““Woman Thou Art Bound””: Critical Spectatorship, Black Masculine Gazes, and Gender Problems in Tyler Perry's Movies

Abstract

Despite Perry’s claim that his oeuvre defies Hollywood formulas, his works succeed precisely because they rely on the racial, gender, sexual, and class ideologies and discourses that produce these problematic stereotypes. This essay builds upon black feminist notions of intersectionality to analyze how Perry’s films interpellate black women into submissive gender roles vis-a-vis the nuclear family, while simultaneously grappling with feminist political and theoretical issues such as sexual abuse and domestic violence that may structure (black) women’s oppression. Perry’s works operate within a patriarchy affirmation–critique dyad: struggling to critique patriarchy as a system, they instead identify only its most blatant and egregious manifestations as problematic. Furthermore, Perry’s success hinges on his and the audience’s inability or unwillingness to connect the particularly egregious manifestations of black patriarchy, specifically physical abuse and sexual molestation, with a more ubiquitous system, namely, submissive gender roles and expectations. With feminist bell hooks’s theory of black looks as a foundation, this essay posits that Perry’s works betray their stated goals of being transformative by not addressing this conflict, as demonstrated in a few suggestive scenes where Perry might have produced a different representation.

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