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

Abstract

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.