how it feels to be BLACK ME: Black Masculinities and Sexualities in Black Visual Culture

• Published in: Studies in art education Vol. 61; no. 3; pp. 240 - 253
• Main Author: Grant, Alphonso Walter
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 02.07.2020
• Subjects: African American Culture; African Americans; Blacks; Cultural Differences; Cultural Influences; Gender Differences; Identification (Psychology); Males; Masculinity; Power Structure; Racial Bias; Racial Differences; Racial Identification; Sexuality; Social Bias; Social Class; Social Differences; Social Influences; Visual Stimuli; Whites
• ISSN: 0039-3541; 2325-8039
• DOI: 10.1080/00393541.2020.1794283

In this article, I build on previous scholarship about Black identities, masculinities, and sexualities within Black visual culture and how their content and concepts reverberate within a larger white-dominant culture as viewed phenomenologically through Black lived experiences. This manuscript is a first-person, focused effort toward contextualizing traditionally nondominant, marginalized stories as valid, viable, and valuable contributions to our larger collective sociocultural (his)tories for composing, curating, and contributing to how I view my physical identities in conjunction with my visual identities. I provide a historical review of literature on Black masculinities, focused on the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexualities. The implications of this article reemphasize this scholarship and simultaneously destabilize hegemonic discourses around identities of Black men situated in whiteness as a way to assert ownership and control over our own images, narratives, and lived experiences.