Masculinity Under Construction. LaToya Jefferson-James
a link between a job and manhood or a quality of manhood. And if Black men were tired of being called “boy,” why was not it considered equally insulting for white women to refer to Black women, who were sometimes ten or twenty years their senior, as “gal”? As a second-generation Civil Rights Warrior (this is the title I have given myself), I KNOW that Black women participated in the protests, were hosed and jailed, and sometimes they were beaten beyond recognition. Why should not a picture of Fannie Lou Hamer leading spirituals at a rally be just as iconic as the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike? What about all of those women who stayed off the buses and walked to work in someone else’s kitchen on tired feet? And where was Claudette Colvin’s story?
As the headache increased in intensity, I guess, dear Reader, you can say that I had an epiphany: From North America to the Caribbean to Europe to Africa, Black men seemed enthralled with the same questions of masculinity. Regardless of language, location, or even religion, it seemed as if the question of masculine identity was centrality to questions and struggles of freedom. Often, masculine identity was discussed as the identity and debates ensued as to how to best portray the identity of a people.
Reader, here is how everything, came together for the project that you now read: the Euro-American nations used the labor of Black males in order to transition from feudalism to capitalism; their presence as earnest competition after enslavement/colonization was considered threats both sexually and economically that must be eradicated legally and extralegally (sometimes, preemptively); race-based capitalism DEMANDED exploitation of Black male physical labor which required subservient behavior; the means whereby this seemingly paradoxical binary of functioning body/paralytic brain were both repressive and ideological; after the firm establishment of capitalism as a viable global economic system, Black males were essentially viewed as obsolete machines or as parts that were no longer needed as the world’s superpowers transitioned from mercantile to late capitalism. Encoded in the language of Black nationalism all over the globe was a rage against the inhumane discursive practices that aimed to reduce men, particulary Black men, to machines.
However (and this is a huge however), men were not the only human beings oppressed, repressed, enslaved, and colonized. The lively debates were often punctuated by a deafening silence, an absence, a void of the voice of the feminine. There were some men who noticed the void and the silence. These authors attempted to correct their masculine cohorts through a process of signification as described by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his watershed text, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literature (1988). Still, other Black male writers attempted to differentiate masculine identities. Last (but certainly not least), Black women writers in no way remained silent about the obscurity of their voices or even the strident misrepresentations that they endured from the pens of Black male writers. They began to critique the masculine as the representation of national identities. First, it is true of women across the African Diaspora that they are well-versed and do verse-well, the same feelings of powerlessness that Black male writers express. Second, they write the kinds of narratives that resist characterization within the academic, white-male dominated power dynamic, and sometimes leave complicated problems unresolved. Third, when writing of struggles for freedom, Black women writers caution Black men about struggles of hierarchy. If we only changed the color of the faces controlling institutions within systems of oppression, could we really call that change? The oppression would simply be replicated within interpersonal relationships, community dynamics, regional dynamics, and maybe even global movements. Fourth, Black women writers tell the kinds of stories that include the notion of gender complementarity—not as an uneven binary as it has been articulated by some male writers, social scientists, and critics—but as different, but equal components of gendered life. Women contribute to the well-being and survival of Black people. Period. Gender differences, according to Black women writers, should not mean gender inequality with patriarchal Black men benefitting from the replicated injustice they perpetrate on the people who love them the most. Fifth, Black women writers use their texts to ask the tough questions: Why does equality imply sameness? Why does equality, at times, tend to DEMAND sameness? How many linguistic/sociological twists and turns have feminists played in order to somehow “prove” that women and men are no different and are therefore deserving of equal treatment? Many African cultures, that were considered “primitive” could respect women as women/different from men and afford them respect and autonomy simultaneously. In some cultures (not all), the imposition of European gender standards caused uneven gender binaries. This is something that writers such as Achebe and Ousmane explore, but their exploration of gendered, colonized bodies is often ignored in favor of a particular political analysis of their texts.
Black women writers ask other questions of anti-colonial struggles. What good is struggle if there is no subsequent change? It is a revolution without, well, evolution. And the systems of inequality that always already suppress women would never change. And while many Black male social scientists, historians, and literary critics decried feminism as something “imported” to Black women from without respective Black cultures, what of their notions of masculinity? Where did they learn patriarchal oppression? Surely, claiming some kind of primordial African heritage did not give license to men to treat others unfairly. Did it?
Reader, all of these questions and observations led to this project, which began as a seminar paper (which is filled with typos and rage) for an independent study that was conducted by the late Professor Reginal Martin. He was kind enough to allow me to read African literature as a Master’s degree student. My program did not have it at the time, and all I had had was an undergraduate course taught by Professor Adetayo Alabi. Later, as a graduate student, I took a class of his that focused on the continuities and divergences of Black autobiography. Rather than teach just African or African American or Afro-Caribbean autobiography, he linked all of the points of the African Diaspora that were part of the global slave trade. While the class certainly was not comparative in the traditional sense of reading in the original languages, we understood the value of looking at these cultures comparatively. It fed my obsession with this topic and eventually turned into a dissertation.
The dissertation, with a name as long as a paragraph, contained a hyperbolic amount of polysyllabic words and footnotes as I was nervously attempting to convince a very skeptical committee that my comparative reading of these texts, in the Irele sense (not always in the original language, but juxtaposed in order to gauge the continuity of respective cultures), was actually a contender for graduation and could withstand the peer review process for publication. Later, as the field of masculinity studies began to grow—particularly Black masculinity studies—I took out this project, dusted it off (in my mind), reviewed, and revised it.
I present this text to you here now, Dear Reader, as a labor of love. Read it, not as a complete text about masculine identity as a continuity within the African Diaspora, but as an introductory text of comparative studies of masculinity within the literatures of the African Diaspora. Do not read the text as one that privileges the African American fact of blackness, but the fact of blackness as something global and heterogenous with various cultural continuities. And one of those cultural continuities is a multiplicity of masculine identities.
Author’s Note
Each of these chapters, with the exception of chapter 4, begins with a discussion of a James Baldwin quote or concept. As a graduate student, I became enamored with the nonfiction writings of James Baldwin. I learned that many of the concepts that are currently circulating in masculinity studies (and feminism) were articulated by Baldwin as early as the 1950s. According to Baldwin, American masculinity is a construction and so is Black masculinity.
Acknowledgments
During the course of my studies, I lost two of my biggest supporters, my maternal grandfather, Mr. Leroy Jefferson, Sr. and my oldest brother, Mr. Damien Ray Gibson. Though they did not live to see this project completed, not a day goes by that I do not think of them in some way. They are present with me always. I would like to pay homage to the memory of my paternal great-grandfather who died years before I was born. Yet, he is still affectionately known as “Poppa Sandy,” and his memory continues to serve as an example of what proactive, empathetic Black manhood should look like. I must acknowledge all of the men of my family and community. Men in my