All-Black Male Spaces and Their Potentialities for Facilitating and Critiquing Cis-Heteropatriarchal Masculinity

• In Event: Troubling Gender and Sexuality: Meditations on Performances of (Un)Gendering in Black Educational Spaces

Abstract

Cisheteropatriarchal notions of “masculinity” and “manhood” have consequences that are acutely toxic for Black men, who, on average, have the lowest life expectancy of any group in the United States (Lindsey & Marcell, 2020). Cisheteropatriarchy refers to the sociocultural system that affords rights and privileges, and advantages and disadvantages to individuals based on their proximity to being white, cis-gendered, heterosexual, and male (hooks, 2003). Given the deleterious ways cisheteropatriarchy impacts Black mens’ holistic well-being, it is imperative for educators, researchers, and community organizers to imagine and implement liberatory interventions that may facilitate Black males’ refusal to conform to cisheteropatriarchal gender norms and instead empower Black males to adopt more expansive and liberatory ways of performing masculinity beyond the cisheteropatriarchal box that constrains their (our) identities.

All-Black male spaces are promising spaces whereby gender identity development and consciousness-raising may be facilitated (Brooms et. al, 2021). However, these spaces have been critiqued because of how they often reinforce cisheteropatriarchal ways of embodying and performing gender (McGuire et. al, 2014). There is a dearth of research that explores how students and educators exercise agency and autonomy in subverting cisheteropatriarchal gender impositions that emanate from all-Black male spaces. Further, few studies explore the liberatory possibilities that exist within all-Black male spaces that foreground critiques of cisheteropatriarchy and provide space for Black males to imagine alternative, more expansive ways of performing gender.

This presentation will share, compare, and contrast findings from two separate studies that sought to understand the gendered experiences of Black males who participated in two respective
all-Black male spaces. Utilizing semi-structured interviews, the first study will explore how Black male participants expressed a desire to process gender identity and sexuality during a non-profit organization’s summer leadership learning program. Students advocated for “personal” development as an additive to their professional development. The second paper deploys focus group interviews with Black male undergraduates to explore the potentialities offered by an alternative, academic
all-Black male space in functioning as a site where Black males are empowered to critique, refuse, and imagine performing gender and masculinity beyond the cisheteropatriarchal box imposed on their identities. Finally, we will discuss this work’s implications and offer recommendations for creating spaces that may empower Black men to imagine more liberatory ways of performing gender.

Scholars who are committed to imagining new educational possibilities with schools that are free from anti-blackness, white supremacy, and cisheteropatriarchy must continue to explore how cisheteropatriarchal ways of performing Gender ultimately contribute to not only the premature deaths of Black men, but also the premature deaths of all of those who are oppressed by race, class, gender, and/or sexuality (Wynter, 2003). In alignment with this year’s conference’s theme, the theorizing that will take place in this session emanates from the central beliefs that 1) another world, and more liberatory ways of performing gender, are possible and 2) counterhegemonically constructed all-Black male spaces may offer us one path—among many—forward.

Authors

• Gene F. McAdoo, University of California - Los Angeles

• Jacques P. Lesure, Brown University