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This book seeks to interrogate the representation of Black women in television. Cheers explores how the increase of Black women in media ownership and creative executive roles (producers, showrunners, directors and writers) in the last 30 years affected the fundamental cultural shift in Black women’s representation on television, which in turn parallels the political, social, economic and cultural advancements of Black women in America from 1950 to 2016. She also examines Black women as a diverse television audience, discussing how they interact and respond to the constantly evolving television representation of their image and likeness, looking specifically at how social media is used as a tool of audience engagement.

Since its invention, television has been one of the biggest influences on American culture. Through this medium, multiple visions and disparate voices have attempted to stake a place in viewer consumption. Yet even as this programming supposedly reflects characteristics of the general American populace, television-generated images are manipulated and contradictory, predicated by the various economic, political, and cultural forces placed upon it. In Shaded Lives, Beretta Smith-Shomade sets out to dissect images of the African American woman in television from the 1980s. She calls their depiction "binaristic," or split. African American women, although an essential part of television programming today, are still presented as distorted and deviant. By closely examining the television texts of African-American women in comedy, music video, television news and talk shows (Oprah Winfrey is highlighted), Smith-Shomade shows how these voices are represented, what forces may be at work in influencing these images, and what alternate ways of viewing might be available. Smith-Shomade offers critical examples of where the sexist and racist legacy of this country collide with the cultural strength of Black women in visual and real-lived culture. As the nation's climate of heightened racial divisiveness continues to relegate the representation of Black women to depravity and display, her study is not only useful, it is critical.

An old adage prescribed that “art imitates life.” If one believes this to be true, then it is plausible that entertainment is a source from which information about everyday life can be gleaned? Can U.S. television shows provide a looking glass into how Americans perform certain aspects of their lives? For a “real” look into how careers are performed, I have examined content from a reality television show which bears a title that implies something about the cast— the Bravo Network’s Real Housewives of Atlanta series. This show was chosen for two reasons. First, The Real Housewives of Atlanta is the most popular show among the “Housewives” franchise. Thus with each airing of the show, those who watch have the opportunity to learn more about the career aspirations, roles, and behaviors, of the cast members. Second, this is the only show within The Real Housewives franchise that features a primarily black cast. As such, the question emerges— can this show provide insight into the way black women construct their career roles? Another goal of this study is to determine how cast members construct notions of housewifery. Hence, throughout this chapter, readers will see that these women are not the typical “housewives,” rather they have reinvented what it means to be a housewife in the modern age.

Within Spoken Soul, better known as Ebonics, the term down can be used as an adjective to describe a person that willingly yields a tremendous amount of support to another person. The “Down Ass Bitch” (DAB) is a controlling image of the black woman that calls for her unwavering support of the black man, even when it is pernicious to her best interest. In fact, we can see this in the black community on many levels: (1) from black women faithfully waiting years for men to be released from prison; (2) hiding domestic abuse or rape at the hands of black men for the sake of protecting the race; or (3) sexually exploiting our bodies for the financial benefit of black men. However, what is most interesting about this particular stereotype of the black woman being “down” for her man is that this is not an expectation that is asked of the black man. It is this author’s contention that the “Down Ass Bitch” is obsequious to the powers of black men— though she is portrayed as being strong, aggressive, and assertive. Essentially, the “Down Ass Bitch,” a highly celebrated image in the black community, is the black version of the submissive white woman, the Eurocentric construction of the idealized womanhood. Various controlling images of black womanhood— such as the mammy, the jezebel, and the welfare queen— served as justifications for the oppression of black women and have been discussed significantly by scholars.

In recent years, scripted television has been joined by a more “realistic” look into peoples’ lives— reality television. Reality television claims to give viewers an unmediated glimpse into how real people live. The “realness” of reality television invokes controversy by providing a voyeuristic and potentially exploitive look into people’s lives. As the genre has matured, shows that offer insight into communities that are systemically underrepresented have become common. Indicative of this trend are shows that depict the lives of African Americans and opportunistically exploit representations of black culture for drama, ratings, and profit. One network that has taken considerable advantage of this is VH1— first, with the success of Flavor of Love and its spinoffs, then more recently with shows such as Basketball Wives and Love and Hip Hop. In fact, the excessive amount of fighting among Black women on Basketball Wives led to a boycott of the show, which prompted creator Shaunie O’Neal to promise less violence in its next season. Akin to Basketball Wives , Love and Hip Hop Atlanta exemplifies the trend of exploiting black culture. As members of the black community, we find ourselves both intrigued and troubled by the implications of the show. Capturing the essence of our paradoxical interpretation of Love and Hip Hop Atlanta — as one of many reality television shows that simultaneously reproduces and challenges negative stereotypes about blackness— are contradictory headlines such as “The 21 Most Ratchet Women of Black Reality TV,” “How Reality TV has Changed our Daughters,” and “Wealthy Reality Stars Humanize Black Women.”

Reality programs rose to prominence based on claims that the shows depicted “real life,” but in recent years many shows have come under fire for being anything but “reality.” Orbe (1998) suggests viewers are drawn to such programs based on the notion that they show “real people in everyday interactions,” and there is a certain level of “unpredictability that comes with reality.” However, what has become predictable and potentially problematic, over the past two decades, are the negative stereotypes associated with African American women on these programs. This skewing of reality is particularly significant when we consider the limited opportunities these shows provide viewers to witness the many facets of black womanhood. From the head-bobbing and finger-waving of Alicia Calaway on season two of the hit show Survivor to the on-and-off-air mudslinging between Kenya Moore and NeNe Leakes of Real Housewives of Atlanta fame, black women are portrayed as disloyal, bitchy, lazy, difficult to work with, and a threat to others.

Tyra Banks, supermodel and producer, is the creator of the reality show America’s Next Top Model ( ANTM ), which is now in its twenty-second cycle, and features contestants who present themselves to a panel of judges for modeling critique. ANTM has been nominated for twenty-nine awards, including the GLAAD Media Award and Image Award, and the show has received five awards in 2009 from the Teen Choice Award and the Director’s Guild of America Award. Further, ANTM is currently shown in over 120 countries. The winner of each cycle receives a featured spread in a magazine, a modeling contract with a prominent agency, and a $100,000 modeling contract from a cosmetics company. In 2005, however, there was an infamous episode— dubbed the “Tyra Tyrade,” —where Tyra Banks yelled at a contestant whom she had just eliminated from the show. This episode was parodied more than any other ANTM episode, with the penultimate parody shown on a 2007 episode of Family Guy (a primetime cartoon television show with millions of viewers each week), where Tyra turns into a lizard and eats the model. While this episode is now nine years old, parodies from as recently as 2014 continue to live on and, as we argue, perpetuate negative stereotypes of black womanhood, particularly as related to the Sapphire mediated stereotype— loud, bossy, angry black woman. From the various interpretations of the “Tyra Tyrade,” it is clear that those who created the parodies covertly and overtly ventured into maintaining white supremacist stereotypes of black womanhood— where one is supposed to be beautiful, a jezebel, or a mammy, but not a Sapphire. Continuing the marginalizing mediated tradition, in almost every parody, the Tyra character becomes the object of ridicule for being “excessively black” and outside the parameters of her hegemonically prescribed role, because she demonstrated negative emotions resulting in an assertion of her power as the expert.

It is near impossible to have a discussion of black women in reality television without mentioning the infamous Angry Black Woman (ABW). In fact, some critiques have argued reality television is damaging for black women since many shows focus heavily on this character. 1 This stereotypical characterization of black women is long-standing, due largely to its constant inclusion in media messages. As noted in chapter one, audiences were first officially introduced to her in the 1920s as Sapphire Stevens from the Amos ‘n’ Andy Show ; and her character continued to resurface throughout the years, across several different genres. Despite the many time periods through which this image has traveled, the key characteristic of the Sapphire— her unexplainable anger and aggression— seem to resonate in many modern day images of black women.

In this chapter we analyze three reality TV (RTV) shows whose main characters do not fit the old movie stereotypes of dark-skinned maternal Mammies, bossy, brown Sapphires or light-skinned sexy Jezebels. Many RTV shows with black cast members are falling back on such stereotypical representations. In contrast, the female characters we analyze are smart and sophisticated, and they live in multi-racial environments. Hence, the primary mediarelated question we address concerns how one slice of black motherhood is represented. The social question we address concerns the extent to which the character presentations actually point to social progress, with diverse symbols and meaning making of real life, or are they as artificial and stereotypical— perhaps in new ways— as the old portrayals?

Jones’ comments reflect a general consensus among TV critics and viewers that: 1) the black women who command the most attention on reality television tend to portray stereotypical, Sapphire-like characters; 2) as audiences consume such portrayals, there is a consistent line of argument from producers that insists “pitting [black women] against each other” is expected or “what the people want;” and 3) black female reality TV stars are willing to indulge the Sapphire fantasy if it means they will be able to further a personal and/or professional agenda. These are important themes to interrogate, especially given the history of mass mediated representations of black Americans, as well as the present-day “evolution” of black characters and other characters of color on unscripted and scripted American television. However, because attention is primarily focused on arguably “negative” portrayals, there has not been much critical analysis of “alternative” or more nuanced portrayals of black women in the televisual sphere. This chapter represents an attempt to fill in some of that blank space by focusing attention on an underexplored and relatively new consortium of reality television programming that features black women who are defined by their roles as mothers and entrepreneurs.

Although African-American women are still underrepresented in narrative television, reality television appears to be a site where one can find many portrayals of them. As other scholars have explained, the representations of African American women in reality television are usually negative, generally presenting them as loud, angry, and without “class.” However, there has been little research on the complicated relationships of black motherhood, black wifehood, and their portrayals on reality television. One black mother who illustrates this tense interaction is Tameka “Tiny” Harris, nee Cottle, formerly of the 1990s girl group Xscape, and star of two reality television programs— BET’s Tiny & Toya , and VH1’s T.I. and Tiny: The Family Hustle . Though both programs prominently feature Cottle, BET’s program constructs Tiny as an emotionally strong and pragmatically capable business woman who maintains the emotional health and financial stability of her family while her relational partner/husband, rapper Tip “T.I.” Harris, is serving time in prison. However, upon T.I.’s return home, The Family Hustle presents Tiny as having little business savvy and as overly permissive with their blended family. This is a dangerous portrayal, given that reality TV purports to disseminate some version of “reality” to its viewers.

The display of spirituality, faith and religion is not a new phenomenon among black women in the United States, nor is it new to the world of media. Africans came to the Americas with their own sense of spirituality and religion, and the awareness of a higher being became the mortar that bound the community together during the trials of enslavement and subsequent oppression. Not surprisingly, this legacy of worship continues to provide solace and strength, with black women at the helm.

The premise of the show revolves around six preachers in the Los Angeles area. They each pastor churches ranging from 3,500– 4,000 members; however, one pastor’s church has nearly 20,000 members (season 1: episode 1). A multitude of cameras follow the stories of each of the pastors’ lives, their relationships with each other, as well as their wives relationships with one another. The show has five black male preachers and one white male preacher. In season 1, all of the pastors— except for two— are married; one of the unmarried pastors is engaged to the mother of his child, and the other has a long-standing relationship with a female friend who frequently appears on the show. As viewers watch the show, they are given a glimpse into the world of evangelical preachers. Although at first glance the show seems to only focus on the men, the women provide an interesting glimpse at what it means to be a preacher’s wife, fiancée, or female companion. There were a total of eight episodes that aired over the course of two months. This chapter explores how black women and their friendships are portrayed on Preachers of L.A. — including the one white woman on the show. It also examines their discourse between one another— using critical race feminism to analyze the roles of these women as first ladies (a term used to describe the wives of pastors), their relationship with one other, and the conversations they have surrounding sex, marriage, relationships, and friendships. The chapter focuses on the first season of the show, which began in the fall of 2013. The show was later renewed for a second season, which began airing late summer 2014. This critique attempts to bring awareness to black women in the church and the discourse that perpetuates the stereotypes of black women on television. It also aims to initiate further conversations on various stereotypes— regardless of context— that have the potential to bear negatively on black women.

Aaron McGruder’s “The Return of the King” (2006) is one of many of the artist’s controversial episodes, yet it stands out because of the criticism it received among mainstream media outlets and civil rights leaders. It was the ninth episode to air from his series The Boondocks, which is an anime show that airs on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim cable channel. McGruder presents the following scenario in “The Return of the King”: What if Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) did not die after his April 4, 1968, shooting and instead awoke after being in a coma for thirty-two years?

At best, our knowledge about the lives and experiences of Black gay men is limited to a series of stereotypes, snap judgments, and ridicule. In terms of television media product, this aforementioned knowledge has been packaged mostly within the framework of comedy: a red-leather-clad Eddie Murphy talking about the most effective ways to shield his ass from the gay male gaze in the 1983 HBO stand-up performance Delirious ; Damon Wayans and David Alan Grier’s effeminate film critics Blaine Edwards and Antoine Merriweather on the 1990s television variety show In Living Color ; fashionista panel members Miss J and Andre Leon Talley

Why is it important that a Black woman created, wrote for, and co-produced¹ two highly-regarded television situation comedies that engaged a variety of Black women’s health issues while at the same time these issues were being reduced, simplified, or altogether ignored in mainstream American hip hop? Mara Brock Akil tacitly responded to this question when asked why four episodes of the third season of Girlfriends (2000–2008), the situation comedy she created and co-produced for UPN, addressed the HIV/AIDS crisis among Black women in America. “I have things I want to say,” explained Brock Akil, “about bridging television’s gap between

Video games studies, including many of our most inspired written accounts of video game history, is very white. Stories about US video game pioneers, from engineers and designers to early adopters and arcade patrons, tend to be mostly about the white men who created, consumed, and periodically saved the industry. Even now that game history is on the verge of becoming as queer and ostensibly nonconformist as some aspects of its games and culture are theorized to be, these new avenues of critical investigation speak most directly to a queer mainstream that has always been constructed as white. Although there is much to be inspired by in the proliferation of emergent video game histories that are more gender-inclusive, trans, or so-called diverse, with few exceptions these progressive accounts still tend to be White. White. White. Black designers, players, blerds, and technocrats have been excluded from the canon of old and new video game histories in much the same way Frantz Fanon theorized that blackness functions as a fact: an outwardly defined pejorative social inscription that justifies its alienation and exclusion.

Much has been written about Nina Simone’s song “Mississippi Goddam” because it lyrically achieves the political consciousness of the embattled community whose experiences and energy it intends to speak to, through, and for. With its curse words, impatient tone, and energetic rhythm, it could never be mistaken for the traditional, Christian-inflected civil rights dirge. “Alabama’s got me so upset,” the chorus complains. “Tennessee made me lose my rest, and,” as if its atrocities need not be spelled out, “every body knows about Mississippi, goddam!” The song was banned from radio airplay but still became part of the civil rights sound

"Debates on the future of the African continent and the role of gender identities in these visions are increasingly present in literary criticism forums as African writers become bolder in exploring the challenges they face and celebrating gender diversity in the writing of short stories, novels, poetry, plays and films. Controversies over the rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer (LGBTIQ) communities in Africa, as elsewhere, continue in the context of criminalization and/or intimidation of these groups. Residual colonial moralizing and contemporary western identity norms and politics vie with longstanding polyvalent indigenous sexual expression. In addition to traditional media, the new social media have gained importance, both as sources of information exchange and as sites of virtual construction of gender identities. As with many such contentious issues, the variety of responses to the "state of the question" is strikingly visible across the continent. In this issue of ALT, guest editor John Hawley has sampled the ongoing conversations, in both African writing and in the analysis of contemporary African cinema, to show how queer studies can break with old concepts and theories and point the way to new gender perspectives on literary and cinematic output. This volume also includes a non-themed section of Featured Articles and a Literary Supplement."--Publisher's description

This essay performs a critical comparison of two documentary films about queer and trans people of color, Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning (1991) and Wu Tsang's Wildness (2012) and examines how the two films negotiate of the politics of representing reality and “realness.” The comparison illuminates two entwined problematics: the ways in which the challenges faced by each film are emblematic of the larger historical context in which they were made, specifically notions of queer community and its subjects; and the ways in which the negotiation of these challenges occurs in relation to a broader field of ethical and formal questions relating to documentary itself.