The Construction of Racial Identity among Same Gender Loving Black Male Characters in Contemporary Film and Television

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kameron J. Copeland
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Same Gender ◽  
Contemporary Film

“Peculiar ‘Til I D.I.E.”

Flaming? ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 115-148
Author(s):  
Alisha Lola Jones
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
Same Gender ◽  
Male Homosociality ◽  
Shed Light

Focusing on Washington, DC’s gospel go-go music scene in the early 2000s, chapter 4 highlights the role of an understudied popular music in performances of socioculturally preferred black male homosociality. This chapter examines men’s performances against the stereotype of the softer, woman-like, flamboyant male vocalist through research on a percussion-heavy music from Washington, DC called gospel go-go. In essence, the go-go music band is a symbolic composite of perspectives associated with the unmarked male-dominant categories of the musicians’ pit and absentee men, who are talking back, providing musical contestation of the duplicitous preacher and choir director stereotypes. Chapter 4 aims to shed light on the musical and performative properties of male homomusicoenrapture and homosonoenrapture, the same-gender musical and sonic textures and visual dynamics that stimulate intense enjoyment while enveloping and propelling gospel go-go participants.

scholarly journals “Other” Characters: The Gendering and Racialization of “Disability” Within Newbery Award-Winning Books, 1922-2012

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-101
Author(s):  
Adie Nelson ◽  
Veronica (Ronnie) Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Disability Rights ◽  
Persons With Disabilities ◽  
Newbery Award ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Children's Picture Books ◽  
Award Winning

Disability rights activists have long urged recognition of the import of cultural representations and their salience in the Othering process. Previous research on children’s picture books and novels has noted that persons with disabilities are commonly depicted in stereotypic and dehumanizing ways. This article explores the extent to which stereotypes of disability may be gendered and/or racialized by examining children’s books that won the American Library Association’s Newbery Medal between 1922-2012. It notes that the crafting of female and male characters with disabilities within these books pays homage to traditional gender roles, images and symbols and, most notably, reiterates an active-masculine/passive-feminine dichotomization. In addition, these representations suggest how racial essentialism is implicated in the production of “disability” within children’s literature, with non-white “racial” identity equated with various forms of impairment.

scholarly journals Black (anti)fandom's intersectional politicization of "The Walking Dead" as a transmedia franchise

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Rendell
Keyword(s):  
Black Men ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Black Male ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Academic Discourses ◽  
Walking Dead

Despite axiomatic industry and academic discourses of The Walking Dead's (2010–) status as quality TV—linked to its graphic visuals and compelling story lines—strong counterclaims question the text's (mis)representations of race and its propensity for systematically killing off Black male characters. An analysis of African Americans' responses to marginalized Black male characters politicizes the racial milieu of the series against the backdrop of wider racial relationships in the United States. Moreover, The Walking Dead is a successful transmedia franchise, and thus racial discourse shifts and changes, depending on which transmedia texts are being consumed. Thus, Black antifan rhetoric aimed at the spin-off series Fear the Walking Dead (2015–) centers on the zombification of Black men, a metaphor of the mistreatment and othering of young Black men by US police. Comparatively, The Walking Dead video game (TellTale Games, 2012) offers character development for its Black male lead character that fans praise against wider cultural representations in relation to both the franchise's hyperdiegesis and to video games in general. Therefore, Black audiences may read The Walking Dead as both racially reductive and radical. In doing so, aspects of self-identity, such as race, can inform (anti)fan positions through intersectional politics.

The Monstropolous Beast

2018 ◽  
pp. 141-170
Author(s):  
Catherine Keyser
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Food Industry ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Critical Race Studies ◽  
Race Studies ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Dorothy West

In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and The Living Is Easy (1948), Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West use the backdrop of agribusiness and fruit imports respectively to dramatize the precarity of black bodies within global capitalism. Their novels feature black male characters who have come to believe in the opportunities the food industry extends them, only to be sorely disappointed and in some cases utterly destroyed. In this way, Hurston and West suggest the racist limits of the category of Man. At the same time that they debunk this ideal subject, Hurston and West use figurative language to connect black bodies with animals and fruit. As scholars of critical race studies have shown, animacy hierarchies, the ranking of bodies according to their relative liveness, frequently subtend pejorative forms of racialization. Instead, Hurston and West overturn these hierarchies, pursue ecological enmeshment, and celebrate black women, queerness, and corporeality.

B(l)ack By Popular Demand: An Analysis of Positive Black Male Characters in Television and Audiences’ Community Cultural Wealth

2020 ◽  
pp. 019685992092438
Author(s):  
David L. Stamps
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Community Cultural Wealth ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Cultural Wealth ◽  
Male Roles ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Media Research ◽  
Television Characters

Often media research interrogating Black male characters featured in television does so from a deficit-based framework. To shift the conversation and showcase affirmative examples of Black male roles in scripted television, the following essay analyzes portrayals in the series This Is Us (2016–current), Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015–2019), S.W.A.T. (2017–current), and A Million Little Things (2018–current). This work adopts critical race theory and community cultural wealth as mechanisms to examine depictions of Black male television characters to illustrate how each offers various forms of cultural capital, including aspirational and resistant capital, for minority audiences. The portrayals discussed here demonstrate a shift in depictions of Black men in television as characters express nonaggressive idiosyncrasies, display vulnerability, and engage in social support with other characters.

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