“It Ain’t Where You Comin’ from, Honey”: Class, Social Mobility, and Marriage in Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Family Reunion

Abstract

This chapter explores representations of class and social mobility and their relationship to marriage as ritual practice and social and economic arrangement in Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Family Reunion. In doing so, it considers the significance of skin color and shadeism and their links to class and gendered notions of femininity in relationship to black American women’s marriageability and class mobility. Based on a stage play of the same name, Madea’s Family Reunion is a sequel to The Diary of a Mad Black Woman released the previous year. Analysis of Madea’s Family Reunion suggests that the film simultaneously challenges as well as underscores deeply entrenched correlations between black women’s body size, skin color, age, perceived morality regarding sexuality and childbearing, and eligibility for marriage. As Doyle Greene noted in his study of American workers on film, “Read symptomatically, seemingly affirmative films can open textual spaces to be read as subversive and ostensibly oppositional films open textual spaces to be read as affirming dominant ideology.”¹ Perry’s films arguably tread this ground in their espousal of advice dispensed by Madea who represents the wisdom of elder black women while simultaneously reinforcing fairly conservative gender and class relations.

“It ain’t where you comin’ from, honey, it’s where you’re going. No matter what your momma was or your daddy was. You can be anything you wanna be. ”

—Madea in Madea’s Family Reunion (2006)