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Abstract
Black Masculinity-as a subfield of Gender Studies-is tailored to study the typical behaviors of African American males. Literature on this subject claims that stereotypical characteristics of Black men have been shaped by centuries of racial subjugation and response to economic oppression. I contend in this article that Black Masculinity and its attributes are decreasingly influenced by one's racial designation and are more influenced by class status. Entering the twenty-first century, behavioral attributes typically associated with Black Masculinity-such as violent compulsion and criminality, frequent womanizing, and homophobia-are more closely linked to class than to race. Growing racial tolerance and media access to Black culture has allowed for the spread of these attributes across racial boundaries. Considered intolerable to progressive American society, these behaviors tend to surface when poor opportunity structure limits the expression of patriarchal male power.
Masculinity and the Construction of Black Identity
The most popular representations of 'gender'- a social construct engineered out of the toolkit of culture- tend to be determined by the dominant institutions of a given society. Like race, many mistakenly assume that the behavioral attributes of gender are born out of biological impulse. We often fail to realize that the conventions associated with masculine or feminine expression are determined for us by our society, and not by genetic predisposition. Pierre Bourdieu claimed that the:
social world constructs the body as a sexually defined reality ..... (T)he biological differences between the sexes ..... can thus appear asthe natural justification of the socially constructed difference between the genders.1
Masculine expectations- especially in a traditional patriarchal society- often obligate men to exhibit strength, aggressiveness, dominance over women, and sometimes violent superiority over other men. Outside of the past one hundred years, most societies accepted patriarchal dominance as part of the natural order. 'The division between the sexes appears to be 'in the order of things,' as people sometimes say to refer to what is normal, natural, to the point of being inevitable.' 2
Within the sociological study of gender, Black Masculinity- masculine attributes ascribed to African American3 men- insinuates more exaggerated forms of patriarchal expression. For scholars of this subfield, aggressiveness, sexual domination, and violent superiority are said to be magnified in African American men. These embellishments of masculine attributes...