Feminism, 'The Boyz,' and Other Matters Regarding the Male

• Published in: Screening the Male pp. 173 - 193
• Main Author: Wiegman, Robyn
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 1993
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Key Characterization; Black Masculine; Young Man; Contemporary African American Culture; Patriarchal Organization; Blaxploitation Films; Black Male Representation; Black Male; White Racial Supremacy; Feminist Film Theory; John Shaft; Pam Cook; African American Male; Masculine Relations; De Lauretis; Masculine Sameness; Girl Friend; Black Cinema; Sexual Difference; Teenage Father; Masculine Differences; African American Political Activity; Gender Nexus
• ISBN: 9781138169517; 9780415077590; 0415077591; 113816951X
• DOI: 10.4324/9780203142219-14

When Newsweek featured the street smart hero of blaxploitation films, John Shaft, on its cover in October, 1972, it was marking a new era for Hollywood cinema: 'All over the country', the cover story exclaimed, ' "bad-ass niggers'' are collecting dues with a vengeance - and, if you don't believe it, just head downtown for a movie' (October 23, 1972: 74). By the end of the decade, however, African American male stars were increasingly finding themselves the twilight figures in interracial male bonding films, and the high hopes of black cinema in the 1970s seemed at an end. 1 But now, Newsweek is heralding another revolution. 'With 19 films this year', it asserts, 'Hollywood fades to black' (June 10, 1991: 50). 2 And as anyone knows who has gone screening, the primary images issuing from these new films concern the historical complexity and contemporary conditions affecting the African American male, whose high rates of poverty, incarceration, and early death have coalesced in the startling appellation: 'an endangered species' (Gibbs 1988). At risk for extinction are several generations, and although cinema can certainly not be collapsed into a naive 'real,' these new films take quite seriously and self-consciously their representational role as modeling a future for today's young black men.