Sarabeth Sesma

ENG 1050
9/18/16
Black Women Empowerment in Precious
Erica Edwards article Tuning into Precious: The Black Womens Empowerment
Adaption and the Interruptions of the Absurd offers an intertextual analysis of the film Precious
(2009) in order to convey the reoccurring theme of black feminism.
Since the 1970s to the early 2000s, the emergence of black feminism began to converge
itself with the musical and visual elements within a scene of a film to highlight the compensatory
framework of individual success and an appeal to ethics. Since then, the targeted audience has
increased by tenth fold and thus allowed more collective radical thoughts that were usually
associated with self-help or individual success to merge into one. Throughout the article, the
phrase pop black feminism is consistently mentioned by Edwards to refer to the celebration of
black womens empowerment in mass media. This allows it to follow a parallel trajectory to
black culture that enables the audience to perceive the problems of black feminism. The
appearance of Black Revolutionary Women into an understanding of black woman that enable[d]
the reproduction of a properly heterosexual sociality (pg 82), Edwards begins, analyzes how the
adaptions of popular films attempts to reroute unruly behavioral for non-normative actions
correlating to sexual and gender. Edwards then provides historical context on black feminism,
the decades following World War II witnessed the development of black womens radical and
internationalist challenges to racism, sexism, incarceration, unfair labor conditions. (pg 82)
which builds credibility toward her views.
Although much of black women empowerment focuses on personal success pertaining
toward mass media much of the movement moves toward spiritual conversion that helped shaped

the discursive world of Precious. Not only providing a move toward spiritual conversion it has
provided the terms by which American popular culture has come to understand the black
womens empowerment narrative after The Color Purple (1982). In the film, after Precious
encounters an argument with her mother that later resorts to physical assault she is then forced to
leave with her newborn son Abdul. On the way down her mother starts throwing old photographs
down the stairs at Precious. Edwards then emphasizes on subtle details of one of the pictures
taken on Christmas day following the quote, Holidays, love we spread / We like to share it on
special days...Christmas, the day that Jesus Christ was born (pg 82). in which alludes to the
black Madonna as well as Christianity. Later on this scene, Precious and her son Abdul were
repeatedly turned away from shelters and were then forced to wonder around in Harlem on a cold
wintery night. As well as highlighting contraction of violence, various figurations of the black
Madonna, the sights and sounds of Christmas, and Preciouss wandering toward any sign of help.
This evokes viewers expectations for the very Christocentric salvation narrative that has played
the primary role in the mainstreaming of black womens empowerment. The film routes black
womens desires for a world not determined by racial and sexual subjection into the gospel
rhetorics of individual worth and sanction. Given the religious language of the adaptation genre
and the Christian wording of salvation that underpin the black feminist narrative it might
consider the adaptation the genre best suited to make over black feminism in the decades since
1968.
In the article, Edwards yet again mentions the aural reverberations and visual remnants of
the black womens feminism narrative made popular through American film adaptations through
the 1980s and 1990s. This sets viewers up to expect Preciouss ecstatic conversion when she
arrives at church. Here Edwards explains how Precious shifts into one of the fantasy sequences

that foreshadows the lurid tragedies of Preciouss world. The fantasy sequences being in earlier
scenes where Precious imagines herself as a movie star, here the film shifts to the exaggerated
hues of Preciouss fantasy life. Another fantasy Edwards provides shifts back again to the
spiritual conversion in which one particular scene focuses on Precious watching the churchs
choir rehearsal from outside. In actuality where she finds herself standing behind an iron grates
and thus starts to imagine herself on stage with the gospel choir. In calling attention to the absurd
elements of the choir rehearsals fantasy sequence and to the tragic vision of Preciouss viewing
position outside of the church, it offers an occasion for audiences to evade rather than confront
the source of their pain in social reality (91), Edwards quotes; to accentuate the reoccurring
theme of feminism towards the normative discourses of race, gender, and sexuality in mass
media.
Given the way that black feminism adaptation has served as a motivation narrative
movements can only be described as absurd. Edwards ends the article claiming that narrative
movements only accentuate the severed form of the black feminisms radical critiques and
structures of oppression. To analyze Precious as the genres high point is to revisit a history of
black feminisms absurd circulations in American popular culture. More importantly, Edwards
successfully defends her stance on black women empowerment in light of cultural production
that emphasizes the story of personal success and individual self-help that Precious provides for
us.

Work Cited Page

Edwards, Erica. Tuning into Precious: The Black Womens Empowerment, (74-95)