Mariah Carey as Monica Weiss; Mo'Nique as Mary in stills from Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire (Lee Daniels Entertainment)

But let us take a moment and think of who these women are when the camera stops rolling. We have two pop cultural icons—household names, even—in possession of very different semiotic cachés within mass culture. Mo’Nique, on the one hand, is a comedienne with a loyal following who has made her career partially out of her off-handed, and at times highly subversive humor around issues of size. No mistaking, Mo’Nique is, medically speaking, “overweight,” but she vehemently, often hilariously, refuses to feel bad (ugly, disempowered, unsexy) about it. In fact, she advocates the direct inverse of this: she feels good about and within her own body, and, accordingly, has earned her rep as a sort of everyday people’s pro-fat folk-hero. And then on the other hand—the reverse-shot—we have Mariah Carey, with her multi-octave voice from another planet, and her lush ballads and sex-kitten music videos. Mariah has continued to crank out rich, buttery R&B jams that have become nothing short of canonical femme anthems (for the ladies, and the fags, yeah!). So, when a single tear undermines Mrs. Mariah Weiss’s steel resolve, confirming her recognition of Mary Mo’Nique’s transition from repulsively monstrous to disturbingly human, director Lee Daniels (homo) is offering, perhaps unintentionally, an olive branch, between the Mo’Niques and the Mariahs—the “fats” and the “femmes” and those who are a little or a lot of both.