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"Perry, Tyler"
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Tyler Perry : interviews
A career-spanning collection of interviews with the multimedia phenomenon who has directed groundbreaking films like Diary of a Mad Black Woman that feature mostly African American actors and tell stories about adversity, faith, family, and redemption.
Book
Womanist and black feminist responses to Tyler Perry's productions
Tyler Perry has made over half a billion dollars through the development of storylines about black women, black communities and black religion. Yet, a text that responds to his efforts from the perspective of these groups does not exist.
eBook
Tyler Perry : a biography of a movie mogul
\"Explores the life of Tyler Perry, including his difficult childhood and troubled family life, his rise from a struggling playwright to a movie mogul, the controversy over his works, and his status as an entertainment icon\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Take Your Place: Rhetorical Healing and Black Womanhood in Tyler Perry’s Films
The unparalleled commercial sucessess that gospel-playwright-turned-screenwriter Tyler Perry has attained through converting his stage plays into films that depict black women overcoming personal crises raises questions about the intent behind his seemingly feminist-inspired representations of black womanhood. Through an analysis of the rhetoric of healing in Perry’s first two films, this essay reveals one of the suppressive pedagogical functions of Perry’s representation of black womanhood. Rhetorics of healing are a series of persuasive messages, performances, and literacy acts that writers deploy in order to convince readers that redressing or preventing crises requires them to follow the curriculum for ideological, communicative, and behavioral transformation that the writer considers essential to wellness. InDiary of a Mad Black WomanandMadea’s Family Reunion, Perry’s representation of rhetorical healing constructs black Christian women as students who must learn prescribed attitudes and behaviors to achieve, or remain in, states of wellness, and these lessons reinforce conservative gender ideologies and reify patriarchal constructions of the family and home. Given black women’s historically tenuous relationships with representations of themselves and their families in mainstream film, and given the ways in which their labor in the home is simultaneously desired and exploited, the popularity of Perry’s films does not suggest that his representations of healing foster black women’s self-empowerment. Rather, his popularity points to a moment where black women’s pain is a commodity and their instructive journeys to wellness are an exploited site where writers can carry out their own agendas.
Journal Article
Tyler perry’s America
Tyler Perry is the most successful African-American filmmaker of his generation, garnering both accolades and controversies. In Tyler Perry's America, Shayne Lee examines eleven of Perry's highest-grossing films to explore key themes of race, gender, class, and religion, and what Perry's films reveal about contemporary African-American life.
eBook
The Cinematic Incarnation of Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie: Tyler Perry's Black Middle-Class
Images of Black Americans in modern cinema often depict negative stereotypes of working-and lower-class Blacks. Yet, with the rise of the Black middle-class and the increasing inclusion of Blacks in positions of power within the mass media, more images of middle-class Blacks have begun to appear, particularly through the work of Tyler Perry. We find that Perry's images largely reflect E. Franklin Frazier's characterization of middle-class Blacks in The Black Bourgeoisie (1957), where Perry frames them as (1) materialistic and status-obsessed, (2) dysfunctional and abusive, and (3) disdainful of workingand lower-class Blacks. We also argue that he is creating new controlling images like the \"Emasculated Black Gentleman.\" In these ways, Perry's images may have detrimental consequences including perpetuating Black stereotypes, reinforcing existing class and gender tensions in Black America, and impeding the life chances of middle-class Blacks by suggesting that they are unsuitable for assimilation and integration.
Journal Article
Tyler Perry and the Rhetoric of Madea: Contrasting Performances of Perry’s Leading Lady as She Appears on Stage and Screen
In this essay, we will explore the variances in Madea’s character and presence on stage and on screen in both productions of Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail: The Play and Madea Goes to Jail. Specifically, we examine the multiple and varying ways in which the character of Madea performs for different audiences by examining how the roles of violence, religion and wisdom operate on stage and screen. Exploring the subtle—and at times, not-so-subtle—ways in which Madea’s performances differ from stage to screen, we suggest that Madea also performs as a text that Perry then uses to impart different messages to audiences of both stage and screen.
Journal Article
Madea Sensation: Paradox and Trans Feminist Possibilities in Tyler Perry's Work
Openly celebrating contradiction, Perry’s films rely on jokes about his cross-dressing performance as Madea as well as his tendency to play multiple roles at once to interpellate the audience as knowledgeable spectators who delight in the films’ seeming inconsistencies.78 While often poorly constructed and frequently deeply offensive, Perry’s Madea films demonstrate that what appears to be inconsistent or contradictory—that which exceeds common sense—can be received with pleasure and joy rather than fear. As a character, Madea tells us nothing that is new or productive about trans femininity. However, as a trickster figure who attracts both outrage and deep affection because of her apparent contradictions, Madea can challenge us to examine the stigma that attaches to all that is not (yet) legible. At the beginning of Madea’s film career, Roberts and Cannick argued that there was something in audiences’ affection for her that might be mobilized toward trans liberation. While hypocrisy is not in fact the answer and although Perry’s politics are violent, patriarchal, and deeply flawed, the pleasures that audiences find in Perry’s Madea films suggest that we have the ability to grapple with the complicated incompossibilities of experience. As M. Jacqui Alexander writes, a “space of convergence” is a space of “possibility.”79 What becomes possible if spectators encounter Madea’s inconsistencies as an incoherent text’s invitation to envision what might lie beyond the boundaries of white supremacist, cissexist, heteropatriarchal common sense?
Journal Article
Do You Want to Be Well? The Gospel Play, Womanist Theology, and Tyler Perry's Artistic Project
Patterson's analysis of Diary of a Mad Black Woman uncovers how content and artistic form mutually embed Tyler Perry's black women characters in masculinist paradigms that restructure but do not transform the patriarchal bases of black women's oppression. I argue that Perry's use of womanist theological paradigms in his representation of religion, gender, sexuality, and wellness would help him achieve his self-professed goal of defying Hollywood's stereotypical representations of black people, and, by extension, black life and culture. This analysis finally argues that if black womanist theological reflection figured more prominently in black religious practice and ideologies, black theological reflection could reconstitute a theological practice that truly aims to liberate all black people and engender experiences of wellness for black women in particular.
Journal Article
Construction of the Crack Mother icon
This article examines the progression of stereotypical images of African American women in film and advertisements (Mammy, Aunt Jemima, Sapphire, etc.) to deviant figures in political discourse (the Matriarch and Welfare Queen). Locating caricatures within theories of African American deviance, the history of welfare policy, and the crack cocaine controversy, I argue that icons of African American women serve as recognizable, shortcut representations of purported African American pathology used to promote political agendas. Methods include discourse analysis of social policies, historical analysis of images of African Americans in media, visual and literary forms, and ethnographic research with African American former substance abusers. The data informed narrative analysis of the Crack Mother characters in films by African American filmmakers from the 1990s and early 2000s. The data reveals that the Crack Mother icon is an amalgamation of previous stereotypes, operating as a stock character to generate predictable responses from audiences and propagate gender and racial ideology. The Crack Mother is not only a loaded signifier infused with notions of racialized deviance; she is also closely associated with broad social problems. The article brings to question the role of hypervisible African American caricatures, suggesting that they function to sustain white normality.
Journal Article