Quick Hit: Salamishah Tillet on For Colored Girls

University of Pennsylvania professor and A Long Walk Home founder Salamishah Tillet is none too happy about how Tyler Perry’s film interpretation of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enough turned out. Tillet writes at The Root today:

“… we must remain hyper aware that Perry’s For Colored Girls does little to dispel the sexual stereotypes and victim blaming of black women in contemporary American politics and popular culture — especially of those women who have endured sexual assault, domestic violence, infertility and sexual transmitted infections. (Here, I should mention that Perry’s new homophobic plot twist — involving a closeted, bisexual, HIV-positive black man and his ostensibly emasculating wife — also works against the open and inclusive spirit of Shange’s brand of black feminism.)”

Read the rest of Tillet’s “A Feminist Analysis of Tyler Perry’s ‘For Colored Girls'” here, as well as Courtney Young’s analysis, entitled “Tyler Perry’s Gender Problem,” in The Nation.

Photo: Essence.com

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Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009. Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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