists as a viable avenue of resistance. Each video is analyzed for Shirleen’s ratchet and womanist acts.
First Video: You Done Let the Devil Use You
In You Done Let the Devil Use You, she illustrates that there is a diverse cross section of Black womanhood that embrace various ways of being that more accurately mirrors the experiences of the larger culture. Her over the top responses challenges the politics of respectability that refuses to acknowledge the audaciousness of reclaiming and making space for new practices that allow individuals to be who they are.
You Done Let the Devil Use You Ruby: Here you go Shirleen. Shirleen: Girl I don't even need it now. Ruby: What you mean? Shirleen: We bout to go. We got to go. Geraldine done had Fraymon change our introduction music. I told her I said listen here, if we can't come in to what we done practiced off of we ain't got to sing. I'll pull them up out of here. Ruby: So, what she want us to do? Shirleen: I don't know. But I told her we have come in and practiced off of Came through Dripping and that's what we gone do. Talking ‘bout that's not scripture. So, I said and neither is your being unfashionable but you do that every Sunday. Ruby: Faithfully.
165 Shirleen: Every Sunday. She done let the devil use her today and he gone use me as well. Ruby: I don't blame you. Shirleen: He can use me. Ruby: Don't let him use you. Shirleen: (singing) You done let the Devil use you he gone use me too. You done let the devil use you he gone use me too. Keeping thinking that's a reason for you to act a fool, you done let the devil use you he gone use me too. Use me too, he gone use, use, use. Use me too. He gone use. He gone use. He gone use, use, use. Keep thinking that’s a reason for you to act a fool you done let the devil use you he gone use me too. Ruby: All right. Shirleen: Let's go Ruby. Ruby: We out.40
Shirleen’s Ratchetness
In this video Shirleen is leaving the church with her choir because her entrance music has been changed. She is wearing one of her signature dresses, matching shoes, pearls, tambourine, and choir robe. She has all of the accoutrements of a seasoned elder of the church. Miss Shirleen visually presents what a respectable church elder who directs the senior choir however, the silencing of her voice by someone inside the church elicits a ratchet response. She engages in a radical and creative response that allows her to bring her entire self into this particular moment.41
Miss Shirleen’s entrance music, Drip by Cardi B, has been changed because according to Geraldine, it is not based on scripture. On the surface it would seem that
Miss Shirleen’s objection is about her not getting her way but she is speaking to larger issues. Her decision to leave is a critique of whose voice gets heard inside of sacred
40. The Christi Show, You Done Let the Use Devil You, https://youtu.be/ZFuE-p58oM4. (Accessed December 15, 2018).
41. Montinique McEachern, “Respect my Ratchet: The Liberatory Consciousness of Ratchetness,” Departures in Qualitative Research 6, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 82.
166 spaces, participating in biblical analysis, and a power analysis. In terms of biblical analysis Shirleen embodies the impetus of womanist though that urges Black women to listen to their own voices and experiences to do theology out of their own context. She exists in at least two contexts that are simultaneously oppressed as a woman and as a
Black person. She is in tune with both of these experiences and what it means to be dehumanized, alienated, and marginalized. Shirleen’s decision to leave critiques the ways in which Black women have not only been silenced in the church but also how their voices and experiences are left out of the biblical text.
Ignoring the perspectives that Black women bring makes them vulnerable to the violence of patriarchy and the expectation that Black women have to endure misogynistic treatment within their own communities as well as in the church. Womanist theologians point out that the oppressed and the abused do not always experience God’s liberating power.42 There are parts of the biblical text where oppression, not liberation, remains part of an individual’s experience with God. As with the story of Hagar, she endures forced motherhood and another person having control over body and its reproductive capacities.43 Although God responded to her despair in the desert, her voice and experience continues to be shaped out of pain and affliction. In retelling these stories from the perspective of Black women, there is an opportunity to reconstruct them in ways that are truthful and empowering.
Womanist theology calls attention to the negative experiences of Black women
42. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 144.
43. Ibid., 15.
167 when they confront the racism of white feminist and white male theologians as well as the sexism of Black male and white theologians.44 It is impossible for Black women to separate their lived experiences as both Black and female in defining who they are and outlining their struggles against racism, patriarchy, and sexism. Womanist theology challenges the Black church with the prophetic and critical messages coming from the practice of Black women.45What Shirleen does is capture the voice and experience of marginalized women and brings it to the church. She speaks to the membership and the leadership in hopes that they will respond to the needs of the surrounding community.
Shirleen purposefully, strategically, and forcefully includes marginalized voices conversation about how they are marginalized and silenced in terms of race, gender, and class especially in the church it makes the institution seem complicit in the abusive practices against women. She does this in a way that is over the top and unexpected through her choir’s introit. The choir’s introit is about ushering in the spirit of God into the sanctuary. By entering with Cardi B’s song, she is also ushering in the disinherited and at the same time validating their presence. Shirleen talks back to these practices by being and acting out who she is in this space. She utilizes her voice as one of the tools
Black women use to do whatever is necessary to protect themselves and their communities from abuse and neglect.
Shirleen takes back her power by making herself visible, worthy, and human. She speaks herself into existence by demanding that others see and know the various ways in
44. Dwight N. Hopkins, Introducing to Black Liberation Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2003), 129.
45. Ibid., 134-135.
168 which she and other Black women live and exist. By insisting that women value and nurture on another she issues a call for Walker’s collective vision of their humanity.
Shirleen’s actions affirm Black women as generators and producers of knowledge on their own terms that interrupts the persistent assaults on their lives and identities.
Additionally, she announces another way to address the complex gender, racial, and class social configurations that impact the lives of the women in her community in a manner that completely dismisses respectability politics. However, ratchetness engages in its own wisdom that utilizes its own barometer of what is right or wrong and develops resistance tactics out of particular cultural settings.
She claims their worthiness to be recognized as human beings who have a particular way of knowing and seeing life that makes them inherently valuable. Shirleen embraces a womanist stance by embodying activism, engaging her spirituality, and demonstrates a commitment to empowering herself and her community.46
Shireen’s Womanist Acts
Shirleen’s love of trap music and its narrative of overcoming difficult circumstances reflects a message of hope found in the gospel message. Signaling the audaciousness of the courageousness that Walker’s womanism engenders Shirleen demands the right to think theologically and do it independently.47 Jacqueline Grant reminds us that Black women must do theological analysis out of their own experience
46. Danielle Drake-Burnette, Bravada Garrett-Akinsanya, and Thema Bryant-Davis, “Womanism, Creativity, and Resistance: Making A Way Out of No Way,” in Womanist and Mujerista Psychologies: Voices of Fire, Acts of Courage (Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 2016), 174.
47. Grant, White Women’s Christ, 209.
169 with racism, sexism, and classism as a way to understand the realities in which Black women live. Additionally, to identify God in the midst of and in solidarity with the struggles of those who exist on the margins of the culture works to continue build bridges between the church and the larger community. Shirleen’s choice of Drip illumines her continual engagement with the oppressive realities that Black women face and challenges the church to divest itself of oppressive attitudes toward Black women who look and live differently. Cardi B’s life is a narrative of escaping poverty, abuse, and the agency of
Black women that is often missed because she is not seen as respectable. Her story is one of survival in the midst of oppressive circumstances that mirrors that of many Black women.
Shirleen centers her narrative by using it as an introit by the choir. This is not accomplished alone; this is a communal act of challenging the erasure of voices and stories. Her actions are womanist because it is a bold and audacious move to claim space, voice, and power in the midst of an institution with a history of being a site of active resistance to oppression and normalized patriarchy. The lyrics are an ode to overcoming abuse and that survival is possible:
Came through drippin (drip drip) Came through drippin (drip drip) Came through drippin (drip drip) Diamonds on my wrist, they dripping (ice) Came through drippin (drip drip) Came through drippin (drip drip) Came through drippin (drip drip) Diamonds on my wrist, they dripping (ice) Give me a little something to remember (Cardi) Tryna make love in a Sprinter (yeah) Quick to drop a n----- like Kemba (go) Lookin’ like a right swipe on Tinder (woo)
170 Shit on these hoes (shit) Light up my wrist on these hoes (wrist) Now I look down on these bitches (down) I feel like I’m on stilts on these hoes (woo)48
The underlying message of the entire song is about trusting and believing in yourself when no one else does. Cardi B was able to transcend her circumstances and now her enemies became her footstools for success. This is not a triumphalist narrative where she is granted respectability in the traditional sense because she continues to engage with being misread and misunderstood; however, she walks in her own self-defined Black womanhood. Further, she engages in a disrespectability politic that honors the ways in which every day Black girls move through systems of oppression on their own terms without being concerned with what others think. This is a liberatory act, and it is one
Shirleen embraces as well. Shirleen uses these lyrics to celebrate the creativity of Black women to defy dominant discourses, resist invisibility through flourishing and adornment, and celebrate their self-identification by setting her own standard.49 This discourse is necessary in the larger culture as well as inside of the church.
As Miss Shirleen begins to sing her song “You Done Let The Devil Use You,” she is referring to the patterns and practices of sexism, patriarchy, and classism that keeps people subordinated and powerless. She is naming the oppressions that are responsible for dehumanizing Black people in general and Black women in particular. This is part of her genius. Shirleen pulls on her survival wisdom to create a space and a language for
48. Cardi B, Drip feat. Migos by Belcalis Almanzar, Quavious Keyate Marshall, Kirsnik Khari Bell, Joshua Cross, Kleonard Raphael in Invasion of Privacy, Atlantic Records, 2018 CD.
49. Drake-Burnette, et al., Womanism, Creativity, and Resistance, 181.
171 resistance. She is serving notice to the systems of oppression that she intends to use her creativity as a form of healing, resistance, and problem solving. She is singing loud enough outside of the church entrance for the people inside to hear her. Not only that, she uses her tambourine and dances in the very space that denied her voice. Shirleen meets her silencing with a thunderous and boisterous response in ways not expected for an elder and active participant of the church. In letting the “devil” use her she engages in a disrespectability politics that calls on all things ratchet. It is ratchet because her response is so over the top that you cannot miss it even if you wanted to. She draws attention to decisions about whose voice is heard and represented. Her response is womanist in its audaciousness, willfulness, and “everydayness” of her actions. She utilizes the tools at her disposal in a trajectory that points towards justice for everyone.
Shirleen never asks that Geraldine give up her point of view however, she asks to be heard. Engaging with survival wisdom means that Black women draw on their collective wisdom to construct solutions to problems. Within womanist spaces there is room for conversation where wisdom is shared and resolutions are reached. There is a place where all are welcome and community building can take place. Layli Phillips suggests that:
Part of this survival wisdom has derived from the maintenance of collectivist values, the teleological end of which is a form of commonweal that could harmonize and coordinate the world’s diverse and ever- changing groupings into a workable and peaceable community. Because individual distinctiveness within overall collectivity is valued there is no tension or paradox between individual and community development.50
50. Layli Phillips, The Womanist Reader, (New York: Routledge, 2006), xl.
172 Community building among women cannot take place if self-love and affirmation are not central to an understanding of self. Shirleen’s response highlight’s the difficulties that remain in transforming alienating spaces into welcoming ones. The organization of the church too often mirrors the male domination that takes place in the larger culture and normalizes it in the eyes of both female and male parishioners.51 Shirleen’s ratchet and womanist response is an attempt to recalibrate and normalize relationships within the church and the larger community. There is a necessary critique of processes that exclude and silence. Shirleen seeks to unmask patterns and practices that reinscribe invisibility and diminish collective empowerment. In the second video, Shirleen addresses this issue head on.
Second Video - Sounds Like a Question Straight From Your Grandmother In her second video, Sounds Like a Question Straight From Your Grandmother,
Shirleen addresses how successful Black women are often silenced and excluded.
Sounds Like A Question Straight From Your Grandmother Be a beautiful day to blow off some steam. I had a young adult in the adult ministry last night Keonte gone stand up and say, uh Shirleen, we talking about relationships. Shirleen how long you think it take for Ernest to ask you to marry him. I said, sound like a question straight from your grandma mouth. That's what I said. And the pastor said, you think your answer was appropriate. I said yeah it was appropriate cause I'm just saying don't discuss me. Ask thine own question straight from thine own mouth because I'll pop the messenger. I will. People say, oh well Shirleen ain't you a fool? And you crazy if you think Shirleen sitting around waiting on a man to ask me to marry me. Not Ernest, not Herbert, not Sam, not Walter not nobody. I'm running an empire. A lot of yall women in a rush to get married for what? I ain't fitting to be locked down. I'll get locked
51. Sanders et al., Roundtable Discussion, 136.
173 down to God I ain't fittna locked down to no man. Yall in a rush to get married and your credit score is 200. Get your life together. I'm about my business I'm about my money. Be about your money, be about the father's business. You ain't even got no credit trying to be a wife. I know what it takes to be a wife. And I ain't in no rush. I got all day. Got a lifetime to be a wife. Run tell that to your grandma.52 Shirleen’s Ratchetness In this second video Shirleen outlines what people’s priorities should be. One of the first issues she addresses is how Black women must embrace their own agency and secure their financial futures. In this way they will not be subject to the dangers of a toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and the concomitant economic abuse of women that often accompanies it. She directly challenges the dominant norms prevalent in her community about notions of feminine comportment and encourages other women to explode the narrow binaries that have complicated Black womanhood.53
Shirleen is a business owner and she encourages other Black women to make sure they can take care of themselves before considering marriage. She tells them that she is running an empire and embracing that leadership role is important to her. Shirleen also functions as a leader in church through choir, her work with the young adult ministry, and with the seniors. Shirleen is a woman on the go. She always has her keys with her. This signals that she is able to come and go as she pleases and remove herself from circumstances that can be potentially harmful to her. She is a self-sufficient woman who can take care of herself. In this way she talks back to a larger narrative about independent
52. The Christi Show, Sounds Like a Question from Your Grandmother, YouTube, https://youtu.be/oDPe7NBfTnl (Accessed December 15, 2018).
53. Bettina Love, “A Ratchet Lens: Black Queer Youth, Agency, Hip Hop, and the Black Ratchet Imagination,” Educational Researcher 46, no. 9 (December 2017): 539.
174 Black women within the Black culture that often sees them in negative light.
The notion of independent Black women is a double-edged sword. The culture celebrates Black women who are high achievers and high-income earners and at the same time these successful Black women are shamed for their achievements. Black women are pressured to calibrate their directness and assertiveness and minimize their accomplishments and success to make the men in their lives comfortable with and confident in their manhood.54 Black women are pressured through respectability politics to become the woman every man wants but then are told that their class aspirations are too high when they seek partners on equal footing. Brittney Cooper critiques the ways in which Black men are not called upon to develop habits of character such as maturity, selflessness, and emotional generosity that make for good relationships but Black women are expected to invest in these qualities and not expect this kind of emotional investment in return.55 Shirleen directly challenges her generation’s idea that Black women’s financial stability and class standing are tied to marriage. Moreover, she addresses this idea that Black women’s sexuality needs to be controlled within the confines of marriage.
Cooper refutes this idea that that continually casts Black female sexuality as bad, dirty, evil, and that marriage was the only proper context in which women could express themselves.56 Additionally, Shirleen draws attention to the privileging of heterosexuality.
54. Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 90.
55. Brittney C. Cooper, “(Un)Clutching My Mother’s Pearls, or Ratchetness and the Residue of Respectability,” in The Crunk Feminist Collective, eds. Brittney C. Cooper, Susana M. Morris and Robin M. Bylorn, (New York: Feminist Press, 2017), 202.
56. Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers her Superpower (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 135.
175 Shirleen offers a subversive critique of the idea that people belonging to the gay community are somehow depraved. She affirms the same gender loving people and it she does not privilege on one group over another. In another video she nods to her arch rival Barbara Ann’s son wearing her shoes in Midtown Atlanta. Shirleen was not bothered that he was wearing her shoes, she was upset because they were stolen. Barbara
Ann was more upset that Shirleen saw her son wearing women’s shoes. In this way
Shirleen expresses a womanist’s fundamental affirmation of human diversity and rejects discrimination or oppression based on sexuality as well as the centering or privileging of one sexual group and its practices over another.57
The myth of Black sexuality as lewd and lascivious in general and Black women’s sexuality as insatiable and morally depraved, in particular, is a remnant of the legacy of slavery that pervades all aspects of American culture.58 Historically, the maligning of Black women’s bodies is part of the national discourse around how they are viewed. Given their unique history that includes chattel slavery their bodies the seed of negative perceptions of Black women were planted centuries ago.59 The controlling images created around Black women’s identity, emerged out of a context of enslavement that where they were capital. Images of the mammy, jezebel, and the sapphire are the lenses that the larger culture uses to view Black women and attempt to tell them who they are. Black women were traded and exploited like other market commodities and their
57. Phillips, The Womanist Reader, xxxvii.
58. Betsch-Cole and Guy-Sheftall, Gender Talk, 200.
59. Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America (Oakland: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc, 2015), 3.
176 labor and reproductive capacities supported an economic system committed to their oppression. The use and misuse of Black women’s bodies created spaces for their humanity to be questioned and for them to be perceived as lacking a moral compass.
These ideas around Black women’s bodes as a site of moral deficiency and lack of femininity has controlled the public discourse around their sexuality and a preoccupation with their performance of respectability. Shirleen creates a counter narrative by engaging in self-definition that explicitly names the oppressions in the church and the larger culture that hinders Black women’s liberation from these controlling images.
Shirleen’s Womanism
Shirleen engages in womanist resistance to these harmful narratives by engaging in self-naming and self-defining. She claims her womanist identity as being serious, responsible, and in charge. She is active in the community, the church, and is a business owner. She lives on her own terms in the midst of a culture that systematically works to dismantle Black women’s integrity and self-determination. She speaks for herself claims the right to exist outside of the narrow constrains of respectability politics. Shirleen refuses to submit to hegemonic heteropatriarchal gender ideals and a puritanical Black sexual politics that invigorates and maintains the circulating religio-cultural discourse on
Black womanhood.60 This is also part of her ratchetness. Her highly stylized movements embodies a defiant loud, defiance stance that draws attention to the systems and structures that marginalize Black women. She does so under the cover of a respectable presentation.
60. Tamura Lomax, Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 174.
177 Her presentation as a traditional church elder belies a discourse on disrespectability politics that honors the varied ways in which Black women show up in the world. Shirleen responds to a respectability politic that shames Black women for their choices and has a damaging impact on their agency. Furthermore, she critiques the white, heteronormative, patriarchal lenses through which Black women are assessed. What people choose to see about Black women is often refracted though a lens that devalues their bodies, voices, ideas, work, and experiences. She resists this kind of hypervisibility that is rendered unto Black women’s bodies. Shirleen’s offers counter cultural knowledge that draws on the strength and experience of everyday Black women. The motherwit she shares signals an awareness of the injustice that Black women face within their own communities and the necessity for affirming and empowering messages. Moreover, her actions foreground the audacity of Black womanhood as the foundation for a resistance discourse to question injustice and to question individuals and institutions who use their power to oppress, silence, and exclude.
Shirleen’s response in the church has the potential to create a community of faith that acts collectively to transform the world.61 She creates a space for new dialogue to occur around how the church can become an active partner in healing individuals and communities from the impact of racist, sexist, and classist ideologies. Black women as the forbearers of their people’s culture, have historically been the forgers of new ways of
61. Diana L. Hayes, “Standing in the Shoes My Mother Made: The Making of A Catholic Womanist Theologian,” in Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society, ed. Stacy M. Floyd-Thomas (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 73.
178 being and speaking in the world.62 Shirleen calls upon the church and the community to imagine new ways that are inclusive of the lived experiences of everyday women by examining the underlying power dynamics that lead to Black women being perceived as objects rather than subjects.
Third and Fourth Videos: Pineapples and Shirleen Would Rather Go Hungry Before She
Go Out With Adults with Baby Hair
In the third and fourth videos, Pineapples and Shirleen Would Rather Go Hungry
Before She Go Out With Adults with Baby Hair Shirleen engages in critiques around aesthetics and negotiating presentations of self. She centers her narrative around the ways that Black women resistant construct notions of beauty and Black womanhood in spite of messages from the larger culture that idealizes and idolizes a white standard of beauty.
Pineapples Shirleen: Came and got my hair done. Look at my hair. Look at it. I asked the girl, I came in the girl been doing my hair for the last six years. I don't know if she having a bad day or not. But you don’t get in nobody head if you having a bad day. I asked her for a little trim up a little spring trim and this what she gone give me. They gone ask me to leave out the shop because I started tearing things up in the shop. I started pulling the Marcels down and throwing them on the floor so they asked me to leave. That ain't how you treat no senior citizen. That ain't how you treat no senior citizen. I got it bad enough and my hair looking like this. Look at my hair, look at my hair, look at my hair. Ruby: Turn around Shirl please. Shirleen: They gone say, she gone say, well Shirleen you want me to try to fix it. You the lead stylist! How you gone fix it? You done messed me up the devil is busy. I done called the police because I'm due a refund. A refund is due unto me. I feel like I just been abused. God ain't pleased with this. You can't do the saints like this. I'm gone sit out here till the police come. I'm gone sit out here till the police come! I'm due a refund! Cause
62. Ibid., 73.
179 I'm due one unto me. What I'm supposed to do looking like this like a pineapple. I didn't ask for no pineapple. She gave me a pine, you gave me a pineapple. Girl, done got my pressure up becoming light headed. Can't do the saints like this done gave me a pineapple. What I'm supposed to do with a pineapple? I'm shaking, I'm shaking.
Shirleen Would Rather Go Hungry Before She Go Out With Adults with Baby Hair Kanekalon: Shirleen you sure you ain't going? Shirleen: No, I ain't going, your mother done raised my pressure up Kanekalon. We was just gone run down there to get something to eat and she come out here with her hair brushed up I said well is you done brush your hair up Beautiful? She talking about no because that's baby hair. That's a bang. It's too hot for a bang. Let me tell you something, she go oh well. Kanekalon she can wear, you seventeen years old your mother is 31 years old. You brushing your hair up three and four inches towards your face is a bang and you need to stop it too. Let this trend die out. Let it die out. Yall is adults. Yall is adults. If yall ain't got edges pray for em. But let this trend die. Yall done raised my pressure way up its so high its way high baby hair. Yall ain't got no baby hair they adult hairs brush it back put it in a ponytail and go on about your life. I can’t be fake I I can't fake it. I ain't going with yall and them bangs brush your hair up and I’ll go.
Black women have the ability to transform themselves and their aesthetic representations are generative. Through fashion, clothing, hair, and music Black culture sets trends world-wide. This kind of trendsetting represents a form of cultural capital that
Black people possess in American society. Cultural capital encompasses non-economic resources that assist with social mobility.63 These efforts work to build a particular kind of competence within a culture that is sought after by others. It is often to Black culture that other look for the newest trends. The irony in possessing this kind of capital and mobility under capitalism is that you are allowed to be creative and at the same time you
63. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John E. Richardson (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986), 52.
180 are marginalized and isolated within the same cultural context that forces the creativity. Black people in general and Black women in particular set the trend and then they are set aside as the larger culture commodifies and profits from it setting its creators aside. One need only look at the “boxer braid” controversy from 2016. When UFC fighters were wearing them during their matches and the infamous Kardashian sisters were sporting them as well. In a Jezebel.com article, White People are Rebranding
Cornrows as “Boxer Braids64, writer Kara Brown notes how cornrows and box braids are styles that women of African descent have been wearing for centuries and now that white women have discovered them it is a new trend. The Los Angeles Times65 and the New
York Post66 gave white women credit without mentioning its history among Black people.
The creators are marginalized within their own cultural milieu. However, despite the larger culture’s attempt to decenter Black women from the cultural capital they produce their creativity continues to provide a template for resistance to larger deleterious narrative regarding the manifestation of their beauty and aesthetic choices. In both videos, Shirleen counters narratives about Black women’s beauty, identity, and representation. She also critiques the ways in which other Black women show up in the world perhaps revealing her own Achille’s heel and limitations.
64. Kara Brown, Jezebel.com. White People Are Rebranding Boxer Braids, https://jezebel.com/white-people-are-rebranding-cornrows-as-boxer-braids-1.76501.2240. (Accessed January 19, 2019).
65. Ingrid Schmidt, Los Angeles Times, Head-turning fashions for Fall: Bangs, Rows and Tails September 20, 2014 https://www.latimes.com/fashion/alltherage/la-ig-fall-hair-201.40921.-story.html. (Accessed January 19, 2019).
66. Alev Aktar, New York Post, UFC is Inspiring the Hottest New Hair Trend March 16, 2016 https://nypost.com/201.6/30/1.4/ufc-is-inspiring-the-hottest-new-hair- trend/?utm_source=url_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons. (Accessed January 19, 2019).
181 Shirleen’s Ratchetness
In Pineapples, Shirleen expresses that Black women’s aesthetic representation matters. That they take seriously how they look, and in doing so, resist narratives around
Black women not being pretty, desirable, and not wanted by men of any race. Her dramatic actions show that Black women take pride in their appearance. As Shirleen is known for her fashions, matching jewelry, and shoes, she is also proud of her hair and the fact that she has long, luxurious edges. When her stylist gives her a pineapple hair style, she completely loses it in the salon and her ratchet response emerges. Shirleen tears the salon apart and throws the curling irons on the floor and yells at the stylist. They ask her to leave because of the damage she causes and her ratchet reaction. Her reaction is about more than a bad haircut, the stylist has negatively impacted her identity, how she sees herself, and how she projects herself into the world. Her entire sense of self is impacted, and it is on such that she prides herself. Her identity is a statement about who she is and who she wants others to think she is. Shirleen defines herself as a successful business owner, self-sufficient, and an engaged community and church worker. This is who she wants people to see when she shows up.
Shirleen’s Womanism
Shirleen also speaks to the intimacy that happens in women’s spaces around hair.
In this womanist space where Black women have intimate conversations about relationships, love, politics, and gossip, they also learn from one another how to survive in a hostile world and navigate it in ways that will keep them whole. Sitting in the stylists’ chair, Black women and girls learn about the tough conditions they face and how
182 much effort it will take to prepare them to meet a waiting world, about where out sage have are and always will be – in community with women.67 Black women’s hair matters and in spaces where it is curated and cultivated they take seriously their sartorial choices and what it says about who they are. Taken together with what she wears her appearance tells the story of her Black womanhood. While Shirleen takes her own choices seriously, she exposes a blind spot about the value and utility of other Black women’s fashion and hair choices when she critiques Kanekalon’s baby hair. In doing so she limits the possibility of forming a womanist community where information can be shared, women can be hard, and where individual beauty choices can be affirmed.
The laying down of one’s baby hair refers to a practice where Black women lay down their soft edges when their hairline is on display. This happens when they are wearing an updo68, a lace front wig69, box braids70, or any other style where one’s hair will be away from their face. It is a way of policing one’s coarse edges that mimics the soft hair that babies have that softly frames their face. Black women can wear lace front wigs with baby hair already attached.
In her fourth video, Shirleen Would Rather Go Hungry Before She Go Out With
67. Cooper, Eloquent Rage, 49.
68. Urban Dictionary. Updo. An updo is a woman’s hairstyle where the hair is fastened up and away from the face and neck. https://urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=updo (Accessed February 14, 2019).
69. Urban Dictionary. Lace Front. A wig where the hairline is glued to the scalp giving the wig a realistic appearance. https://urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lace%20front (Accessed February 14, 2019).
70. Liveabout. How to Style and Care for Box Braids for Black Hair. Box braids are a braided hairstyle often achieved with synthetic hair additions. The name is derived in part from the box or square shape partings for each braid. https://www.liveabout.com/how-to-style-and-care-for-box-braids-for-Black- hair-400253 (Accessed February 14, 2019).
183 Adults with Baby Hair she offers a critique of Black women who for making a style choice that is beyond the boundaries of what seems appropriate for Black women in general and for Black women of a certain age in general even though it is a practice not usually limited by age. It is a unique style choice that makes one look younger. In an
Ebony magazine article entitled, Detangling our Roots: The History of Baby Hairs, the author notes that Black women have engaged in this practice since the 1970s with
LaToya Jackson, continued through the 1990s with the rap duo Salt ‘n Pepa, and remains a hair style choice for Black and Latina women.71 This is an aesthetic representation that
Kanekalon and her mother embrace.
Shirleen is revolutionary, ratchet, and womanist in that she speaks to the necessity of constructing images and sharing narratives that celebrate Black women’s ways of being. At the same time, she maintains some allegiance to a respectability politic that dictates the ways in which Black women should look, behave, and act to prove themselves worthy of respect. The distance around appropriateness and age allow her to levy a critique. She is very much the church mother who takes several hours preparing for church, and yet, levies a critique about how other women make choices for themselves.
Shirleen’s problem is that Kanekalon and her mother are too old to have their baby hair combed down even though this is a practice in the community. She questions this particular aesthetic representation. However, she misses their ratchet resistance in a culture that dictates how they should look and dismisses Black beauty when it is convenient.
71. Princess Gabbara, Ebony Magazine, Detangling Our Roots: The History of Baby Hairs, April 27, 2017 https://www.ebony.com/style/history-baby-hairs/ (Accessed January 3, 2019).
184 For Kenekalon and her mother to embrace and celebrate their own what they consider beautiful and desirable represents how they negotiate the complex nature of identity politics and how they live into their definition of Black womanhood. Given that
Black women often stand outside of what is considered beautiful in an American context
– white, blue eyed, and blond – their resistance to this standard indicates that they are not interested in being acceptable to a racist culture. While Black women cannot police the mainstream consumption of their cultural capital, they can and do manipulate the boundaries of what is considered beautiful to include themselves. They are in fact embracing a self-worth on their own terms utilizing tools and a language at their disposal.
These are womanist and ratchet lessons learned Kanekalon and her mother learned from
Shirleen. She fosters a resistance that embodies a way of moving in the world that refuses invisibility and is anchored is the wisdom of Black women. In the fifth video, Shirleen expresses the necessity for Black women’s self-definition as central to surviving in a patriarchal world.
Fifth Video – Hershel Out My Face
In her fifth video, Hershel Out My Face, Shirleen continues to embrace a womanist and ratchet way of being that reflects the ways in which Black women care for one another.
Hershel Out My Face
Ruby: Shirleen where you going? Shirleen: I'm going to my car. Ruby: Why?
185 Shirleen: I'm down here at Sewing with Seniors and Janice come up to me talking about Shirleen uh, woman to woman did you talk to Hershel? I said why? Because uh, me and Hershel are talking, dating now and I don't want it to be a problem. Girl talk to Hershel. We went to the Sizzler thirty years ago I don't care nothing about no Hershel. We sat and talked at the sizzler and I found out that he had potential. Potential to be a hindrance to my life. A lot of people see potential and want to explore the options. I ain't exploring nothing. I saw that you had potential to be poor and I said no I ain't gone touch that. Fool with Hershel? Hershel ain't done nothing since 30 years ago, Hershel? Girl that's how I feel about him. I dive right over this and break my neck, Hershel? Girl I have better luck breaking my neck than dating Hershel. Date Hershel? Hershel ain't had nothing going for him but good, nice shoes. That's all he had. Nice shoes. Hershel? Hershel out my face.72
Shirleen’s Womanism
Shirleen affirms the necessity of Black women having safe spaces where they can build and share knowledge that helps them with daily survival. She reflects a womanist practice of women having sister circles for fellowship, communication, prayer, or simply to support or caution one another. Sister circles can take place in any space where Black women are committed to building meaningful relationships through sharing their lived experiences that build resilience among themselves and it extends into the world.
These spaces are important because it validates their knowledge, experience, and motherwit as the authoritative center from which they can speak. Through dialogue and ritual performances women share equal voice and connectedness in the decisions and
72. The Christi Show, YouTube, Hershel out My Face, https://youtu.be/WeLwddbUhGA (Accessed December 15, 2018).
186 choices they make.73Sewing with seniors is a womanist sister circle for Shirleen and
Janice. It is affirming and it provides an arena for difficult dialogues.
Janice engages Shirleen in a conversation that marks Hershel as her territory. She creates boundaries and claims ownership over him. The conversation they have inside the church offers insight into Black women’s dialogue practices that differs from images of them breaking into fights and throwing food and drinks at each other in public and private spaces. It is also a nod to how women negotiate love matters in a patriarchy that often situates them on the underside when it comes to availability and desirability.
Black women’s musical traditions acknowledge this kind of dynamic when it comes to love affairs. Janice and Shirleen’s conversation about Hershel is reminiscent to
Shirley Brown’s song, Woman to Woman, where she claims ownership of her man while speaking to another woman. She says:
Now Barbara, I don’t know how you’re gonna take this But whether you be cool or come out of a bag one me You see, it doesn’t really make any difference But it’s only fair that I let you know that The man you’re in love with He’s mine.74
Both women, Shirley and Janice, assert themselves, claim sexual agency, and sexual freedom. These negotiations often pit women against one another, however, this is not the case for Shirleen and Janice. There is room for women to assert themselves and their
73. Vanessa Sheared, “Giving Voice: An Inclusive Model of Instruction – A Womanist Perspective,” in The Womanist Reader, ed. Layli Phillips (New York: Routledge, 2006), 275.
74. Shirley Brown, Woman to Woman, Written by Eddie Marion, Henderson Jr. Thigpen, James Banks © Universal Music Publishing Group 1975.
187 desires in ways that are not judged and pathologized. In a culture where Black women’s sexuality is negatively stereotyped and rooted in historical and sociocultural systems of oppression75 this womanist space affirms their sexuality and being. She also reveals her vulnerability and it is important that in these spaces one’s humanity is affirmed. Moreover, through difficult sharing stories within safe spaces, the conversations that Black women have with one another express and ethic of caring.76
An ethic of caring recognizes that sometimes empathy and understanding is a more appropriate response. When Shirleen responds outside of the womanist space, she honors Janice and the ways in which she defines herself, even if she disagrees, because
Shirleen is aware that her response would not be appropriate. In doing so, she points to
Walker’s embrace of love as a central feature of womanism. Love is the purposeful and unconditional commitment to sacrificial action for the good of another.77 The survival of the group and the community leads to the building of healthy individuals and communities. This love builds and does not ask people to sacrifice themselves to support oppressive systems and ideologies.
As Shirleen responds, she engages in her own act of self-definition by outlining her priorities, what makes sense to her, and why it matters. This is also womanist. As
75. Qiana M. Cutts, “Black Women’s Sexuality and Relationships: Embracing Self-Love Through Breathe-ing,” in Black Women’s Mental Health: Balancing Strength and Vulnerability, eds. Stephanie Y. Evans, Kanika Bell, and Nsenga K. Burton (Albany: SUNY Press, 2017), 161.
76. Marsha Houston, “Triumph Stories: Caring and Accountability in African American Women’s Conversation Narratives,” in Centering Ourselves: African American Feminist and Womanist Studies of Discourse, eds. Marsha Houston and Olga Idriss-Davies (Cresskill: Hampton Press, Inc, 2002), 80.
77. Alero Afejuku, Shelia Flemming-Hunter, and Ayo Gathing, “Love Lessons: Black omen Teaching Black Girls to Love,” in Black Women’s Mental Health: Balancing Strength and Vulnerability, eds. Stephanie Y. Evans, Kanika Bell, and Nsenga K. Burton (Albany: SUNY Press, 2017), 246.
188 Shirleen stands outside of the church, she creates her own womanist space and engages in truth telling that does not disrupt community. In terms of her own romantic and sexual sense of self, she is clear that a man with potential and nice shoes is not enough for her. She does not dismiss his value as a human being nor his importance or contributions to the larger community. She is also telling women when a romantic possibility shows up that is not in alignment with your priorities you should leave it at the
Sizzler. This is part of her ratchetness.
Shirleen’s Ratchetness
Shirleen’s response outside of the church is about being confident, affirming one’s self-worth, and self-love as an example of subjective empowerment. Her emphasis on these qualities may help Black women distance themselves from potentially abusive relationships, negative self-talk, and see themselves as sacred beings who deserve loving relationships. Black women are worthy of a love that challenges, changes, and liberates them from oppression.
Shirleen’s ratchet response lies in her over the top, outrageous, and embodied response to her conversation with Janice. She literally throws herself on the railing claiming that she would have better luck breaking her neck than dating Hershel. She would rather sacrifice herself than entertain a relationship with someone who is not suited for her. Shirleen critiques a culture that requires women to sacrifice themselves and their needs for companionship. Black women consistently sacrifice their needs and forget about the importance of self-nurturance. This is key to their well-being and survival.
Ratchetness is part of a cultural tradition of freedom for Black women. It shows how they
189 have claimed authority to challenge oppression and create alternative visions of what resistance looks like for everyday women.
Ratchetness gives Black women the room to design ways to creatively resist and express themselves. Black women are complex and multidimensional, and they do not have to ascribe to the narrowly defined roles ascribed to them. Additionally, ratchetness provides a language for Black women to reject ideologies that tells them their bodies and beauty are unacceptable. McEachern asserts that ratchet makes room for it all, telling us our bodies are not wrong, they just is what they is.78 Black women are free to be who they are and walk in their authentic selves without apology and be celebrated.
In a patriarchal society, women are expected to be self-negating and place people- pleasing above their own need for personal transformation. This is part of the “sin of servanthood” that continues to exploit Black women. The idea that Black women are supposed to be servants to all does little to change the condition of Black women or the image of Black people as inferior beings meant for servanthood.79 This is destructive for
Black women to continually give and not take care of themselves. Shirleen resists this aspect and expectation from and for Black women. In her own way, she unapologetically advocates for a cultural context that encourages Black people in general, and Black women in particular, to focus on self-care.
Caring for one’s needs is an act of survival80 and it resists the narrative that women have to put the needs of everyone else before their own. When Black women care
78. McEachern, Respect My Ratchet, 85.
79. Brown-Crawford, A Hope in the Holler, 93.
80. Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light and Other Essays (Mineola: Ixia Press, 2017), 130.
190 for themselves they resist larger narratives about their bodies being ugly and emphatically declare that they are worthy of love, care, and protection. As they embrace their own standard of beauty they subvert white supremacy, patriarchy, and its social constructions of beauty. bell hooks asserts that when Black women place their well-being at the center they attend to the deeper needs of their souls and see themselves as they really are.81 This is the space where Black women can come together, celebrate one another, and help each other heal. It is the space where the focus is on the holistic care of
Black women’s minds, bodies, and spirits.
Shirleen’s womanism and ratchetness reflect the practices of everyday Black women as they build languages of resistance, love, and self-care. Shirleen manifests the ways in which womanism and ratchetness as praxis for Black women often overlap. The line between the two is not always clear. The theory and praxis are not the same. Theory often lags behind praxis. What happens most often is that something is lived before it is explained. With womanism and ratchetness, there are ways of being and living that gives
Black women the space to build resistance practices while they are in the midst of fighting oppression, building nurturing practice, and constructing a language of motherwit that contributes to the survival of Black women and girls that extends into future generations. These creative, fluid, and dynamic resistant rituals speak to the audaciousness of Black womanhood to create ways of survival that honors their genius of making a way out of no way. As both are grounded in Black women’s ways of being and moving in the world they embrace the varied ways in which Black women define and
81. bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 139.
191 redefine themselves away from harmful narrative that misrecognize their strengths and humanity. Shirleen shows that being ratchet and womanist can coexist together.
Every kind of Black woman is needed to dismantle the hegemonic forces of race, sex, and class oppression.
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
The purpose of this study was to investigate whether Tyler Perry’s Madea and
Christianee Porter’s Miss Shirleen represent figures of Black women’s agency when analyzed through the lens of womanism and ratchetness. To accomplish this, the researcher analyzed the first two Perry films and five Shirleen’s videos for acts that represent womanism and ratchetness. Given their large following on film and social media and their impact on the popular culture, these two characters deserve analysis.
While the characters are comical, the underlying messages they convey have cultural significance beyond entertainment. Images representing Black women engaging in ratchet and womanist resistance communicates the importance of embracing the radical subjectivity and dismissal of respectability politics that visualizes and embraces Black womanhood in powerful and affirming ways.
Ratchet Is…Ratchet Ain’t
192 193 Ratchet acts are those actions that do more than required for a given situation; they are over the top and excessive.1 It is the disproportionate response to transgressive acts of disrespect that catches one’s attention. Ratchet acts are impossible to miss and are meant to be visible. At its worst, ratchet has been defined as foolish, ignorant, ho’ishness and ghetto.2 Limited to this definition, ratchetness renders Black women invisible, reduced to binaries, silenced, and marginalized. Black women’s agentive capacities are limited, and they become objects of shame. At its best, as McEachern and Cooper assert, ratchetness is a liberative framework for Black women to facilitate survival in a culture that is hostile to Black bodies. This research has revealed at least three important ideas about ratchetness.
First, ratchetness is not new. The behavior it engenders has been around for a long time; the nomenclature around it has changed. It may have been called womanish, hood, or even ghetto. However, its liberative edge remains the same. Black women who decide to take action against oppression in ways that are outside acceptable norms, are always read as transgressive and women to be feared. Moreover, these are women who must be controlled through socially constructed methods such as respectability politics which advocates for particular behavioral standards. Those who fail to conform may suffer marginalization from the community. It also occurs by policing of Black women’s bodies through physical violence in an effort to silence them and stop their protest efforts.
1. Brittney Cooper, “(Un)Clutching My Mother’s Pearls, or Ratchetness and the Residue of Respectability,” in The Crunk Feminist Collective eds. Brittney Cooper, Susana Morris, and Robin Bylorn (New York: The Feminist Press, 2017), 218.
2. LaMonda Horton-Stallings, “Hip Hop and the Black Ratchet Imagination,” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 2, no. 2 (2013): 13.
194 Second, ratchetness helps to illustrate that Black women are always clear about their identities and how they define themselves. Michaela Angela Davis believes that Black women are the shape shifters, superheroes, style-layers, soul scholars, sisters, healers, holy-rollers, hotties, listeners, lovers, dreamers, divas, daredevil, doers of the damn thing – all at the same damn time.3 Black women walk in many intersectionalities, and ratchetness celebrates all of them. It makes room for all voices at the table and respects what each voice brings. Ratchetness provides space to question the superficial binaries of Black womanhood that complicate and humanize working class Black life4 and expands these complexities to Black women across class lines so that they can resist economic, political, and social oppressions together.
Finally, ratchetness recognizes the ways in which Black women are successful despite living in in a racist, sexist, classist society. Ratchetness honors the creativity, resilience, and knowledge production of Black women as they devise methodologies that subvert systems of oppression. Despite being portrayed as mammy’s, sapphires, jezebels, and other controlling images, Black women manage to overcome misogynoir and mythic lies about who they are, see themselves in the mirror, and like what they see.5 Success for
Black women is not solely measured in terms of finances. Success also means redefining power as the capacity to maintain natural and personal balance in order to positively
3. Brittney Cooper, Susana Morris, Robin Bylorn, “Introduction Girls Studies: Black Girls are Magic,” in The Crunk Feminist Collective, ed. Brittney Cooper, Susana Morris, Robin Bylorn (New York: The Feminist Press, 2017), 109.
4. Bettina Love, “A Ratchet Lens: Black Queer Youth, Agency, Hip Hop and the Black Ratchet Imagination,” Educational Researcher 46, no. 9 (December 2017): 539.
5. Cooper et al., Introduction Girls Studies, 108.
195 impact the world.6 Ratchetness honors Black women as they are and their right to push back against definitions of a Black womanhood they never agreed to.
You Still Acting Womanish? Good!
Alice Walker’s phrase, “you acting womanish” originating from Black folk culture referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous, or willful behavior, served as part of her definition for her womanist definition. A womanist is a strong Black woman who has been mislabeled a domineering matriarch because she developed strategies for survival in spite of racial and sexual oppression to save her family and people.7
Womanists are audacious and courageous enough to demand the right to be seen as fully human and that they are entitled to the dignity that accompanies everyday living.
Womanism is a space that honors the genius of everyday Black women and recognizes that they are their own authority. It frees Black women from respectability politics because it calls on them to act in ways that counter a desire for white approval and its practice is rooted in racism and sexism. This research revealed at least three important ideas about the continued relevance of womanism.
First, womanism continues to be a reminder that it takes all kinds of Black women to participate in the liberation of the entire community. Womanism asks the question, “If you’re not liberating everyone, are you really talking about freedom?” As an antioppressionist ideology and practice, womanism identifies with liberation projects of
6. Stephanie Y. Evans, From Worthless to Wellness: Self Worth, Power, and Creative Survival in Memoirs of Sexual Assault,” in Black Women’s Mental Health: Balancing Strength and Vulnerability, eds. Stephanie Y. Evans, Kanika Bell, and Nsenga K. Burton (New York: SUNY Press, 2017), 92.
7. Jacqueline Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 205.
196 all sorts and supports the liberation of all humankind for all forms of oppression.8 It affirms the voices and gifts of Black women and is an option for those concerned about justice. Womanists are moved to act beyond the paradigms of race, class, and gender.
They are committed to the dignity of all people and recognizes that there are several sites of brilliance within the community.
Second, womanism’s emphasis on safe spaces continues to be necessary for Black women. In the midst of community, the well-being of all members becomes the center of concern. There is room for reconciliation and balancing relationships. Developing resilient individuals contributes to building resilient, enduring communities. By aggregating and articulating individual expressions of consciousness, a focused collective consciousness becomes possible.9 There is room for the single mother and the University professor, the sex worker and the banker, the grandmother and the high school sophomore. Black women need these spaces for knowledge creation, community building, and self-definition.
Finally, womanism encourages Black women to love themselves. Black women loving themselves pose a threat to heteropatriarchy and white supremacist structures because of their fierceness, beauty, intellect, and fortitude.10 Encouraging Black women to love themselves means that they are committed to focusing on and exposing injustices
8. Layli Phillips, The Womanist Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), xxiv.
9. Janice D. Hamlet, “Assessing Womanist Thought: The Rhetoric of Susan L. Taylor,” in The Womanist Reader, ed. Layli Phillips (New York: Routledge, 2006), 226.
10. Brittney Cooper, Susana Morris, and Robin Bylorn, “Sisterhood: She’s Not Heavy, She’s my Sister,” in The Crunk Feminist Collective, eds. Brittney Cooper, Susana Morris, and Robin Bylorn (New York: The Feminist Press: 2017), 270.
197 that affect marginalized people. As Black women love themselves they eschew the narrative of a larger that devalues their bodies and beauty. Additionally, by embracing their aesthetic choices their creativity creates a template for resistance in a culture that worships at the altar of white beauty standards.
Findings on Madea
Based on these ideas, this research sought to answer the following questions:
What actions of Madea are ratchet and what are womanist? How are these actions agentive? Why does she engage in these behaviors and why does she encourage others to do so? Are her actions contributing to the dismantling of oppressive systems, and do they aid in building community?
Madea engages in several ratchet actions in Diary of A Mad Black Woman and
Madea’s Family Reunion. Her ratchetness is revealed through acts of disrespect, hypervisibility, and freedom from controlling images. Acts of disrespect reveal her ability to go off, talk back, vocalize her anger, and otherwise let her displeasure be known.11
Specifically, Madea destroys property, threatens violence with a weapon, assaults two minors, and instructs her niece to throw hot grits on her abusive fiancé. Her actions exceed the limits of acceptable behavior and break away from respectability politics.
Some may view her actions as someone who is acting in a dysfunctional or out of pocket manner, unruly, someone whose actions could be considered as severely
11. Brittney Cooper, Susan Morris, and Robin Bylorn, “Crunk Glossary,” in The Crunk Feminist Collective, eds. Brittney Cooper, Susana Morris, and Robin Bylorn (New York: The Feminist Press: 2017), 326.
198 undistinguishable, possessing little or no class.12 However, to read her actions through that lens alone misses the power of her ratchetness. Madea’s actions embrace a liberatory consciousness that undermines misogyny and behaviors and impact the well-being of
Black women. Her ratchet acts encourage other Black women to embrace their own agency by making different choices for their lives, finding and using their voice, and engaging in self-definition.
Madea’s willingness to engage in acts of disrespect allows Helen and Vanessa to do the same. Helen tears the clothes of her husband’s mistress as an avenue towards regaining her sense of self and take back her power. Madea uses ratchetness to teach Lisa and Vanessa grit ball as an organic resistance technique. In doing so, she shows them how Black women have historically used to tools at their disposal to resist oppression.
Tools that seems harmless can also be instruments of liberation. Lisa engages her ratchet agency when she throws a pot of hot grits on him after he strikes her for the final time.
Lisa not only reclaims her, life but also her voice, and she almost lost both in an abusive relationship. What appears to be destruction is an avenue for Black women to express their anger and rage in ways that will not be judged.
Madea’s Ratchetness
Ratchetness gives Black women the freedom to undermine and challenge systems that prevent their well-being and wholeness. Moreover, it makes room for extreme measures that may be necessary for some Black women in order for them to escape situations that jeopardizes their lives. Ratchet acts of resistance disrupt disempowering, hegemonic spaces and narratives. Madea empowers Black women to tap into their own
12. Horton-Stallings, Hip Hop, 136.
199 ratchetness as a way to engage in their own self-determination. Madea’s ratchet mentoring helped Helen find her voice and speak her truth to her husband. That is something she was unable to do in her marriage. Under Madea’s tutelage, Nikki learned how to stand up for herself and realize she was someone who deserved love. This is especially important because Black girls deserve spaces where they are celebrated in love, solidarity, and visibility.13
Madea’s ratchetness is critical because there are communities where Black women must engage in violence to protect themselves and their families. There has to be space to include their experiences, recognize their stories as valid forms of resistance, and claim agency and revolt against the commodification of Black women’s bodies. In a culture that consistently visits violence upon Black bodies – male and female – advocating for wholeness and being prepared to defend one’s self is a ratchet act.
Patriarchy, racism, sexism, and homophobia condones violence against marginalized populations. These ideologies strip Black women of their humanity, but there has to be room to respond to these oppressive systems with force. As Cooper asserts, a precisely focused rage becomes a powerful source of energy for change.14
Freedom from controlling images validates the ways that Black women choose to express themselves when they show the full range of their emotions. They can embrace their full agency as human beings and resisting the binary of respectability politics.
Liberation means promoting the physical, emotional, and psychological well-being of
13. Cooper et al., Introduction Girls Studies, 109.
14. Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers her Superpower (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 5.
200 Black women that recognizes their different experiences. Embracing this liberation also affirms that the definition of who Black women are exists on a spectrum.
In the popular imagination, Black womanhood has become virtually synonymous with strength15, however, there is no singular definition of Black womanhood. It is important to have a myriad of representations that creates space for everyone to exist and express their authentic selves. This helps to eliminate the binary language of a good/bad
Black womanhood. An understanding of Black womanhood that is responsive to the needs of Black women and girls is responsive to, and provides sanctuary from, the discrimination they face.
Madea’s Womanism
Madea’s insistence on self-definition actively engages a womanist commitment to self-love, self-care, and liberation that resists the daily systemic injustices Black women endure. Her womanist acts are revealed through her creation of safe, epistemic spaces for women and her sharing of intergenerational wisdom to help Black women and girls survive.
Madea builds community by creating safe spaces where woman can be heard, share their experiences, and learn how to respond to oppressive forces. Madea provides an opportunity for women to strengthen their relationships with each other to build alliances that provide support and produce liberative spaces. The conversations around her kitchen table become a classroom to learn how to deal with and respond to
15. Chenequa Barnes-Walker, “When the Bough Breaks: The StrongBlackWoman and The Embodiment of Stress,” in Black Women’s Mental Health: Balancing Strength and Vulnerability, eds. Stephanie Y. Evans, Kanika Bell, and Nsenga K. Burton (New York: SUNY University Pres, 2017), 43.
201 oppression.16 Alliances are constructed that move Black women from being victims of oppression to women who walk in their strengths.
While many of Madea’s actions seem unorthodox, womanism creates spaces that are relatable to Black women and reflects the complexities their lives. Madea’s kitchen becomes a womanist space where she passes on her wisdom to Lisa and Vanessa. When
Madea teaches Vanessa and Lisa about grit ball as a way to protect oneself against abuse, she is also demonstrating how Black women can make any space a location for revolutionary resistance. Madea also uses this space to build her self-esteem. Madea’s womanist mentoring help Nikki’s to see herself as an empowered young woman. When
Madea shares her wisdom, she imparts intergenerational survival strategies and tactics that have been passed down by generations of Black women in America.
Madea’s womanist acts empower regular Black women accomplish what they thought was impossible. They can leave and abusive relationship, start life anew, thrive in school, and resist negative messages about their sense of self. In the midst of the community, Madea’s concern remains the well-being of all women. She creates a space where women are able to attain or regain their sense of balance. This demonstrates the importance of community where the well-being of all members is the primary concern.
Everyone around the table is heard and as a result a focused and collective consciousness becomes possible.17
16. Patricia Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 49.
17. Hamlet, Assessing Womanist Thought, 226.
202 Madea encourages Black women to speak for themselves. No one can articulate and advocate for their humanity better than they can. No one else can speak about the depth of Black women’s pain, understand their family, church and community responsibilities, or faithfully assess their abilities without prejudice.18
Findings on Miss Shirleen
The second research question this research sought to answer was: What actions of Miss Shirleen are ratchet and womanist? How are her actions agentive and work to dismantle oppressive systems within churches?
Miss Shirleen’s Ratchetness
Shirleen’s ratchet acts are revealed through her acts of creative resistance and her rejection of respectability. Her acts of creative resistance and rejection of respectability are evident when she attempts to use have the senior choir use a Cardi B song on Sunday morning, her tambourine protest outside of her church, her animated response to questions about her marital status, destroying the hair salon, critiquing baby hair on adults, and almost throwing herself over a railing at church.
Shirleen’s deployment of ratchetness as her disrespectability politic embraces trap music, pearls, and a love of fashion. Her acts speak truth to power in ways that are radical, creative, and talk back to the inter and intracultural policing of Black women’s bodies and behavior. Shirleen demands that Black women confront assaults to their humanity and her ratchet responses depathologize the ways that Black women often have to fight back in order to be heard, seen, and understood. This again reemphasizes the
18. Teresa Fry-Brown, God Don’t Like Ugly: African American Women Handing On Spiritual Values (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000), 54.
203 power of ratchetness and how it facilitates Black women’s survival. It undermines messages that challenge and prevent the well-being of Black people.19
Shirleen’s actions reject respectability politics representing a set of behaviors and attitudes embodied by white middle-class people that Black people are supposed to emulate in order to be respected. It emphasizes public displays of decorum, sexual restraint, and deportment.20 Shirleen is overly dramatic, hyper-expressive, loud, and enjoys getting loose and having fun. Shirleen’s ratchet acts foreground the language and experience of an audacious Black womanhood that uses every tool at its disposal to combat oppressive ideologies. Shirleen uses the creativity of ratchetness to resist the imposition of respectability politics and its restrictions on how Black women and girls should act and present themselves. Her language and actions issue a call to authenticity that affirms and facilitates Black women’s survival. Shirleen’s actions call for a reconsideration of what empowerment looks like through a defiant form of female agency.
Miss Shirleen’s Womanism
Miss Shirleen’s womanist acts are revealed when she outlines her priorities and demonstrates how Black women care for one another. Shirleen outlines her priorities when she shares what is important to her and this contributes to her overall wholeness.
This includes knowing what she wants in a relationship, her aesthetic choices in clothing
19. Montinique McEachern, “Respect my Ratchet: The Liberatory Consciousness of Ratchetness,” Departures in Qualitative Research 6, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 80.
20. Paisley J. Harris, “Gatekeeping and Remaking: The Politics of Respectability in African American Women’s History and Black Feminism,” Journal of Women’s History 15, no 1 (Spring 2003): 213.
204 and hair, and the activities she chooses. Shirleen’s narrative symbolizes the way in which womanism empowers Black women to claim their own voices, claim their own spaces, and tell their own diverse stories of living.21
Shirleen demonstrates her love and care for other Black women when she honors their truths and the sacred spaces where they are shared. In addition to honoring these spaces, she also validates their knowledge, experience, and motherwit as the authoritative center from which they can speak. Through dialogue and ritual performances women share equal voice and connectedness in the decisions and choices they make.22 At the same time within these sacred spaces, Shirleen critiques the church as an institution invested in respectability politics and the harmful narratives it inscribes on Black women’s bodies. Specifically, she points out a church culture that creates hierarchies of value for women based on their marital status. In affirming her own worth as a complete and whole human being, Shirleen deconstructs this idea that women exist to help men meet their needs while ignoring their desires.
Shirleen’s actions help to dismantle oppressive systems in the church because she directly challenges the ideologies that keep Black women marginalized. Specifically, she questions the church’s willingness to silence the poor and working-class women in the community because of how they live. Her creative resistance through using Cardi B’s
Drip and her protest speaks to the silencing and neglect of these communities. She uses
21.Kelly Brown-Douglas, “Twenty Years a Womanist: An Affirming Challenge,” in Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Society and Religion, ed. Stacy Floyd-Thomas (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 146.
22.Vanessa Sheared, “Giving Voice: An Inclusive Model of Instruction – A Womanist Perspective,” in The Womanist Reader, ed. Layli Phillips (New York: Routledge, 2006), 275.
205 the tools that have helped Black people keep their sanity and humanity under impossible circumstances - music, dance, and the Spirit23 – to point out oppression and usher in a spirit of liberation. She reinterprets her environment to effect a healthier atmosphere24 for herself and other women.
Why This Matters – Ratchetness as Praxis: Ratchet(procity)
Based on the data collected on Madea and Miss Shirleen, the researcher developed a descriptive theory called ratchet(procity), a valid oppositional practice rooted in Black women’s ordinary acts of resistance to oppression and marginalization.
Ratchet(procity) means that Black women engage in behaviors that will lead to their freedom, joy, and an ultimate expression of who they are without shame or judgment.
These acts, which are particular to each woman, reject the silencing, the disrespect, and marginalization that Black women often experience because their strengths are misrecognized. Ratchet(procity) as praxis is an everyday form of resistance.
Ratchet(procity) rejects the politics of respectability and its limitations on creativity and personal expressiveness that results in unequal treatment. As an oppositional practice, it seeks to serve as a pedagogical, liberatory, and communal way of being for Black women that resists any system, institution, policy, or structure that denies people the opportunity to live out their full humanity regardless of how they show up.
Ratchet(procity) is not about performance; it is about how Black women teach each other to challenge sexist, racist, homophobic, and classist ideologies. Ratchetprocity is a
23. Cheryl Townsend-Gilkes, “The Loves and Troubles of African American Women’s Bodies: The Womanist Challenge to Cultural Humiliation and Community Ambivalence,” in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emilie M. Townes (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1995), 238.
24. Fry-Brown, God Don’t Like Ugly, 57.
206 disrespectability politic that honors and validates the voices and experiences of all
Black women. The importance and value of ratchet(procity) lies in three major points.
First, it allows Black women, however they present themselves, to be heard when they speak authentically without judgment. Respectability politics forces Black women to wear a mask to reflect the ideals and mores of the larger culture. They are often expected to hide their true selves behind the mask of acceptable femininity and not feed into the larger hegemonic discourse about their bodies and sexuality. Ratchet(procity) insists on
Black women using their voice and body to transform knowledge building for themselves. It is a valid, organic way of questioning, challenging, interrogating and talking back to oppressive systems that insists on being heard. It dismantles the ways that respectability politics pathologizes poor and working-class women and builds alliances across beliefs so that lessons can be learned from everyone. It is a reminder that lessons for survival come from unexpected places. Ratchet(procity) uses Black women’s embodied knowledge, which positions them as empowered agents in their own liberation.
Second, ratchet(procity) gives Black women room for an excessive creativity that leads to a form of hypervisibility that cannot be missed. Black women have learned that assimilation has not led to their protection. Assimilation has contributed to their invisibility. Despite Black women’s achievements, according to the dictates of respectability, they are consistently confronted by violent structures that seek to silence and shame them. Embracing the radical subjectivity of ratchetprocity dismisses the narrow definitions of Black womanhood and leaves room for creating definitions that are powerful and affirming. It resists the inter- and intracultural policing of Black women.
Ratchetprocity embraces and encourages an over the top, rebellious female agency that
207 gives Black women space to express their creativity through excessive responses.
Their acts foster healing from the daily assaults against their humanity.
Moreover, this agency affirms the ways they show up in the world and legitimizes their daily resistance activities as normative, valuable, and authoritative. This on the ground, excessive creativity and response are part of the pedagogical impetus of ratchetprocity. Everyone has a seat at the table, regardless of class status, to share resistance strategies and epistemologies that help them navigate and survive in a world hostile to Black women. In this way it engages in a non-hierarchical, communal womanist discourse where all voices are welcome. All bodies and voices are not the same and they do not have to agree. However, there is room for them to be supported, respected, and encouraged to achieve freedom and liberation in an effort to end oppression and vulnerability.
Third, ratchet(procity) commands and demands an audience so that Black women are seen and heard outside of patriarchal hegemonic discourses that silence and dismiss those not deemed worthy. It rejects patriarchy’s use of women’s bodies to render women invisible and unworthy in public and private spaces. Ratchetprocity resists the dampening of Black women’s authenticity so others are comfortable; it intentionally names, claims, and shouts the complexities of Black womanhood as a critical consciousness. The voice of their politics, this critical consciousness, positions their identities as antagonistic toward stereotypes, defiant against discrimination, and even dangerous in the face of disrespect. Black women’s joy and pain is on full display in ways that cannot be missed or ignored. It is a way to recreate and recenter one’s own narrative that is close to one’s experience. Ratchet(procity) calls on Black women to use their voices, music, dancing,
208 and any other means at their disposal to move from places of pain and silence to power. These are coping strategies that illustrate a creative resistance to how the larger culture attempts to erase them; they are full-bodied expressions of their humanity.
Ratchet(procity) insists that Black women articulate and demonstrate an understanding of themselves; it insists on Black women being heard and seen as they proclaim it.
Madea and Miss Shirleen represent ratchet(procity) in three ways. Outside of the slapstick and satire performance they provide, they engage in a pedagogy that validates the voices of all Black women, they speak their truths regardless of how it looks, and they show that Black women do not need their truths validated by anyone other than themselves. What they convey is that it does not matter who is presenting it, whether it is a man in drag or a young woman parodying an elder church mother, the truth and authority of the message is received. Moreover, their messages may be received because, perhaps, they remind the viewer of women they know. They are the mothers and othermothers who are respected in their churches and communities, but who are engaged in ratchet actions.
Madea and Shirleen teach women how to challenge and resist ideologies that are harmful to them. They raise their voices, tambourines, and even guns in protest to unfair treatment. Using the wisdom of their foremothers, and mixing in some of their womanist sass, these two women model how Black women can redefine what respectable action looks like and leave room for others to develop strategies that work for them. In this way they help other women find their own agency through ratchet(procity).
This work matters because Black women matter. Black women are determined to speak and act for themselves despite the consequences and risks. It is important that they
209 use the practices and languages available to them as essential forms of agency that allow them to assert their identity and build community. Black women continue to resist despite existing in a larger culture that disregards their voices because of an inability to see their humanity.
We Help Each Other
After completing seminary in 2003, I began working in full-time ministry at a large church. I was clear that part of my calling was to find ways to help Black women engage with one another on important issues. The one issue that concerned me was Black women’s health. The local and national news reported on the dismal health outcomes for
Black women. The reports indicated that Black women had the worst rates of HIV/AIDS infections, higher rates of heart disease, stroke, and cancer. I wanted to put together a local health conference so Black women could come together to discuss the statistics and how we could reverse the trend. However, there had to be more than just physicians at the table. I wanted to include community women, small business owners, clergy, and others who wanted to make an impact on shifting the outcomes for Black women. Out of this the Black Women’s Health Symposium was born.
The Symposium took a holistic approach, and its goal was to have workshops that addressed the minds, bodies, and spirits of Black women. Additionally, it was important that the attendees represented a cross section of Black women. The membership of the church where I served was Black, middle to upper middle class, and a majority of the members did not live in the community where the church was located. The church was located in an area of the city where mostly low income and working-class Black people
210 reside. In order for the conversations to be the most productive all voices and experiences needed to be represented at the table.
The committee that worked on the conference was just as varied as the women who attended. This ensured that all perspectives were heard and considered during the planning process. It proved to be very helpful when gauging interests on session topics, potential speakers, marketing, and planning the day. The committee agreed on three session blocks for the day.
The first would be a two-hour “Ask the Doctor” plenary session where a panel of all Black female health professionals who would address the major health issues in their fields. The second and third sessions would have four workshops that would run an hour and a half each. Lunch would be provided between sessions two and three with a final closing session at the end of the day. The sessions covered topics such as healing, financial management, removing the stigma around being a single Black woman, working spiritual growth, celebrating Black women’s beauty, self-care, loving your body, yoga, healthy eating, skin care, getting organized, and being your most authentic self.
Women were able to choose one workshop from the second and third session. This is the format that remained in place as the conference grew over the next several years.
I reached out to local agencies, social workers, community groups, shelters, and other organizations to ensure women from all walks of life were able to attend. For those women who were unable to pay the ten-dollar conference fee, a small scholarship fund was established by a few women so they could attend. For the women who came from local shelters or who were sent by their case workers, they assisted with their child care issues as that was something the conference could not manage.
211 Throughout the day of the conference as I moved from session to session, what I noticed was how each space provided an opportunity for women to learn and share more about themselves, their strengths, and how they met challenges in their lives. It was a space of empowerment, a womanist space, a safe space for them to assist one another as they live and exist in hostile environment and difficult situations. All of these women of various ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, and social locations, shared coping mechanisms, prejudices, and goals as a source of determining how contemporary women can cultivate strategies for self and social transformation.25 This communalism is vital to the survival of Black women. Interdependent community provides a space for healing the wounds of living in a racist, sexist, classist society that does not value Black bodies. In this environment, all women are affirmed and reminded of their individual and collective power.
There were some women who were louder and more expressive than others.
Regardless, their voices were welcome. What they had to say mattered, and they were not judged nor shamed for being their authentic selves. Varying representations of Black womanhood were present, and this was extremely important. There is no one definition of what a Black woman must be, look like, or act like. Larger controlling narratives of
Black women the mammy, matriarch, Jezebel, welfare mother, or Black bitch, continue to resurface to objectify them and justify gender, race, and class oppression.26 The authenticity of Black womanhood lies in its variety and representation matters.
25. Fry-Brown, God Don’t Like Ugly, 173.
26. Ibid., 59.
212 While it is critical to have representations of Black women such as Michelle
Obama and Kamala Harris in the mainstream media, there is also room for images of
Black women who have fun, get loud, and take pleasure in engaging in outrageous behaviors. Conforming to the dictates of respectability politics will not save Black women from being abused, neglected, and dismissed. For eight years, Michelle Obama served as the First Lady of the United States of America, and her status did not protect her from negative controlling images about her body, beauty, and intellect.
Michelle Obama came from a two-parent home, is a graduate from two prestigious universities, and is married with two children. Despite all her achievements, she was connected to the tropes of hypersexuality, the Jezebel, and the angry Black woman. She was referred to as Barack’s baby mama – a derogatory term referring to children born outside of marriage and implies that she is difficult and bothersome.27It was a way to connect her to the racist legacy of Black women being sexually immoral forgetting the rapes and the ways in which motherhood was often forced upon Black women during slavery. The angry Black woman trope was launched when she critiqued the country’s racism while simultaneously acknowledging her pride in being an
American citizen. The July 21, 2008 cover of The New Yorker attempted to solidify this angry Black woman image by portraying her as a gun-toting, afro wearing, Black radical and President Barak Obama as a Black Muslim. The Jezebel trope image was unmasked
27. Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 273.
213 when her body was dissected and discussed in the media. Articles about her sleeveless tops and her behind were seen as overtly sexual and distractions to powerful men.28
Despite these assaults, Michelle Obama insisted on being her most authentic self, and in doing so, she challenged the racist and sexist narratives that sought to reduce her to a stereotype. She engaged in a radical subjectivity that resisted the inter and intracultural policing that often happens to Black women. She was not ashamed of her distinctive Black woman’s body and all of the attributes and anxieties it evokes.29 As
First Lady, she was able to project this message in front of an audience at all times. She rejected the ways in which patriarchy attempts to use women’s bodies as a source of shame and silencing. She told women that it was okay to love themselves as they are.
Michelle Obama engaged in ratchet(procity). She practiced a disrespectability politic that refuses to let Black women be shamed for being their most authentic selves.
The space that the conference provided for Black women to gather was also a space for ratchet(procity) to occur. Black women from all walks of life met, shared, ate, and engaged in important conversations that contributed to the overall quality of their lives. Providing safe spaces for Black women to engage in conversations around self- care, self-identity, and community is critical to their survival. The work that I engage in as an ordained clergy person, must be inclusive of all the ways that Black womanhood exists. Moreover, Black women must be free from being disciplined for the words they use and how they use their bodies, get loose, and have fun. Black women need space to
28. Ibid., 278.
29. Ibid., 284.
214 experience joy without judgment and push back against the restraints of respectability that places unreasonable demands and expectations on Black womanhood.
As a clergyperson engaged in the work of dismantling oppressive ideologies that oppress Black women, their narratives and experiences must be pushed from the margins to the center. Black women’s narratives encompass their wisdom traditions that are replete with brilliance. Dismantling oppressive ideologies means claiming the authority to represent the self in ways that reflect the multiplicities and complexities of Black womanhood. It means you can be ratchet and intellectual, ratchet and love God, ratchet and twerk while teaching. These two identities are not diametrically opposed. Black women get to define themselves for themselves in a language that is organic and authentic.
Employing a framework that affirms ratchet(procity) advocates for subjectivities that are often silenced and shunned as spaces for freedom in daily life. These identities often viewed as deviant and deficient are pathways toward a liberation that acknowledges how Black women speak themselves into existence in spaces where none existed. In the midst of what is labeled as problematic about Black womanhood lies the freedom to construct and embrace modes of living that move past surviving toward thriving.
There is room to incorporate new narratives that speak to and affirm the spectrum upon which Black womanhood exists says that it is good. In the church, this speaks to a new generation of unchurched millennials who have not found themselves represented.
Ratchetness acknowledges their lived experience and recognizes that there is space for inter and intragenerational knowledge sharing. It is a language that speaks to experience of another generation that makes room for embracing one’s authentic self. Ratchetness in
215 the church is inclusive and helps to deconstruct language, attitudes, and behaviors that reinforce the politics of exclusion. This work lends itself to merging the church and the streets with a language that is identifiable and relatable. Creating womanist and ratchet spaces where Black women can come as they are and see their brilliance, is a critical manifestation of resistance.
In the end, ratchetness is a liberative construct for Black women to resist marginalized and oppressive tropes about who they are. Furthermore, it is important to note that not all ratchet behaviors are liberative; there is a standard. There are four important practices to remember. First, engaging in ratchet(procity) means that Black women are not complicit with oppression. Black women work together to alleviate the racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and other problems that conspire against communities of color.
Second, ratchet(procity) is not judgmental or engages in the politics of exclusion that isolates Black women because of their appearance, the way they wear their hair, how they dress, or how they earn money to support themselves and their families. It is a framework that meets Black women where they are and encourages dialogue. As a disrespectability politics, ratchet(procity) recognizes the tensions of living in a racist, sexist, and classist society that looks to silence Black women’s pain, voices, and experiences.
Third, ratchet(procity) is not dehumanizing. It resists the tradition of dehumanization that negatively impact the quality of life for another person.
Ratchet(procity) sees the humanity in every person and works to help people claim their own unique agency to dismantle systems of domination. As a resistant consciousness it
216 provides a counternarrative that advocates for the healing and preservation of Black girls and women who consistently resist the destructive narrative of white hegemony.
Black women draw upon their own language to push back against the micro- and macroaggressions they experience. In this way they create the necessary discourse and dialogue to collectively decide how to respond.
Fourth, ratchet(procity) uses the threat of violence to remove oneself from physically and/or emotionally abusive situations to protect oneself from harm. Engaging in ratchetness for vengeance is not enough. Vengeance is not liberative because it causes more oppression. Ratchetness and ratchet(procity) is about dismantling oppression.
Actions that do not embody these concepts are outside of the liberative framework of ratchet(procity) and become trifling. Trifling acts are self-serving, are not helpful for the larger community, do not work toward the growth of the self in healthy ways, and lack a liberative edge. Ratchet(procity) is not about performance; it is about how Black women teach each other to challenge sexist, racist, homophobic, and classist ideologies. This embodied knowledge positions them as empowered agents in their own liberation.
Performance of ratchetness is about liberation. For black women the performance of ratchetness and ratchet(procity) is about embodiment and centering themselves inside their own narratives. It is about creating spaces where there they are authentically themselves. While some of the tropes of black womanhood are performance based there is a level of truth in them that lends itself toward the liberation of black women.
This study helps to reframe how to understand the voices that are often marginalized. When these voices are silenced essential liberatory tools are removed from the purview of the larger community. In the future it is important to examine other
217 communities of women who are marginalized because their voices and self- presentation are deemed unacceptable to white gaze or respectability politics. It is imperative to look at the multifaceted ways that black womanhood presents itself outside of the gaze of white womanhood. When black women look at themselves through the lens of others their sense of agency is lost. Performance arts offers one avenue to see how
Black women can cultivate spaces to find an authentic self without the gaze of mainstream society.
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