MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

For over twenty years, Alison Bechdel’s “Bechdel Test” has informed reviews and public discourses about popular films. The test, created in 1985 via Bechdel’s comic strip “Dykes…,” poses three simple questions that challenge popular films to meet basic feminist standards: “1. It has to have at least two [named] women in it; 2. Who talk to each other; 3. About something besides a man.” This paper revisits the Bechdel test and applies it to several popular black films, Tyler Perry’s—For Colored Girls (2010); TD Jakes’—Jumping the Broom (2011); Steve Harvey’s—Think Like a Man (2012). Although these films are made for women and the narratives target women, they are all written and directed by men. These films also pass the Bechdel test. The fact that they do so invites several critical interventions: how might the Bechdel test be expanded to account more directly for the intersections of gender identity, sexuality and race. Given the feminist underpinnings of the Bechdel test and the limitations of the test with respect to holding black popular films accountable to basic feminist principles, I turn to Alice Walker’s womanism and reform the Bechdel test so that it might be used to critically engage popular black films. Walker defines a womanist (in part) as a woman who concerns herself with her own health and wellbeing as well as the health and advancement of her community (inclusive of men). By expanding the Bechdel test via Walker’s ruminations on womanism, I develop a rubric through which we can assess popular black films that are made for women but lack womanist perspectives. This work will be informed by Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens(1983), bell hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1999), and Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Sexual Politics (2005).