Tucking In — SAINT

Tyler Perry: Notes on Black Camp

SAINT reconsiders Tyler Perry’s work through the tradition of Black camp - from its visual artifice and moral melodrama to gender performance and the complicated place of sexuality within his work. Moving through Madea and Netflix sensation Beauty in Black, the speculation surrounding Perry’s sexuality and E. Patrick Johnson’s concept of “quareness” - the essay asks what camp might reveal about the strange, contradictory world Tyler Perry has created.

Episodes

Glee: The Beginning, Middle and the End of Twerk

Using Glee’s infamous “End of Twerk” as its unlikely starting point, SAINT traces twerking from its roots in Black cultural expression and New Orleans bounce to its transformation into a mainstream symbol of vulgarity and moral panic - asking what gets lost when Black culture becomes pop culture. Along the way, he reappraises Glee itself: its handling of race, sexuality and difference, its spectacular contradictions, and why one of its most hated episodes might also be one of the clearest expressions of what the show was always trying - and often failing - to do.

Black Panther and The Miseducation of Africa

SAINT revisits Black Panther to question the film’s flawed understanding of Blackness, Africa and the diaspora. Through Afrofuturism, Afropessimism and the history of colonialism, the essay examines the contradictions behind Wakanda - and what it means for this fictional nation to have become one of the defining images of Blackness in 21st-century popular culture.

How the Transatlantic Slave Trade Became the Music Industry

SAINT traces the birth of the modern music industry through the commodification of Black music, from minstrelsy and jazz to the rise of mass popular culture. Following the transformation of Black cultural expression into a product to be packaged, sold and consumed, the essay asks how the legacy of slavery became embedded in the business of popular music.

Does A Black Doctor Who Really Work?

Doctor Who has always imagined itself as a show about freedom - but its relationship with Black people has been considerably messier. From its Black companions and recurring racial politics to the arrival of the first Black Doctor, the essay examines the contradictions between Doctor Who’s progressive ideals and the world it actually creates.

Striking Vipers: Black Mirror’s Homiesexual Episode

SAINT reads one of Black Mirror’s most misunderstood and divisive episodes as “unintentionally intersectional”: a story that becomes something far more complicated because its two protagonists are Black men. Through Black masculinity, DL culture and queer fantasy, “Striking Vipers” becomes a story about two men searching for forms of intimacy they can only fully inhabit once they escape the identities demanded of them in real life.

Madonna: Transgressive or Privileged?

Madonna built her career by transgressing the boundaries of sex, gender, religion and respectability - but who actually gets to transgress, and at whose expense? Through an intersectional and oppositional reading of the Queen of Pop, Saint examines the uneasy relationship between Madonna’s radicalism and her privilege, where liberation, appropriation and exploitation are rarely as black and white as they appear. only fully inhabit once they escape the identities demanded of them in real life.