Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 58

52 Popular Culture Review American female identity as illustrated by the female characters and storylines present in the movies Waiting to Exhale and Set It Off. It was found that while the African American female characters were tell ing stories of relationship (dis)satisfaction and race, class, and gender oppression, the same stories perpetuate controlling images that have become a mainstay in Western culture. Instead of challenging the very negative depictions that such images epito mize, the various characters keep alive the matriarch, Jezebel, and welfare mother images traditionally associated with African American women. Both movies em body African American women’s experiences from two distinct socioeconomic classes through the interpersonal context of friendship/sisterhood, creating an interesting dynamic in need of critical inquiry. Collins states that Black Feminist Thought of fers African American women a voice or a “self-defined collective black women’s standpoint about black womanhood” (1996a). In turn, formal inquiries into such experiences have provided African American women a conceptual framework that challenges stereotypical images of American women (Collins, 1993), thus creating a consciousness of systematic oppression from all fronts. In a recent qualitative study about perceptions of the cinematic representa tion of professional African American women in the movie Waitingjo Exhale, Har ris and Hill (1998) found that some women serving as members of an undervalued interpretive community experienced cognitive dissonance as they watched the char acters develop on-screen. While there was satisfaction in seeing a somewhat realis tic representation of life for themselves in the movie, most participants were dis heartened to observe the subconscious debasing of African American women. Al though they felt Waiting to Exhale was a positive attempt by African American film makers at providing creative space for the expression of Blackness and femaleness, participants felt that it also perpetuated the matriarch and Jezebel stereotypes tradi tionally associated with African American women (Harris & Hill, 1998). According to Collins (1993), African American women have experienced a particular oppression and misrepresentation, which has created unfavorable im ages that have been readily accepted as truth by the masses. Currently, some cin ematic efforts have been made to challenge such manipulated constructs in an effort to redeem the beauty of all African American women. Using Black Feminist Thought as the conceptual framework, this essay explored a dialectical tension whereby attempts to portray African American women in the movies ultimately perpetuate stereotypes of matriarch, Jezebel, and welfare mother, which are his torically and traditionally associated with African American women in Western culture. It is hoped that future inquiry into this tenuous state of cinematic annihila tion will be explored to deconstruct and reconstruct the multiple identities of all African American women. University of Georgia Tina M. Harris