Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture

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In Jezebel Unhinged Tamura Lomax traces the use of the jezebel trope in the black church and in black popular culture, showing how it is pivotal to reinforcing men's cultural and institutional power to discipline and define black girlhood and womanhood. Drawing on writing by medieval thinkers and travelers, Enlightenment theories of race, the commodification of women's bodies under slavery, and the work of Tyler Perry and Bishop T. D. Jakes, Lomax shows how black women are written into religious and cultural history as sites of sexual deviation. She identifies a contemporary black church culture where figures such as Jakes use the jezebel stereotype to suggest a divine approval of the “lady” while condemning girls and women seen as "hos." The stereotype preserves gender hierarchy, black patriarchy, and heteronormativity in black communities, cultures, and institutions. In response, black women and girls resist, appropriate, and play with the stereotype's meanings. Healing the black church, Lomax contends, will require ceaseless refusal of the idea that sin resides in black women's bodies, thus disentangling black women and girls from the jezebel narrative's oppressive yoke. Tamura Lomax is an independent scholar, CEO and founder of The Feminist Wire, and coeditor of Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry's Productions. Prolegomenon. "Hoeism or Whatever": Black Girls and the Sable Letter "B" vii Acknowledgments xix Introduction. "A Thousand Details, Anecdotes, Stories": Mining the Discourse on Black Womanhood 1 1. Black Venus and Jezebel Sluts: Writing Race, Sex, and Gender in Religion and Culture 13 2. "These Hos Ain't Loyal": White Perversions, Black Possessions 34 3. Theologizing Jezebel: Womanist Central Criticism, a Divine Intervention 59 4. "Changing the Letter": Toward a Black Feminist Study of Religion 82 5. The Black Church, the Black Lady, and Jezebel: The Cultural Production of Feminine-ism 108 6. Whose "Woman" Is This?: Reading Bishop T. D. Jakes's Woman, Thou Art Loosed! 130 7. Tyler Perry's New Revival: Black Sexual Politics, Black Popular Religion, and an American Icon 169 Epilogue. Dangerous Machinations: Black Feminists Taught Us 201 Notes 211 Bibliography 243 Index 251