Abstract
This chapter surveys the academic literature on “black male feminism,” with a critical focus on the foundational work of literary critic and cultural historian Michael Awkward since the 1990s. Contrasting readings are presented of scholars David Marriott on “blackness and deathliness” and the late Aimé Ellis on the pursuit of freedom through “death-dealing violence” and “death-discovering sex” between and among black men.
They said I was wild, untamed, devilish. That I was lost to this world. For my part, I don’t mind. My dreams, moving slowly, tell me I’m home….
— David Marriott , “Cut”
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Notes
- 1.
There is an extensive literature already, but for some recent examples, see Anthony (2013), Crawford (2008), Davis (2017), Drake (2016), Dunning (2009), Ellis (2011), Gerstner (2011), Greene (2008), Harris (2012), Hoston (2016), Ikard (2007), C. Jackson (2011), Lemelle (2010), Lemons (2008, 2009), McCready (2010), McCune (2014), McGuire et al. (2014), Munby (2011), Murray (2015), Neal (2013, 2015), Noguera (2008), Orelus (2010), Pochmara (2011), Richardson (2007), Scott (2010), Snorton (2014), Taylor (2008), White (2008), White (2011), Woodward (2014), and Young (2007). For a great critical overview of the field, see Drake (2016), especially the Introduction.
- 2.
Joy James (2002) marks a distinction between the black male feminism espoused, for example, by Awkward (1995), Lemons (2008), and Neal (2015), and the pro-feminism espoused by Gordon (1997) and Carbado (1999). I will collapse that distinction for the sake of economy, but also because I see an underlying commonalty to the approaches.
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The essay is reprinted in Spillers (2003) with some modification. The phrasing of the crucial passage in the latter publication is slightly different: “the black American male embodies the only American community of males handed the specific occasion to learn who the female is within itself” (228, emphasis added). Spillers’ revision of the passive clause “which has had” into the active verb “handed” matters upmost; it installs an agent—the black female, and the black mother in particular—of the black American male’s learning opportunity. But then, this agency is ambiguous, for Spillers also notes, in the same passage, it is because of the peculiar American denial of parental function to the black male that an opportunity is afforded, whether had or handed.
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Awkward is dismayed that Stephen Heath and other contributors, both men and women, cannot find a means of affirming the possibility of a genuine male feminism. Awkward might be happy to learn that the consensus a generation later among white public intellectuals is more sanguine. See, for instance, Tarrant (2009), Berlatsky (2014), and McDonough (2014).
- 9.
Awkward’s use of the term and concept “womanism ” is imprecise. He uses it interchangeably with “black feminism” and generally to distinguish, crudely, between those black feminist thinkers that he feels some affinity for, that is, those most open to the prospect of a black male feminism and those he does not, that is, those with the most questions about the prospect of a black male feminism. On the history and development of womanism and its relationship to black feminism, see Phillips (2006, 2012).
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“Nevertheless, in relation to the potential development of a black male feminism, I am troubled by what appears to be a surprisingly explicit determination to protect turf … black feminist literary critics do not best serve the discourses that concern them by setting into motion homeostatic maneuvers intended to devalue all forms of inquiry except for those they hold to be most valuable (in this particular case, a female-authored scholarship that emphasizes Afro-American women’s writings of black female subjectivity)” (Awkward 1995, 50). Aside from the tautological accusation that black feminist critics value only what they value, one can see here how Awkward inflates the healthy suspicions and informed judgments of black feminist critics into a self-defeating policing, echoing “in unfortunate ways those of antifeminist male critics, white and black, who consider feminism to be an unredeemably myopic and unyielding interpretive strategy” (Awkward 1995, 50).
- 11.
Gary Lemons (2006) repeats much the same misreading in his own important essay, “To Be Black, Male, and ‘Feminist’: Making Womanist Space for Black Men.” There he chastises the contributors to Men In Feminism, stating: “If all feminist men concluded as [Stephen Heath] does that our relation to feminism is indeed an impossible one, we would never get on with the task at hand—to end sexism and the oppression of women. The history of black male pro-feminist relation to women’s movement against sexism shows that despite the patriarchal baggage all men carry, we can be men without being oppressors of women” (Lemons 2006, 107, emphasis added). This move rests upon a misreading of the anthology. He writes: “Men in Feminism raises a fundamental question as to whether male feminists can work to empower women in non-patriarchal ways. In “Male Feminism,” Stephen Heath addresses this question asserting that ‘[m]en’s relation to feminism, is an impossible one … politically. Men have a necessary relation to feminism … and that relation is also necessarily one of a certain exclusion … no matter how “sincere,” “sympathetic” or whatever, we are always in a male position which brings with it all the implications of domination and appropriation …’ (1). The idea that men cannot in feminist alliance with women politically subvert the power of male supremacy is like saying white people in anti-racist solidarity with black people cannot divest themselves of white supremacist thinking” (Lemons 2006, 106–7). Heath is, quite clearly, speaking to matters of what Awkward calls “positionality” not matters of ideology. Moreover, Heath does not declare that “men cannot in feminist alliance with women politically subvert the power of male supremacy,” but rather that in any such alliance men will experience an “impossible” relation, “one of a certain exclusion,” because they will inevitably inhabit “a male position” that is implicated with “the power of male supremacy” in a way that women will not be, that is, as agents of gender domination and appropriation. After dismissing through leaps of logic such political-intellectual caution, Lemons then concludes similarly: “(Black) male feminism as a politic of intervention (opposing sexism in black communities) represents a crucial step toward educating men on the ill-effects of male domination. According to bell hooks , the struggle against sexist oppression will be most successfully fought when men undergo feminist transformation—only when we are challenged by women to understand that the oppression of women is a form of self-oppression. Women can no longer afford to theorize men on the margin of feminism when sexist practice impacts the lives of women daily as its victims and men as its perpetrators. Women accepting progressive men as feminist allies end [sic] the stigma of feminist movement as a separatist enterprise. While separatist thinking may free women from the presence of men, it does not eradicate sexism in the society at large. Instead, it mirrors the very sexist behavior feminist women seek to end” (Lemons 2006, 107).
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The outstanding exception is, of course, represented by Native women, whose rates of abuse index conditions of structural vulnerability derived from ongoing settler colonialism and manifest in overwhelmingly interracial forms of gender and sexual violence (Smith 2005). See also, generally, INCITE (2006), Sokoloff (2005), and Richie (1996, 2012).
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“Indeed, my personal and intellectual interests often seem less a matter of choice than part of a ‘mission’ that I ‘felt duty bound to fulfill,’ to echo Paule Marshall’s evocative line in Praisesong for the Widow” (Awkward 2000, 4).
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I cannot help but think that Awkward unconsciously mangles, and thereby undercuts, Spillers’ rewriting of the old adage regarding material and symbolic violence in “Mama’s Baby”: “We might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us” (Spillers 1987, 68, emphasis in original).
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“If autobiography is a genre in which contributors shape their self-representations in response to earlier texts, ‘autocritography’ is a self-reflexive, self-consciously academic act that foregrounds aspects of the genre typically dissolved into authors’ always strategic self-portraits. Autocritography, in other words, is an account of individual, social, and institutional conditions that help to produce a scholar and, hence, his or her professional concerns. Although the intensity of investigation of any of these conditions may vary widely, their self-consciously interactive presence distinguishes autocritography from other forms of autobiographical recall” (Awkward 2000, 7). Note the strong emphasis on greater reflexivity and consciousness, on the one hand, and lesser strategic self-portraiture, on the other. The net effect is to deliberately and knowingly, nay honestly, lay bear one’s conditions of emergence, something more confessional than the sort of “critical self-inventory” advanced by West (2009). Contrast this with the critical approach in the “biomythography” written by Lorde (2011). See also, Russell (2009): “In the preface to her ‘autobiography’ Zami, Lorde describes her work as born from a fusion of ‘dreams/myths/histories that give the book shape.’ To the authorial signatory, she assigns the following: ‘A Biomythography by Audre Lorde.’ The term biomythography unequivocally signifies on the autobiographical form. If autobiography is traditionally believed to refer to accurate, chronological, and stable representation of the events of one’s life (even if only illusorily so), then for Lorde ‘biomythography’ refers to the self-conscious act of destabilizing such conventional dictates” (60).
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On the history and politics informing the problem of child abuse in black communities, see Patton (2017). She argues there that black children are more vulnerable than their non-black counterparts given the structural conditions of antiblackness, and that both this structural vulnerability and the collective desire among black caretakers to protect them from harm serve to compound and to normalize their abuse.
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“At work in all of these cases is an abiding sense of racial mistrust—and animus—so deep that it appears to diminish the capacity of black Americans to ponder events rationally. I recognize the legitimacy of this animus, which I admit I too feel at times. But I suspect that its appearance in response to incidents like the Imus controversy is largely the result of the still-unresolved trauma from which black Americans continue collectively to suffer because, notwithstanding Barack Obama’s historic election and other indisputable signs of progress, our nation still has barely addressed, yet alone begun to atone for, its racially motivated sins. Consequently, manifestations of such animus must be carefully monitored and, when necessary, identified as wholly unhealthy for the black body politic” (Awkward 2009, xv). We see here that Awkward is analogizing the irrationality of the black community regarding antiblackness generally with the irrationality of black women regarding misogynoir specifically. Put differently, black people generally act like irrational black women specifically, which of course suggests that black women act most irrationally due to compounded and overwhelming animus born of unresolved trauma. So where Awkward is initially concerned with how the unresolved trauma of black men contributes to the gendered suffering of black women (principally in the form of interpersonal violence), he later inverts his emphasis to focus upon the supposedly deleterious effects for black men of the unresolved trauma of black women and, likewise, the deleterious effects for white men of the unresolved trauma of all black people. In the latter case, those less powerful and more vulnerable “impose” irrational judgment upon black men and white men respectively, and this presents a problem serious enough for Awkward to pen (at least) two books describing and denouncing it.
- 20.
It may be important to note what O’Connor’s famous 1953 short story involves, and it is anything but the titular good man. In brief, a middle-class Southern white man named Bailey suffers the trifling of his unnamed mother (known only as “Grandmother”) during an attempt at a family vacation with his wife and children. His mother’s meddling and deception lead the family into a fateful encounter with the gang of an escaped prisoner (a poor white man called “The Misfit”) who is convicted of murder. The Misfit’s gang eventually kills the entire family in an off-road wooded area and Bailey’s mother is the final victim. The Misfit shoots her to death after she reaches out to him tenderly and says, “You’re one of my own children.” The Misfit then utters the infamous line: “She would have been a good woman … if [there] had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (O’Connor 1993, 51).
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We recall that Celie makes this statement in relation to a life of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse at the hands of black men, most centrally her stepfather, Pa, and her husband, Mr.___.
- 22.
It is stunning that Awkward expresses his disillusionment with black feminists by appropriating so iconic a figure of black women’s suffering, and at precisely the moment she is testifying to her experience of her husband’s brutality: “He beat me like he beat the children. Cept he don’t never hardly beat them. He say, Celie, git the belt. The children be outside the room peeking through the cracks. It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That’s how come I know trees fear man” (Walker 1982a, 23). The phrase “prejudgment of malefaction” above is an oblique reference to the title of the short story accompanying the publication of Walker’s most celebrated novel (Walker 1982b).
- 23.
James’ (2002) incisive critique of works by Awkward (1995), Gordon (1997), and Carbado (1999), and that critique’s relation to her prolific writing (James 1996, 2013) warrants a careful and detailed reading beyond the scope of this chapter. While I interrogate different aspects of Awkward’s project in the current chapter, I was prompted to reread his seminal chapter largely due to its inclusion in James and Sharpley-Whiting (2000) and I have been greatly instructed by both James’ specific criticism of Awkward and her larger defense and elaboration of black radical feminism.
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The long list of noble attributes is cribbed, tongue in cheek, from the official oath of the Boy Scouts of America.
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He writes, by contrast, of other possibilities: “Unanticipated desires might arise which could not be contained within the terms of heterosexual domesticity. Desire might play itself out in no prescribed terms at all, no terms except those of its own treacherous and unruly drives” (Barrett 1997, 118). This passage is a point of departure for a genuine theorization of the practice and imagination of “badboys,” or, simply, “black men,” in a privileged but non-exclusive relation to blackness, that is to say, in the mix.
- 26.
There is an instructive analogy here to the relation between the psychoanalytic cure and conventional healing therapies. Christian Dunker (2011) writes that psychoanalytic “therapeutic action is not based even on a deontological type of word. It is certain that an analyst may sometimes make a deontological intervention … but it is not from obedience to these injunctions that one hopes for any progress during the curing process” (30). So, after indicating that black men must seek resources for an ethics of relation—with black women, with themselves, and with other others—in neither negative moral injunctions nor positive moral examples, we can state more clearly that there is an opposition between ethics and morality at hand. “This, however, does not authorize us to proclaim that there is any type of constitutive and specific negation of the form of power involved in such [moral] practices. That is, it is not sufficient to say that there is an opposition … that would exempt [ethics] from these strategies of power. It must be shown how [ethics] depends internally on the practices of negation or of counterpower derived from points of de-stabilization of the hegemonic [moral injunctions and examples] and their respective regimes of truth” (Dunker 2011, 30). Regarding “auditors” Lacan (2006) writes about the aim of analysis in the full speech of the subject: “For my part, I would say that she verbalizes it, or … that she forces the event into the Word [le verbe] or, more precisely, into the epos by which she relates in the present the origins of her person. And she does this in a language that allows her discourse to be understood by her contemporaries and that also presupposes their present discourse” (212). For a critique of the possibility of full speech for the black, see Wilderson (2010), especially Chap. 2, “The Narcissistic Slave.”
- 27.
See also, Elizabeth Alexander (1995), who writes: “we all want to look at black men, whether we are gay or straight, black or white, male or female. The desire to look is veiled … but the real reason for looking, no matter who we are, is the sex of it” (161).
- 28.
On the concept of “sexuation,” or the psychic formation of sexual difference, derived from the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, especially in its distinction from social constructionist notions of gender difference, see Salecl (2000), Morel (2011), and Ragland (2012). In her introduction to the edited volume, Salecl writes: “For Lacan, sexual difference is not a firm set of ‘static’ symbolic oppositions and inclusions or exclusions (heterosexual normativity that relegates homosexuality and other ‘perversions’ to some secondary role), but the name of a deadlock, of a trauma, of an open question, of something that resists every attempt at its symbolization” (Salecl 2000, 2). The “unrelieved crisis” regarding categories of gender and sexuality (and class and …) produced by the law and logic of racial slavery is, in part, what Spillers’ oeuvre tracks so adroitly. However, if for Spillers and other theorists in African American studies—including Rizvana Bradley, Saidiya Hartman, Sharon Holland, Zakiyyah Jackson, Matt Richardson, Darieck Scott , C. Riley Snorton, Calvin Warren, and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard—we cannot think about gender and sexuality as separate social categories that apply according to an arithmetic of privileges and penalties; if, that is, we have to wonder what gender and sexuality might mean in the first place given the ongoing historical context of racial slavery, that does not therefore abdicate or minimize the need for a robust black radical politics that is explicitly feminist, queer and socialist, at least. In fact, the particular instability or indeterminateness of black genders and sexualities heightens that need and, moreover, affords it the greatest potential. The resultant politics are not simply difficult—that is true of all politics—but also exceptionally intricate.
- 29.
Jackson’s notion of subjectivity without (sanctioned) subjecthood might provide a means, for the black male, female and/or genderqueer, for thinking about masculinity without (sanctioned) manhood.
- 30.
See Richardson (2013) for an elaboration of the larger conceptual framework mobilized in the cited article.
- 31.
Jacques Derrida spent half a century elaborating upon the generativity of crisis and decision for a whole range of practices—social, political, economic—and how distress and consternation arise, in part, from a refusal to think (about) the conditions of indetermination and undecidability that make possible not only any ethics worthy of its name, but also all movement and development whatsoever. See, for instance, Derrida (1978) for his thoughts on crisis and decision; see Wood (2009) for exposition and explication on the earlier text; and see, finally, Bass (2006) for a discussion of how deconstruction might inform a “strange ethics” of care.
- 32.
On blackness and the police power, see Wagner (2009). If we can think of Alexander’s (1995) observations above in relation to Wagner’s arguments in the presently cited source, then we might talk henceforth about the eroticized surveillance and sexual regulation that attend all looking at black men and boys, however such are defined.
- 33.
Jonathan Munby’s (2011) is a study of “the black badman figure” and it is that figure’s particular ambivalence, for the black community, that he is interested in exploring. And yet, he also notes in an antiblack world “the ordinary character of the black life-world is one where one is unavoidably guilty—‘guilty of blackness’” (8). The slippage between this ontological criminality and the mundane criminality of empirical acts of lawbreaking creates a productive tension in the text. For a different treatment of the “black badman figure” or the “bad nigger” and his relation to the emergence of the “nigga” in the post–civil rights era, see Judy (1994). Judy says apropos of the latter: “A nigga is that which emerges from the demise of human capital, what gets articulated when the field nigger loses value as labor. The nigga is unemployed, null and void, walking around like … a nigga who understands that all possibility converts from capital, and capital does not derive from work” (Judy 1994, 212). Consider this, again, alongside Marriott’s question above: “what value do black men themselves possess as free black men?”
- 34.
I arrived at a similar observation in a critical discussion of the early prison writings of Eldridge Cleaver, another figure of black masculinity fusing reactionary criminality, especially the use of gender and sexual violence against women (and men), and radical political possibility (Sexton 2003).
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Sexton, J. (2018). Where Manhood Lies. In: Black Men, Black Feminism. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74126-0_2
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