1. Gary Laderman, Sacred Matters: Celebrity Worship, Sexual Ecstasies, the Living Dead and Others Signs of Religious Life in the United States (New York: The New Press, 2010). For more on the relationship between religion and popular culture, see God In the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture ed. Erica Michael Mazur and Kate McCarthy (New York: Routledge, 2001); Religion and Popular Culture in America, ed. Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey Mahan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Understanding Theology and Popular Culture (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005) by Gordon Lynch.
2. LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant. “Fat Spirit: Obesity, Religion and Sapphmam mibel in Contemporary Black Film,” Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring 2013): 56–69.
3. Studies of blackness and negative stereotyping within popular media forms are an ever-expanding field of study. Select texts include Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks; Manthia Diawara, Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993);
4. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995);
5. bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York: Routledge, 1994) and Reel to Real: Race Sex, and Class at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1996);