Madea Sensation: Paradox and Trans Feminist Possibilities in Tyler Perry’s Work

Year after year, the most powerful black media mogul to date has cross-dressed¹ as a foul-mouthed grandmother to promulgate a conservative religious message. And year after year, this seeming contradiction has inspired people to ask whether this filmmaker—or his audiences—are hypocritical. In response to this persistent question about Tyler Perry’s Mabel “Madea” Simmons, I want to ask instead what is the political utility of the charge of hypocrisy, how does it work to preserve the status quo, and what alternatives are we actually invited to explore through Madea’s popularity as a paradoxical trickster figure? Perry’s work is undoubtedly a media sensation. Even though he has retired his most famous character, the paradoxes that Perry staged remain, and I want to examine this lingering effect of Perry’s work as a “Madea sensation.”² By this, I mean that the spectatorial experience of Perry’s films produces ways of knowing and navigating paradox that can, if we choose, teach us things about inconsistency, boundary crossing, and trans feminist possibilities that—in stark contrast to the majority of commentary about Madea—might be mobilized for trans liberation.

Beginning with Diary of a Mad Black Woman (Darren Grant, 2005), Perry’s Madea films pair his madcap, cross-dressing performance as Madea with lessons about chivalry, family values, and faith in God. This contrast does not merely produce tension; in many ways, Perry’s Madea films feel like two different stories hastily sutured together.³ As a result, Perry’s cross-dressing performances starkly diverge from other cross-dressing films, from Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982) to Mrs. Doubtfire (Chris Columbus, 1993) to Eddie Murphy’s extensive catalog of cross-dressing performances. Unlike these examples, the inconsistent tone of Perry’s films seems to underscore a perceived conflict between the sacred (Christianity and God) and the profane (cross-dressing). Yet this apparent conflict is also dramatically overstated in commentary about Perry’s films, and since this purported tension undergirds the accusation of hypocrisy, I begin this project by asking what ideological interests are served by insisting that cross-dressing and God are opposed and, for that matter, that there is a meaningful distinction that should be maintained between the sacred and the profane.

In fact, by A Madea Family Funeral (Tyler Perry, 2019), the juxtapositions Perry stages between the sacred and the profane have become rote. Reading these sequences as a conflict between cross-dressing and family values distracts us from recognizing what actually binds these themes together. As the family waits in the emergency room to learn whether the family patriarch will survive a heart attack, this conventionally solemn occasion is rendered profane by Madea and her brother Joe. Framed frontally in a wide two-shot, Madea and Joe bicker and solicit chuckles from knowledgeable spectators as they joke about Perry’s cross-dressing performance—and make evident the simple special effects that enable Perry to play both characters. After another member of the party asks Joe why he keeps asking women such as Madea to obey “the bro code,” Joe gestures across the split screen toward Madea as he says, “You know, in the animal kingdom, some—some species, they have both sexes.” Madea turns to Joe, invokes the transphobic trope of the genital reveal, and then threatens him with penetrative abjection as she says, “Keep it up, Im’ma raise this dress up and show you how much of a dude I am. You know what, I just can’t wait for you to be maggot food. I just want maggots all over you, just eating you alive.” At this moment the rest of the family arrives, including the dying man’s long-suffering wife, and the tone of the scene seems to abruptly change. Supported by the plaintive score, the family begins to grapple with complicated layers of grief. Yet given that their grief is for a patriarch who died having sex with his mistress and since the audience is aware of this fact even as many of the characters do not yet know...