Book Review: Performing Black Masculinity: Race, Culture, and Queer Identity

Special to NewBlackMan

Performing Black Masculinity: Race, Culture, and Queer Identity
by Bryant Keith Alexander
(AltaMira Press, 2006)
Review by Armond R. Towns

The construction for dominant society of what black masculinity looks like has been disseminated through the media. This construction of black men is one of hyper violence, hyper (hetero)sexuality, and hyper deviance. In Performing Black Masculinity: Race, Culture, and Queer Identity, Bryant Keith Alexander posits that black men construct their own masculinities which:

are unlike the stoic images of Black masculinity that we see on television, or the rough, mean, and aggressive images that we see in film. These images are not the violent, sexualized, and sometimes ineffectual images of Black men that we are expected to take as real. These are not the performances of ‘the angry Black man’ that has become the iconic representation of Black masculinity—and that we sometimes shamelessly use to a/effect service. (Alexander, 2006, pp. 151-152)

This “displacement” of the black masculine performance, either physically (by visiting China or teaching in “the ivory tower”) or mentally (detailing alternative depictions of black masculinity to the dominant black masculinity), is Alexander’s project throughout this book. And speaking through a lens of autoethnography, performance studies, and cultural studies, Alexander toys with his acceptance as well as his denial of black male stereotypes.

Taking the reader through his activities—some “homespace,” daily activities, others “tourist,” international activities—Alexander illustrates the ways in which performing black maleness is viewed overseas, on a college campus, as well as within black communities. In one chapter, Alexander details a visit to China, in which he engaged gazing and being gazed at. A fairly large, African American male with dreadlocks, Alexander recalls being “an oddity, if not a commodity that [the Chinese people] visually consumed” (3). His dreadlocks especially drew stares. In fact, multiple residents would touch his hair throughout his visit.

This reverse gaze and tactile approach threw Alexander off, because he acknowledges his plan to initially make the Chinese people a spectacle, to simply be a “fly on the wall” and watch as the Chinese residents did their daily thing. “The gross assumption here that both undergirds and haunts tourism, as well as particular practices in ethnography and intercultural scholarship in general is that the researcher/tourist is a privileged viewer and is not held to the culture-specific codes of propriety that govern human sociality in the spaces of their observation” (Alexander, 2006, p. 13). Acknowledging his privilege and his planned viewing—while coming to grips with the eyes of the Chinese people that were fixated on him—Alexander begins to “question [his] own culpability in acts of domination as [he] characterize[d] the Chinese in [his] tourist experience and in this documentation of experience” (2006, p. 19). Ultimately, Alexander leaves China with more questions than answers in relation to his black body (and black hair) and how it impacted the way in which he was viewed and the way in which he performed.

Tying into black hair, Alexander also recalls some of his earliest years in the black barbershop. Like many black men, “the test of establishing community for [him] has often been grounded in locating a barbershop” (137), a black cultural cornerstone. This cornerstone is not without outside influences that are tied to both race and gender. Within the barbershop, “the old men’s talk…served both as functional component of social exchange, and as a way of perpetuating culture and community” (143). There is also talk that is largely heterosexual in nature “that both reveals and promotes desire for women” (152). There seems little to no room for discussion of homosexuality in these spaces.

In more recent years, Alexander has also traveled “betwixt and between” two communities: the barbershop (for his shavings) and the beauty salon (for maintenance of his dreadlocks). The beauty salon, like the barbershop, is marked by gender, and Alexander acknowledges some discomfort in his travels into the beauty salon, despite becoming a regular customer. From his memory, the beauty salon, like his mother’s kitchen, was reserved for “women’s talk.” Still, “In some ways [he is] gradually accepted into this community, but not as a member. The maleness of [his] body tells a different story” (156).

The acceptance and denial of the black male body—and the various levels of acceptance and denial—is the theme that carries throughout Alexander’s book. From the “migration of Black faculty, staff, and students across the borders between the university campus and ‘the Black cultural community’” (34), to the performance of the “Good Man/Bad Man” dialectic, to the performance of a black, gay professor teaching drag in the classroom, to engaging “readers in topics that are sedimented in all of our lived experiences” (163), like the death of a loved one, Alexander’s book displays a black masculinity that is both accepted and despised, both dominant and subordinate. And by examining multiple intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, as well as showing the ways in which black men differ from and can be complicit to various black masculine performances, Alexander’s book provides a level of understanding that depicts the complexity of black masculine performance rather than the simplicity of the dominant depiction of black masculinity.

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Armond R. Towns is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the communication and cultural studies department.