Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory

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Shoving aside the politics of respectability: black

women, reality TV, and the ratchet performance

Therí A. Pickens

To cite this article: Therí A. Pickens (2015) Shoving aside the politics of respectability: black
women, reality TV, and the ratchet performance, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist
theory, 25:1, 41-58, DOI: 10.1080/0740770X.2014.923172

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2014.923172

Published online: 30 Jun 2014.

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 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2015
Vol. 25, No. 1, 41–58, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2014.923172

Shoving aside the politics of respectability: black women, reality TV,

and the ratchet performance
Therí A. Pickens*

Bates College, Lewiston, ME, USA

This article investigates the performative strategies deployed by black female

reality-television stars. Situating their performances in response to black
respectability politics, this article recuperates the derogatory term “ratchet” as a
performative strategy that secures a liberatory space for black women. The
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author looks to Tamar Braxton, background singer cum reality-TV star cum
pop sensation, as an example of the potential and limitations of a ratchet
performance. Her behavior suggests that the ratchet performance becomes
viable when the ratchet figure moves incrementally out of cramped cultural
spaces like the politics of respectability or black middle-class values. Yet,
others’ reactions to her behavior imply that the ratchet reaches her limitations
within the confines of heterosexuality or after being co-opted by the very
community she attempts to flee. I conclude that the ratchet offers an
opportunity to move beyond representation as a panacea for black cultural
politics. She proves the necessity of individualism and rejects the dangerous
pressures of an irresponsible collective imagination.
Keywords: African American Studies; Women’s Studies; Gender Studies; black
women’s performance; Performance Studies; reality television; ratchet; hip-hop;
Tamar Braxton

I am curious about the way we conceptualize black women’s images and performance in a
changing televisual landscape. As Nicole Fleetwood reminds us, the black body has been a
“problem” in the field of vision because “seeing black is always a problem in a visual field
that structures the troubling presence of blackness” (Fleetwood 2011). Elsewhere in her
text, Fleetwood points out that black women are often marked as excessive and disciplined
accordingly. Within the context of new media like reality TV and YouTube, “troubling
blackness” becomes pronounced as black and non-black audiences attempt to police
black women’s behavior. These audiences evince an “investment in a conception of cultural
politics that continues to privilege representation itself as the primary site of hope and cri-
tique” (Gray 2005, 2). Such an investment problematically casts black performers and
images within political terms primarily and shunts aside the possibility that some perfor-
mers prioritize economic or cultural concerns.

*Email: tpickens@bates.edu

© 2014 Women & Performance Project Inc.

 42 T.A. Pickens

If we consider the way slavery was, as Jasmine Cobb (2011) notes, an “ocular obses-
sion” and trace black images and performance into our current moment, it becomes clear
that black cultural performance carries the charge to “produce results, to do something to
alter a history and system of racial inequality that is in part constituted through visual dis-
course” (Fleetwood 2011). In short, black performances always have ancillary effects on
political discourse. The hand-wringing over black women’s performances in particular
reflects worry about the availability of political progression when black women transgress
gendered and racialized behavioral boundaries. We must consider what political discourse
might look like if our cultural gatekeepers discussed, understood, and (perhaps) embraced
images and performances that did not have a primarily political purpose or even shunned
certain kinds of racial politics in favor of more individualized concerns. In some ways,
this is a new twist on an old issue, pace Langston Hughes, who encouraged black cultural
producers to explore “our beauty […] and our ugly, too” (Hughes 2000, 30). The “ratchet”
performance, which is the focus of this essay, shifts the conversation about racialized and
gendered discourse, making an incursion into so-called ugly social and political territory.
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Within Black intra-racial conversations, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. The
politics of respectability and the desire for upward mobility animates discussions about
proper behavior, interracial interaction, and the parameters of blackness itself. In the nine-
teenth century, “[t]he politics of respectability emphasized reform of individual behavior
and attitudes both as a goal in itself and as a strategy for reform of the entire structural
system of American race relations” (Higginbotham 1993, 187). Currently, respectability
functions as “one of a number of strategies that African Americans have developed to
create unity” (White 2001, 14). To be respectable is to be policed by oneself and a larger
black community so that one is deemed worthy of equal treatment. Implicit in the ideology
of respectability lingers the idea that it is not possible to remain individualized as a black
person: one’s individual will and desires must be subordinated to the political and social
uplift of the collective. In many ways, the parameters defining black respectable behavior
have not changed much since the nineteenth century. As Evelyn Higginbotham notes:
“There [can] be no laxity as far as sexual conduct, cleanliness, temperance, hard work,
and politeness [are] concerned” (Higginbotham 1993, 196). Such mandates restrict the be-
havior of black women and attempt to force them into conformity based on the regulating
norms of whiteness as standard.
Since reality TV shares kinship with network TV news, talk shows, and sports as a
genre where “the disciplining effects of racial discourse and fascination with black rep-
resentation are expressed” (Gray 2005, 21), black women reality-TV stars contend with
larger discussions about their behavior as representative of all blackness and a general
anxiety about how their images circulate within the public sphere. Some censorship and dis-
ciplining of black women’s performance comes from the characters on reality TV (i.e., they
avoid specific behaviors on camera or reframe their behavior in the confessional moment
taped days later) or social media like Facebook/Twitter where fans express their critiques,
disapproval, or praise. In some ways, reality TV tempers these anxieties over black
women’s comportment because the genre has “established cultural conventions [that]
further collaps[e] television’s historic roles as a technology of truth, fiction, public
service, and corporate gain” (Ouellette and Murray 2008). Viewers understand reality
TV as unscripted but still performed, “an unabashedly commercial genre united less by
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 43

aesthetic rules or certainties than by the fusion of popular entertainment with a self-con-
scious claim to the discourse of the real” (Ouellete and Murray 2008). Patricia Hill
Collins notes the difficulty of “claiming the theoretical space to raise issues that concern
Black people in ways that deviate from the paradigms advanced by more powerful
groups” (Hill Collins 2004, 14). Hill Collins’s nod to ‘more powerful groups’ includes
those who would police blackness and enforce respectability regardless of race. This con-
fined theoretical space becomes more urgent to unpack given the global reach of African
American televisual images. In what follows, I examine one particular performance strategy
of black women reality-TV stars – the ratchet – for how it disrupts narratives of black col-
lectivity as wedded to the politics of respectability. I preemptively participate in a discourse
that animates Jayna Brown and Tavia Nyong’o’s retrospective discussions of black
women’s performances, one they term a “[transcendence of] the additive model of incorpor-
ating women in a male-dominated story or African-Americans into a white dominated story
and instead [one that] begin[s] to suggest […] means for moving into a more generative
critical space” (Brown and Nyong’o 2006, 4). I find that “the ratchet” as a figure and a per-
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formance is not only useful, but also vitally necessary for imagining black female subjects
in the changing racial mediascape of the twenty-first century.

Enter the “ratchet”

The critique of black women’s performance has risen alongside the visibility of black
women in reality TV. The TV landscape now includes Real Housewives of Atlanta, Love
and Hip-Hop: Atlanta, Braxton Family Values, Tamar & Vince, Hollywood Exes, and I
Love New York, compared to the paltry offerings of shows focused on black men (Flavor
of Love, Real Husbands of Hollywood). This volume of representations does not open up
the space for multiple ways of conceptualizing black womanhood; instead it appears that
critiques follow a well-worn path. In Herman Gray’s discussion of black women’s
absence in television programs, his comments articulate the particular contours of the cen-
suring these black women receive. He writes: “In the moral economy of contemporary
American discourses of gender, sexuality, and race, black women’s bodies operate cultu-
rally to mark the boundaries of female (hetero)sexuality, motherhood, family, desire, and
beauty” (Gray 2005). In fact, such censuring echoes the critiques that “objectified and sub-
jugated” black women in hip-hop music videos (Perry 2003, 136). Despite the fact that
viewers tune in to see their lives (and perhaps because they tune in for this reason),
these black female reality-TV personalities face wide-ranging critiques of their behavior.
The criticism surfaces specifically when their behavior violates the prescriptive norms of
race and gender by daring to articulate an individual vision regarding their own sexuality,
reproductive capacity, family, desires, and beauty.
Enter the “ratchet.” “Ratchet” surfaces as both critique and ridicule. Though “ratchet”
did not originate as a way to describe reality-TV stars, it seems to have evolved to account
for their presence. Issa Rae, creator and star of the hit webseries The (Mis)Adventures of
Awkward Black Girl, describes it thusly: “It’s like if ‘ghetto’ and ‘hot shitty mess’ had a
baby. And, that baby had no father and became a stripper, then made a sex tape with an
athlete and then became a reality star” (Harris 2012; Palmer 2012). Other critics and cultural
producers have commented on ratchetness as a classed performance of cool, calling it an
 44 T.A. Pickens

evolution of terms like “crunk” and “ghetto,” both of which bring to bear the simultaneity of
acknowledging racial expectation and shedding it (Daniels 2007; Dubrofsky and Hardy
2008; Forman 2000; George 1992; Keeling 2003; Kelley 1997; Neal 2002, 2006; Palmer
2012). Subtending these explanations of ratchet and the implicit critique of reality-TV
stars is the idea that ratchetness has little utility for anyone other than the performer and
can be easily dismissed as comic relief or play. I argue for a wider definition of ratchetness
as a performance of excess that makes and unmakes both performer and audience. The
ratchet imaginary has no desire to participate in narratives of racial progression or social
uplift; instead, it articulates a desire for individuality regardless of the ideas and wants of
a putative collective. It functions as a tertiary space in which one can perform a racialized
and gendered identity without adhering to the prescriptive demands of either.
At its core, the ratchet is fundamentally an act of making and unmaking for both per-
former and audience.1 Thinking through the etymology of ratchet suggests that the
common usages speak to the mercurial aspect of this kind of creation. As a verb, ratchet
tends to mean that something is moved by degrees, usually followed by up or down. For
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instance, one can ratchet up the volume or ratchet down prices. Incremental movement is
centrally important to understanding ratchet performance. To maneuver within the
ratchet imaginary is to deploy strategies that work bit by bit. In noun form, the ratchet
refers to the ratchet wheel, a tool devised to control movement either by stopping it or chan-
ging its motion. The ratchet is also a tool by itself that when used with a socket wrench
allows one to unscrew a fastener in cramped spaces. The tool metaphorizes ratchet perform-
ance in its reference to the confined cultural spaces in which the ratchet subject must man-
euver. The ratchet performance borrows from this linguistic lineage, seeking to maneuver
around expectations of black respectable behavior without being ignored or dismissed. In
other words, the ratchet seeks to make itself audible and visible while it unmakes
notions of acceptable black behavior. It is not simply that the politics of respectability
creates a small space for racial and gender identity, but it also further circumscribes
one’s behaviors and options in situations where one has little room to maneuver.2 The
ratchet participates in what Daphne Brooks terms a “spectacular opacity” which
“emerges at varying times as a product of the performer’s will, at other times as a visual
obstacle erupting as a result of the hostile spectator’s epistemological resistance to
reading alternative racial and gender representations” (Brooks 2006). In challenging
black respectability politics, ratchet performers become the visual obstacle for black and
non-black audiences of all genders since black cultural production often carries the
charge to debunk stereotypical notions of blackness and participate in a narrative of
racial progress. Moreover, the ratchet seeks to individualize oneself. Even as the perform-
ance references an amorphous black community and the images pertaining thereto, the
ratchet also ekes out space for self-promotion and entrepreneurial enterprise.
The relationship between the ratchet performer and the audience rests on an implied
contract in which both parties are aware that the ratchet violates norms of respectable be-
havior. The ratchet comes to be, ontologically speaking, based on being interpellated and
policed as abject. For example, it is widely speculated that ratchet is a sonic derivation
of “wretched” within Southern speech, a sonic transformation that appears out of the
desire to say “wretched” through clenched teeth and pursed lips (Palmer 2012). It is the
polite black Southern ladies’ way to communicate exactly how inappropriate one’s
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 45

behavior is. This instantiation of the term hinges on ratchet as an adjective that ridicules one
for not being a “lady” and attempts to discipline one into ladylike behavior. This sonic
transformation (wedded as it is to unspeakability) captures the idea that ratchet subjects
must be interpellated as such by arbiters of acceptable black behavior. The southern hip-
hop origins of the term speak to a similar ethos of letting loose (Palmer 2012). However,
this ratchet adheres to heteronormative masculinist notions of womanhood. Sexual profli-
gacy is acceptable in this version of the ratchet imaginary, but only when it serves male
carnal need. Otherwise, the ratchet is ridiculed as a woman who behaves poorly. The
ratchet becomes constituted as a subject only as abject and, in turn, constitutes the subjects
that police it as respectable. When continuing to perform, part of the implied contract is that
the ratchet will violate those acceptable norms of behavior, an act that by implication ques-
tions the basis upon which those norms are established.
Ratchet performances rest on the images and expectations of several black female
archetypes even as they react to them to create a layered performance of gender, queerness,
and class. In keeping with the idea that “there is no identity negotiation that is not at the
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same time a gendered negotiation,” the ratchet references the so-called respectable black
woman and also builds upon the discourse of excess that inheres in ideas about the black
urban poor, specifically the putative welfare queen and the notion of ghetto fabulous
(Shih 2007, 87). In other words, we’ve seen hints of the ratchet before. Patricia Hill
Collins anticipates the ratchet in her understanding of the “sexualized bitch [who] consti-
tutes a modern version of the jezebel, repackaged for contemporary mass media” (Hill
Collins 2004, 127). As a sexualized performance, the ratchet also engenders resistance
from those who remain skeptical of performances “shaped by […] a ‘white man’s
fantasy vision’ that somewhat celebrate[s] stereotypes of black female sexuality” (Dunn
2008, 15). Furthermore, by blending black popular culture with queer performances like
theater of the ridiculous, the ratchet marshals traditions, memories, and everyday praxis
(Hall 1992) to play to a “coterie audience, one knowledgeable about the many historical
and contemporaneous cultural forms and images upon whose foundations it direct[s] its
wacky edifice” (Marranca and Dasgupta 1998). For example, Phillip and Emmanuel
Hudson created a YouTube video sensation, “Ratchet Girl Anthem,” that marks the
ratchet girl as one who is concerned with cars, clothing, and coifs (Hudson and Hudson
2012). They have two videos, both of which perform the same song in drag. The first
video features them without women’s make-up or clothing performing their original song
in front of a camera. In the second video, they perform their song dressed as women
(though they do not shave their facial hair) in a nightclub. In their song, the ratchet girl
determines her success in self-promotion by ability to conspicuously consume hair,
make-up products, and fine dining.
The Hudson brothers’ video both defines and enacts the ratchet performance. That is,
the Hudson brothers perform “ratchetness” even as they attempt to locate it in someone
else. First, they make use of “willfully exaggerated style, parodic intent, and irony laced
with the grotesque” to mark and ridicule the ratchet girl (Marranca and Dasgupta 1998).
While singing the song, their facial expressions and ad-libs punctuate their gender-
bending queer performance of ratchet sensibilities. The Hudson brothers sing/rap the fol-
lowing chorus:
 46 T.A. Pickens

OMG What do she have on?

(She ratchet!)
Her lace front is all wrong.
(‘Cause she ratchet!)
Gimme the phone. I’m finna’ take this heffa picture.
(She ratchet.)
Got it! I’m ‘bout to put this girl on Twitter.
(Cause she ratchet.)
See? I ain’t got time for this. I’m too grown.
(See, you ratchet.)
Boy bye! Not with them shoes on!
(Because you ratchet!)
Oh I just want to punch her in her face!
(Oh! She ratchet!)
I can’t stand her! Oh she’s too fake!
(She ratchet!) (Hudson and Hudson 2012)
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During the chorus, Phillip Hudson’s character buttresses Emmanuel Hudson’s perform-
ance by repeating and emphasizing what constitutes ratchetness. He consistently interjects
with commentary that privileges the contributions of one sidekick in determining who and
what comprises ratchet behavior. In addition to the brothers’ (or sisters’ or friends’)
enabling of each other, they team up to enable someone else’s ratchetness. They perform
a scenario in which they ask someone to model both her outfits and her hair weave.
When her back is turned, they mock vomiting and make faces of disgust while telling
her that she looks great. When she leaves, they dissolve into giggles and repeat the
chorus. Their actions and reactions not only define their phantom subject as ratchet but
also constitute them as ratchet, ironizing their label of someone else as fake.
They draw on their layered performances of black womanhood, queerness, and
working-class black cultures to define and enact the ratchet. The Hudson brothers’ drag per-
formance mocks women, calling upon the history of ratchet as a label of derision. Their
characters poke fun at the invisible woman in the video as a way to mark her as abject,
while they perform the two-faced behavior they deem ratchet in others. The references to
hair weaves, baby daddies, and “hitting the club” implicitly racialize the ratchet figure as
black. Within the chorus, the ratchet is defined as a gendered and raced other. In the
lyrics, the brothers enact the ratchet. The brothers’ performance references queerness not
just based on their drag performance. They rely on an interplay between black queerness
and black womanhood in which each emulates and draws on the history of the other.
The drag marks the brothers as queer as they deliberately draw on stereotypes of excess,
brazen behavior, and explicit sexuality associated with black women. However, given
that the same stereotypes are associated with black gay men, the song implicates black
queer identity as integral to being and seeing ratchet. Lastly, many of their quips about
food stamps and child support rely on the markers of working-class reality to ridicule the
ratchet’s priorities. The song scorns the ratchet for emphasizing appearance over suppo-
sedly more substantive concerns. According to them, the ratchet is only focused on class
mobility based on sexual exchange. Part of what adds to the classed performance is the
brothers’ role as producers. They raised money to produce a full-fledged video that features
them dressed up as women in a club. Their paying public corroborates their definition of
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 47

ratchet. In endorsing their video, that public allows them to perform a significant aspect of
the ratchet – the exchange of money or goods for simply being ratchet.
The popularity of the brothers’ YouTube clips foregrounds the extent to which the
ratchet is policed and circulated via new media. In keeping with the idea that the ratchet
“undermines logic and accepted canons of behavior with […] abandon or with equally dis-
arming viciousness” by refusing to play by the rules ostensibly constructed by a black
middle class (Marranca and Dasgupta 1998), the ratchet seeks public spaces to perform.
In point of fact, the ratchet performance begs to be noticed and trades on the idea of
black respectability even as it disrupts it. The brash, often loud, sexually brazen and/or pro-
vocative, and self-conscious (if not self-absorbed) behavior has so-called respectable black
people as its ever-present shadows. The tension between the ratchet and the politics of
respectability emerges on social media because one can use comments that aim to police
or ridicule as a stepping stone to visibility. The ratchet’s desire for visibility (or self-pro-
motion) can be fully realized if one “hits [her] up on Facebook and follows [her] on
Twitter” because there notoriety and infamy is equated with popularity (Hudson and
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Hudson 2012).
Black female sexuality subtends any discussion of the ratchet – beholden as it is to
eschewing the politics of respectability. Within the ratchet imagination, sexuality
becomes utilitarian and the ratchet performance capitalizes on the problematic notion of
black female sexual availability. The result lays bare the relationship between sexuality
and power, an economy of desire where the body is currency. The payoff of the ratchet per-
formance can be anything that serves her goal of advancement. Sexuality then becomes the
cachet she needs to advance her own interests. It is not simply what you know or whom you
know, but what you’ve done for those whom you know (or how well you know them). In
other words, this economy of desire is not solely relegated to the bedroom but the exchange
lies in the body itself as a commodity. The ratchet performance trades on one’s knowledge,
experience, and talents to secure one’s own status and create a public persona. Karrine Stef-
fans, the self-described “video vixen,” is one such example as she literally cashed in on her
intimate sexual knowledge of black entertainers with her book and speaking tour.3 Even if
she is considered a pariah by some (which is not a problem in the ratchet imagination), her
name, body, and sexual skill set now have recognition all their own. Laying bare this
economy of desire reinforces dominant and racist views of black female sexuality, but it
need be reiterated that the ratchet is not concerned with the needs of any collective. Her
concern is her own individual uplift and so she articulates herself against the structures
that silence her in particular without regard for those that silence black women in
general. Even the ratchet is kin to those Jacqueline Bobo describes as “constantly
engaged in interacting forcefully with the various structures of power” (Bobo 1995, 31).

“She! Me! Her!” Tamar Braxton as ratchet subject

Given that reality TV functions as a space where the politics of respectability can be pushed
aside (to varying degrees), I turn my attention to one of its most recent stars: Tamar Braxton.
Tamar stars in and produces Braxton Family Values (BFV), a show meant to be a vehicle for
showcasing the life of famed 1990s R&B chanteuse Toni Braxton and her tight-knit
relationship with her sisters. Considering that television is both a business and a culture,
 48 T.A. Pickens

BFV also permits a specific kind of opportunity for sales and rebranding. Coupling docu-
mentary and soap opera themes in BFV allows for “a range of institutional and cultural
developments that include the merger of marketing and ‘real life’ entertainment” (Ouellette
and Murray 2008). Toni Braxton has capitalized on the show to remain relevant to current
pop culture, and promote her new album. Tamar has used the show to help launch her solo
record career. The three other sisters have also tried to mobilize the success of the show to
further their own solo careers. Trina promoted her single “Party or Go Home.” Towanda
resigned from being Toni’s personal assistant to start a business that trains personal assist-
ants. She also has aspirations to be an actress. Traci has tried to re-enter the record business
as a singer and tried her hand at being a beautician. In thinking of Tamar Braxton as ratchet,
I concede that her performance is not exclusive (e.g., many others may also perform in this
manner) and that her wealth (from her success as a former background singer and her mar-
riage to Vincent Herbert) functions as a fly in the ointment of the ratchet’s perceived
working-class position. Nonetheless, Tamar’s performance suggests a wide range of possi-
bilities in interpreting ratchetness.
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In the first season of BFV (which is the only season I will discuss here), Tamar performs
ratchetness as a strategy to rebrand herself. She capitalizes on reality TV as an opportunity
to become a standout personality among her sisters. In other words, she seeks to reimagine
herself in the public eye as no longer being Toni Braxton’s background singer and wife to
the famous and influential record producer Vincent Herbert, but being Tamar Braxton, full
stop, or as she might say, “point blank and the period” (Braxton 2012). She helps to (re)
popularize the punctuation of phrases with “dot com” (or “dot org”) for emphasis. She
also relies on her own irascible yet humorous Delaware-Maryland-Virginia meets Los
Angeles brogue with phrases like “have several seats,” “get your life,” or “he tried it,”
many of which she borrows from black queer culture.4 Tamar also attempts to rebrand
herself as “hot” not just in terms of popularity, but also in terms of sex appeal. She repeat-
edly makes mention of wanting to “drop it like it’s hot.” Her reference to the dance move is
clear (which she makes literal by dropping to the floor every now and again) along with her
reference to the stripper culture from which “dropping it” originally comes. This combi-
nation of popularity and sex appeal culminates in Tamar’s desire to be “She! Me! Her!”
without defining what that is exactly.
Tamar’s ability to succeed in rebranding herself heavily depends on the network that
airs Braxton Family Values (BFV). BFV airs on Women’s Entertainment TV or WE TV
(owned and operated by AMC Networks Inc.) which has the tag line “Life as WE know
it.” WE TV is one of several networks that capitalizes on black women’s performances
(many of which could be classified as ratchet) to make money. Like Oxygen and Lifetime,
WE TV makes a claim to showcasing the real. They boast “original stories about every kind
of family and all kinds of drama” and claims to “[provide] a modern view of family life that
viewers can’t get anywhere else” (AMC Networks 2013). Producing and starring in BFV
allowed Tamar the opportunity to highlight her close connection to her family and articulate
her desire to break free of the constraints placed on her by family. The network targets
women as its main demographic desiring to showcase drama that resonates with its
viewers. Its main staple is programming that highlights the tension within families, specifi-
cally young women who seek to differentiate themselves. For instance, WE TV has original
programming like My Fair Wedding with David Tutera and Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 49

Best (featuring Joan and Melissa Rivers) and airs re-runs of shows like Charmed.5 The
company, originally launched in 1997 as “Romance Classics,” rebranded to WE TV in
2006 and now is available to more than 77 million US households (AMC Networks
2013). As part of the WE TV line-up, BFV fits in as a documentary-soap opera in
reality-television form, chronicling the lives of the sisters and their mother. The theme
song says it best: “We are the Braxtons and you’ll see that we are not like an ordinary
family. Toni. Traci. Towanda. Trina. Tamar and Ms. E. We’ll teach you a thing or two.
Braxton Family Values” (Braxton 2012).
In thinking through Tamar’s performance as ratchet, it helps to conceive of reality TVas a
genre that has matured into a “distinct, and widely recognized, cultural form” (Ouellette and
Murray 1998). Viewers are inclined to be sufficiently skeptical of the “real” in reality TV.
Despite the fact that Tamar makes a claim to authenticity, this should not be conflated with
a claim to the real. In other words, we have to maintain a distinction between Tamar as
reality-TV star, living person, and solo performer/professional. This becomes especially
important for thinking through the ratchet as a strategic performance that navigates gendered
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and racialized norms. It could be said that BFV is similar to celebrity reality programs like
VH1′s Flavor of Love “where the whole point is the impossibility of accessing a celebrity’s
true self” (Hendershot 2008). However, the advertisements suggest that viewers are hanging
out with the sisters and learning with or from them. In Dubrofsky and Hardy’s words, “auth-
enticity is verified when participants appear to be themselves despite the highly contrived
panoptic nature of the settings in which the action unfolds” (2008, 378). This invitational
moment suggests that one expects to view something authentic, but not necessarily that
one will fully understand Tamar or any of the sisters as living people. Her ratchetness is auth-
entic, but that is not the only version of herself. In other words, Tamar also has to traverse
ratchetness itself, implying that the ratchet has its own limitations as a strategy.
Tamar Braxton’s particular performance of the ratchet participates in the simultaneous
making and unmaking of performer and audience. She exists between the rock of black
respectability and hard place of male privilege. She hails from a preacher’s family in Mary-
land. Her fairytale marriage to record producer Vincent (Vince) Herbert, who is responsible
for the success of artists like Lady Gaga, adheres to a narrative of racial and fiscal uplift. In
the theme song to Braxton Family Values, the sisters point to unity and the value of family
as a way to distinguish themselves from other family-based reality television shows. Within
the show, the sisters and their mother echo the refrain that they fight hard and love harder.
Furthermore, during the first part of the first season, Vince Herbert seems to stand in as a
kind of patriarch substitute who reminds the women of the importance of faith and
family. What becomes clear is that Vince’s success, much like Toni’s, overshadows
Tamar’s. As a strategy, she turns to the ratchet to differentiate herself by unmaking the poli-
tics of respectability and re-creating herself as a brand. Since she cannot capitalize on her
husband’s masculinity or the success of her sister without being second fiddle to either, the
ratchet imagination allows Tamar a liberatory tertiary space to become her own entity.

Having her way: ratchet as strategic performance

In the first season, Tamar uses her own ratchet performance to negotiate family drama. I
would argue that Tamar performs deliberately. She deploys what Rebecca Wanzo refers
 50 T.A. Pickens

to as “subjective objectification” as she “attempt[s] to reconfigure [herself] as the central

agent[] of a particular project” (Wanzo 2006, 138). In the middle of the first season,
Vince approaches the sisters about doing a Braxton family album. This prospect is exciting
for Trina and Towanda because they would appreciate the opportunity to sing with their
sisters again. For Traci, this would be her big break after a record company refused to
sign her in the early 1990s (because she was pregnant). Tamar finds the prospect exciting,
but also views it as an interference with her possible solo career. Toni thinks it would be a
good idea for the four sisters to do an album without her because she wants to differentiate
herself as an individual and stop the admixture of family and business. It is clear that Tamar
has reservations. Her response in the confessional provides a useful framing of her reser-
vations and sheds light on how she feels about the album and its relationship to her own
career: “Regardless of Toni doing the album or not, I definitely have to deal with this
Braxton album thing delicately because if I don’t do it, it’s like I don’t give my sisters a
chance to do it. And, then, I feel like if I do it, I knock myself right out the competition.
What? I’m ’on [I’m going to] be 45, shaking my booty? No, that’s not hot” (Braxton
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2012). What emerges as a significant issue is that Toni may not participate. Tamar uses
that as a red herring to negotiate her actual concerns. Tamar reiterates two major points.
First, she declares that she will push back her solo album if Toni sings on all the tracks.
Second, Tamar will not help create the album if Toni does not participate, where partici-
pation is constituted by “singing on at least all the songs” (Braxton 2012).
In part, Tamar has a point: Toni’s full participation would allow them to all use Toni’s
cultural cachet as a household name and distance the other four sisters (particularly Tamar)
from being Toni’s background singers. But being ratchet is not about being right. It is about
being efficient. Tamar’s delivery mobilizes excess and hyper volatility as a way to challenge
Toni’s decision. Tamar’s delivery is also part of a strategy to remain an individual when
faced by the threat of an encroaching collective. What could be read as Tamar’s excess
is really a pre-emptive strike. She can not only reframe the issue and the players, making
it easier to advocate for herself, but she can also present her album as a last resort rather
than a principal desire and position herself as a lone voice of reason. She sits at Trina’s
kitchen table and bangs on it with her fists saying “No! No! I am not doing the record if
Toni is not doing it. No. I. Am. Not!” (Braxton 2012). When asked about her own
record in relationship to the family album, Tamar says that she’ll have no choice but to
work on her solo album if Toni does not participate, couching her reservations about the
prospective family album in terms of Toni’s actions. In addition to the ritualized perform-
ance of increased passion – finger-waving, neck-rolling, increased vocal volume, and
speech peppered with “dot com” for emphasis – Tamar reframes the issue so that others’
objections make the album a potentially volatile endeavor. Her performance of excess
“enact[s] visibility that seizes on the scopic desires to discipline the black female body
through a normative gaze that anticipates its rehearsed performance of abjection” (Fleet-
wood 2011). Tamar expects her sisters to pressure her to perform on the album, circumscrib-
ing her behavior into parameters that more clearly conform to respectable (Braxton) family
values.
Tamar’s negotiation of the possible Braxton family album speaks to the necessity of
maneuvering out of being policed on racialized and gendered terms. On the one hand,
she has her familial obligations to her sisters, which are consistently remarked upon by
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 51

their mother and her husband. Yet, Tamar’s career as a solo artist appears to be contingent
upon her moving aside her black middle-class roots and her explicit belonging to a family
unit. The schism between an individual’s aspirations and a community’s expectations
(familial or not) is the fertile ground in which Divas are created in African American litera-
ture. Aisha Lockridge describes the Diva as one who manifests a “performance of survival”
to throw off the expectations of black motherhood, racial uplift, and community belonging
(Lockridge 2012). Tamar articulates what Lockridge terms “Diva desire,” a narrative of
independence and self-determination vis-à-vis one’s life and career (Lockridge 2012).
When Tamar disavows her identity as Toni Braxton’s background singer saying that she
does not want to be one of those “doo wop pop pop chicks” (Braxton 2012) anymore,
she shuns her beginnings and the respectability associated with that in favor of wanting
to “drop it like it’s hot and pick it back up again” (Braxton 2012). According to Lockridge,
the Diva “perform[s] [her] identity for a limited audience in a mixed and potentially hostile
space” (Lockridge 2012). Tamar objects to a family album, not directly but instead by
deploying a strategic performance that allows her to survive intact as a solo artist.
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I do not intend to suggest that all Divas are ratchet nor are all ratchet performances
indicative of Diva desire. However, the Diva’s strategy of performance becomes a useful
lens to think through Tamar’s ratchetness because they each enlist performative strategies
to “solidif[y] her position, a position which her race and gender usually dictate as unreach-
able” (Lockridge 2012). They seek a narrative of independence, one that remains elusive
because of the way their blackness and womanhood intersect. For both figures, the perform-
ance willfully engages in “spectacular opacity” (Brooks 2006) to distract an audience who
will not have their expectations met. Yet the ratchet differentiates herself from the Diva by
opening up the possibility of embracing images and behaviors the Diva may carefully
avoid. At times, the ratchet seeks to “undermine logic and accepted canons of behavior
with […] abandon or with equally disarming viciousness” by refusing to play by the
rules ostensibly constructed by a black middle class (Marranca and Dasgupta 1998). For
instance, Tamar gets more cachet as a standout personality based on her performance of
the ratchet within the conversations about the album than she ever would by recording
the family album. The performance is paramount. As Jayna Brown notes of the equally dif-
ficult-to-capture black woman performer Valaida Snow, “fictions are as telling as ‘truths’
[and] the lines between them are not always easy to police” (Brown 2006, 52). For the
Diva, the performance is a means to an end. For the ratchet, the performance is the end
itself. Tamar tends to mobilize her performance for the purpose of a solo career, but she
is also clear that this personality (i.e., this consistent ratchetness) is what differentiates
her from her sisters. It is this that makes her a star. Her claim to the real – made by
virtue of her reality-TV appearances, the invitational moment to fans via Twitter and com-
mercials – suggests that the Diva desire gets articulated through her ratchetness.

(Hetero)sexuality in the ratchet imaginary

In addition to the sororal bond, there is another family at stake in Tamar’s performance. She
and her husband, Vince, have to negotiate their careers in the music business and their
relationship with each other. In the first season of Braxton Family Values, Vince appears
to fulfill the role of a twenty-first century beleaguered Ricky to Tamar’s flamboyant
 52 T.A. Pickens

Lucy.6 Within their relationship, Tamar attempts to trade on her marital status to launch her
solo career. Vince refuses this performance of the ratchet, making clear that the parameters
of the ratchet performance are not only circumscribed by the performers’ need for nego-
tiation, but also the audience’s acceptance of an implied contract. Vince has to remind
Tamar that her desire for a solo career cannot be fully realized based on her marital com-
mitment to him. Vince’s rejection of Tamar’s ratchet performance also points out that,
within the parameters of heterosexuality, the ratchet can only do so much. His outburst
from the first episode becomes a much-echoed refrain (and flashback): “It just doesn’t
happen the way you want it to happen because you’re my wife” (Braxton 2012). Tamar
struggles to marry her wifely role with her desires to be a star. In one misguided attempt
to do so, she plans an appreciation party for Vince. What becomes clear as she describes
the party in the confessional is that she conceives of the party as a quid-pro-quo moment
where Vince is supposed to be so floored by the party that he hustles to get her album com-
pleted. Even though Tamar belly dances and gives him a large framed semi-nude photo of
herself, Vince expresses very little in the way of thinking about her album. In fact, he
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receives the photograph with what the other sisters describe as chagrin and embarrassment.
He also makes clear that he does not care for the food, thinly veiling his desire to eat at a
downtown LA food institution, the famed hot-dog stand Pinks.
Vince resists Tamar’s own reading of her desirability as a rationale for launching her
solo career. He delineates the limitations of her behavior because he calls attention to ratch-
etness as performance. Vince’s resistance points to two ideas that reframe ratchetness as a
limited strategy. First, the economy of desire does not always open doors for those who par-
ticipate in it. In the first episode, he makes clear that his position as a record producer grants
him insight into when and how a career can and should be launched. In a conversation with
Toni, Vince stresses that Tamar has to set up her career launch correctly (Braxton 2012).
Despite his position as Tamar’s husband, he cannot (and should not) circumvent the
process, especially if he wants her to be successful. In the third episode, Vince reminds
Tamar that she has yet to sign the contract he gave her (Braxton 2012). Without it, he
cannot legitimately begin to work on her solo career. The economy of desire is no longer
at stake when she cannot use her marital status to her advantage. She must, like other
artists, mobilize her talent and work ethic first. Moreover, even when Tamar relies on the
economy of desire as system of exchange, she does not receive what she expects. Vince
may work harder on her behalf, but will not simply do what she says. Second, the par-
ameters that bind her performance are more fluid than she thinks. In other words, Tamar
does not have to negotiate her role as spouse, sister, and entertainer. In Vince’s mind,
she can do all three if she were to get out of her own way. At the Braxton Family Values
Reunion Special hosted by Wendy Williams, Vince notes that he is the only one who can
deal with his wife (Braxton 2012). He positions himself as the person who allows her to
be completely authentic – meld the living person with the telegenic personality. Though
I would argue that Vince appears unaware of how Tamar must, in some way, “negotiate
the tension between archetypes of black womanhood and a performed self,” Vince does
point to the possibility of other available performative strategies (Wanzo 2006, 139).
Vince’s comments clarify that the ratchet performance rests on an implied contract,
whereby the audience has to participate in defining and thereby sanctioning the ratchet
as such. Vince disrupts Tamar’s performance by redefining the economy of desire,
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 53

emphasizing her professional obligations, and reframing her behavior as unnecessarily

outlandish.
Vince and Tamar’s relationship attests to a set of cultural anxieties vis-à-vis black het-
erosexual relationships. The politics of respectability mandates a code of conduct that pri-
vileges romance and eschews discussions of sex. The ratchet intervenes by pointing out that
sex is integral and, in some cases, work. Considering that the family is thought to be an
analog for the nation, the black heterosexual pair has tended to represent the pinnacle of
a healthy and thriving black community and the achievement of racial progress – the ulti-
mate goal of adhering to respectability by marrying. The ratchet upends what Herman Gray
(2005) describes as “romantic cultural politics offered in the name of a marginal and belea-
guered blackness”. Vince’s resistance to thinking of his relationship with Tamar as quid pro
quo suggests that ratchetness attempts to unmake too much. While (in Vince’s mind) the
ratchet perhaps marks an undoing of the black family, the performance opens up the
space for discussing the cultural taboos of black sex, HIV/AIDS, sex work, and a host of
other related topics. Gray (2005) argues: “In the moral economy of contemporary American
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discourses of gender, sexuality, and race, black women’s bodies operate culturally to mark
the boundaries of female (hetero)sexuality, motherhood, family, desire, and beauty.” Hill
Collins corroborates this point, arguing that:

Images of working-class Black femininity that pivot on a Black women’s body politics of
bitchiness, promiscuity, and abundant fertility also affect middle class African American
women. In essence, the controlling images associated with poor and working-class Black
women become texts of what not to be. (Hill Collins 2004, 138–9)

I would argue that the presence of the ratchet performs the same cultural work as Gray’s
televisual images and Hill Collins’s working-class black femininity. The ratchet marks
the outer limits of those acceptable narratives for black women, allowing them to reject
the ratchet as exceptional to blackness itself thereby un/making her as a subject. In short,
the ratchet reaches its limits when the audience refuses to participate in what it considers
to be its own unmaking.

Ratchet as cultural capital

Keeping in mind that the ratchet helps black reality-TV performers muddy the expectations
and understandings of racial-uplift politics, we must consider the way ratchetness operates
as cultural capital within the world of reality television. The genre “is increasingly overde-
termined by the logic of marketing and promotion[;] its central job remains to promote
itself” (Hearn 2008, 177). The genre of reality TV encourages viewers to understand ratch-
etness a performance even though it makes some claim to being truthful and authentic. Sim-
ultaneously, it allows for ratchetness to sell as cultural capital. The ratchet performer then
becomes marketable as a personality following a trajectory of defiance to bowdlerization to
co-optation (Mukherjee 2006).
In Tamar’s relationship with her sister, Traci, the choice appears to be between the
respectable black family and individual success that jeopardizes its cohesion. However,
Tamar’s resort to the ratchet allows room for both her and Traci to become marketable
 54 T.A. Pickens

within the public sphere. Without shunting aside their long history of butting heads as
sisters, it is important to note that on the show Tamar and Traci’s major conflicts arise
usually as a result of their differing relationships to the music business.7 In the ratchet ima-
ginary, Tamar can only condescend to Traci. Since the ratchet performance is not a commu-
nity-building enterprise, they must be at odds with one another. Traci still harbors anger,
sadness, and resentment about her missed opportunity to sing with her sisters. Seemingly
in mocking, on the first season, the caption under her name reads “The Wannabe.” In the
first episode, Traci expresses significant jealousy and sadness that she cannot sing with
her sisters in Bermuda. Tamar grasps that Traci is upset but does not understand why
Traci has difficulty letting go of the past. If we are to understand that the “normative tele-
vision family is […] a fully scripted set of generic expectations,” Tamar and Traci’s sibling
rivalry makes sense in that context (Kompare 2008). However, the ratchet performance dis-
rupts the expectation of compassionate sisterhood. Rather than attempt to understand
Traci’s position, Tamar tells the camera (during confessional) that she is not “Captain
Save-a-Hoe” or the “Human Resources for Background Singers” (Braxton 2012). Her
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“relational aggression” manifests itself in real time when she yells at Traci about her
own desire to not be a background singer (Coyne, Robinson, and Nelson 2010). What
Tamar seems to misunderstand is that Traci does not have a choice to quit because she
never got started. Tamar’s protestations allow her to distance herself from Traci’s concerns.
To be fair, Tamar is not to blame for Traci’s lost opportunity, but her lack of sisterly com-
passion bespeaks the individualized focus that she needs to perform in order to propel her
solo career.
Tamar’s commentary about human resources and Traci’s disappointment in Bermuda
occurs during the first episode of the series, allowing the confrontation to set up Tamar
and Traci’s individual personas as well as their relationship to each other. The episode pro-
poses a contentious sisterly bond and a falsely inverted relationship that the ratchet disrupts.
Traci’s success seems to hinge on the obligations of family trumping individual success and
Tamar’s success appears to hinge on the opposite. The show constructs their success in that
fashion by making Traci reliant on her sisters and positioning Tamar’s successes at the
expense of her sisters. In some ways, Traci and Tamar’s relationship is not unique. Families
are “sites of cultural anxieties, where the work of social cohesion is ritually enacted”
(Kompare 2008). In addition to the general cultural anxiety regarding family, Tamar and
Traci’s relationship is racialized and gendered such that their opposition to each other chal-
lenges the possibility of cohesion in a black family structure. Their relations challenge
specifically the solidarity that rests on the link between respectability and uplift as well
as the disciplining of the black female body to maintain racial and familial cohesion.
That they cannot be successful simultaneously indicates that the upwardly mobile black
family has become a profoundly anxiogenic space particularly as it moves into the
public sphere. However, Tamar’s performance perforates this anxiety by allowing others
to place blame for Traci’s lack of success onto her as the ratchet individual rather than
the entire family dynamic or the backstory. In other words, the family can remain cohesive
as it uneasily makes room for one contentious individual: a ritualized performance of
unmaking and making indeed.
In making room for Tamar as a contentious individual, the family can stave off anxiety
about its cohesion. Tamar becomes exactly what she wants to be: a standout individual
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 55

among her sisters. Her ratchet performance allowed her to transform into a reality-TV star, a
cultural cachet she now mobilizes for her career advancement. Though the ratchet perform-
ance remains one of defiance, the family’s reaction allows her to bowdlerize what is useful
and co-opt ratchetness so that she can sell it. Without arguing Tamar’s intent, her perform-
ance allows her the tertiary space between her sisters and her husband. As the producer of
BFV, Tamar constructs her persona in front of the camera during live action and confes-
sionals as well as behind the camera in deciding the narrative of each episode and
season as a whole. During seasons two and three of BFV, Tamar continues to behave in
a ratchet fashion, mobilizing excess and volatility as strategies to maneuver within the
family structure. Though this performance dissipates somewhat in her spinoff series
Tamar & Vince, she remains engaged with the fruits of her ratchet labor: a coterie of
fans whom she calls “Tamartians,” speaking engagements that capitalize on others’ under-
standing of her as volatile, and her eventual R&B success. The ratchet has propelled her to a
level of stardom she would not otherwise have without it.
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Take a bow, ratchet girls

By way of conclusion, I return to my earlier assertion that ratchet performances allow sub-
jects to maneuver incrementally. Herein lie the stakes of the ratchet performance: that the
ratchet moves bit by bit within and out of the spaces delineated by progressive racial poli-
tics. The resistance to the ratchet from those who participate in and subscribe to the politics
of respectability surfaces as a disciplining and regulatory practice, which reacts to the
prevalence of putative post-racial politics. Within the post-racial paradigm, the ratchet is
simply another example of someone doing what she needs to achieve success. Here, the
ratchet seems to justify an inattention to issues of institutional and structural racism and
sexism because she promulgates individualism and is thought to be a manifestation of
black success after race ceases to matter. As one might imagine, the ratchet individual
engenders resistance from those concerned with contemporary racial politics because her
success would indicate the demise of progressive black politics and suggest that racial dis-
courses are obsolete. I would argue for a more complex view that recognizes the importance
of the ratchet performance and the ratchet imaginary in a shifting political and cultural land-
scape. To dismiss or ignore the ratchet searches for “a stable, unified subject or for one set of
truths” while eliding the “complexities and ambiguities of [black women’s] multi-valenced
presences” (Brown 2006, 52). To my mind, the ratchet performance keeps in abeyance the
necessity of addressing institutional and structural racism and sexism. Far from signaling
the demise of progressive racial politics, the ratchet thrusts us out of looking to singular cul-
tural representations as thermometers for the temperature of race relations. The ratchet must
be both the exception and the rule for she proves the necessity of individualism and rejects
the dangerous pressures of an irresponsible collective imagination.

Acknowledgements
I extend my deepest and heartfelt thanks to Aisha Lockridge for her support and encouragement on
this project as well as the “Sister Scholars Writing Group” for their assistance: Andreá Williams;
Ayesha Hardison; Courtney Marshall; Kameelah Martin; Leslie Wingard; and Samaa Abdurraqib.
 56 T.A. Pickens

Notes on contributor
Therí A. Pickens researches Arab American and African American literatures and cultures, Disability
Studies, philosophy, and literary theory. Her book manuscript, New Body Politics: Narrating Arab
and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States (Routledge, 2014), asks: How does a story
about embodied experience transform from mere anecdote to social and political critique? Her critical
work has also appeared in Disability Studies Quarterly, MELUS, Journal of Literary and Cultural
Disability Studies, Al-Jadid, Al-Raida, the ground-breaking collection Blackness and Disability:
Critical Examinations and Cultural Interventions, and the critical volume Defying the Global
Language: Perspectives in Ethnic Studies (Teneo Ltd).

Notes
1. LaMonda H. Stallings (2013) calls for a Black Ratchet imagination, citing that the ratchet is a
failure to be respectable. The scholar provides a raced and queered lineage for the ratchet.
Much of this work inspires this conversation.
2. It is worth noting that this discussion of the ratchet is in dialogue with others’ discussions of the
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putatively respectable black woman. The respectable black woman functions as a shadow for the
ratchet performance even though the ratchet is not particularly concerned with the respectable
woman’s interests. I have chosen not to engage a more expansive discussion of the interplay
between the respectable and the ratchet for reasons of space. I suspect this article rather enjoys
the opportunity to disregard respectability and, in so doing, not only describes but participates
in a ratchet performance.
3. Karrine Steffans is a model and author, most well known for her appearances in music videos and
the Vixen series. In Confessions of a Video Vixen, she describes many of her sexual relationships,
some of which were exploitive, with hip-hop artists.
4. According to Mikael from the popular YouTube show, The Skorpion Show, he coined the phrase
“have several seats” and Tamar popularized it. He makes clear his ownership of the phrase,
marking it as originating within a black queer space.
5. My Fair Wedding with David Tutera is a reality-TV show in which participants ask David Tutera
to plan their wedding. Usually they have to navigate strained family dynamics. Joan and Melissa
is another reality-TV show which focuses on the lives of television personalities and irascible
fashion commentators, Joan and Melissa Rivers. As a mother/daughter duo, Joan and Melissa
consistently serve drama related to their contentious relationship. Charmed was a scripted
drama that followed the lives of three sisters who happen to be very powerful witches, while
they lived, worked, and fought evil in San Francisco.
6. In the later seasons and in their own reality television show, Tamar and Vince, we learn more
about Vince and Tamar’s relationship. Vince is no longer the beleaguered husband and Tamar
the ratchet performer (at least not all the time).
7. Within the first season, Traci and Tamar have a very difficult argument about marriage. Traci
makes a point that marriage is difficult. When Tamar expresses her opinion about marriage,
Traci awkwardly points out that Tamar and Vince’s relationship is new and so they have very
little understanding of the trials of marriage. Tamar believes that Traci has doomed her and
Vince to divorce. Though this argument is not about the music industry, it features the same
elements as the arguments that do revolve around that subject. Neither woman really listens to
the other. Traci feels condescended to and Tamar feels attacked.

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