Boys, Boyz, Bois

An Ethics of Black Masculinity in Film and Popular Media

Keith Harris

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135496074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Film e video

Boys, Boyz, Bois concerns questions of ethics, gender and race in popular American images, national discourse and cultural production by and about black men. The book proposes an ethics of masculinity, as ethnics refers to a system of morality and valuation and as ethics refers to a care of the self and ethical subject formation. The texts of analysis include recent films by black/African American filmmakers, gangsta rap and hip-hop and black star persona: texts ranging from Blaxploitation and New Black Cinema to contemporary music video to autobiography and the public image of Sidney Poitier. The book is a significant contribution to cultural studies and gender studies and critical race theory. What is distinctive about the book is the question of ethics as a question of race and gender.

Chapter One

Spooks in the Mirror: Racial Performativity and Black Cinema

[T]he Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.

—Daniel Patrick Moynihan

By cool pose we mean the presentation of self many black males use to establish their male identity. Cool pose is a ritualized form of masculinity that entails behaviors, scripts, physical posturing, impression management, and carefully crafted performances that deliver a single, critical message: pride, strength, and control. Black males who use cool pose are often chameleon-like in their uncanny ability to change their performance to meet the expectations of a particular situation or audience. They manage the impression they communicate to others through the use of an imposing array of masks, acts, and facades.

—Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson

The two opening quotes are indicative of two overlapping discourses of black men. The first, from the “Moynihan Report” (1965), established the latter part of the twentieth century’s discussions of black families as sites of “dysfunction”; pre-figured the governmental and media language collapse of the un-wed mother and single female-headed households onto the black family as the black un-wed mother and black single female-headed households; initiated public discussion, debates and policy geared toward the recuperation and assimilation of the black family; and pathologized blackness, laying the discursive foundations for the social categories of the inner city and underclass. “The Moynihan Report” is a re-iteration of discursive black masculinity as part of governmental policy, imposing a split image of a historical burden to the family, the economy and the nation and victim of institutionalized and de facto racism:

When Jim Crow made its appearance toward the end of the 19^th century, it may be speculated that it was the Negro male that was the most humiliated thereby; … and just as important, segregation, and the submissiveness it exacts, is surely more destructive to the male than to the female personality … Keeping the Negro ‘in his place’ can be translated as keeping the Negro male in his place (Moynihan, 16).¹

Black men are ultra-victims, of sorts. The survival of the black man is pitted against that of the matriarchal black family that is complicit in his emasculation. The report sets the primacy of the image of the black man as the focal point of the rhetoric of race, the black family, and black women. Indeed, the black man is synecdochal in that the black man and discussion of the black man form the whole discussion of “the race” (Beavers 1997, 257). Furthermore, through the language of racial liberalism this black man is historically damaged, appealing to an American ethos of democracy and self-help that engenders a discourse of endangerment and loss.

The second quotation above is taken from Cool Pose, the influential study of black men. In Cool Pose, Majors and Billison (1992) examine the response of black men to the report’s governmental discourse of family, race and gender responsibility and to popular discourses of black masculinity.² For Majors and Billson, cool pose is a performative response to the rhetorical and discursive absence/presence of black men, a shifting posture of masculine performances that is crafted by race, gender, and class. It also, according to Majors and Billison, deeply embedded psychically:

Cool pose is a distinctive coping mechanism that serves to counter, at least in part, the dangers that black males encounter on a daily basis. As a performance, cool pose is designed to render the black male visible and to empower him; it eases the worry and pain of blocked opportunities. Being cool is an ego booster for black males comparable to the kind white males more easily find through attending good schools, landing prestigious jobs, and bringing home decent wages. Cool pose is constructed from attitudes and actions that become firmly entrenched in the black male’s psyche as he adopts a facade to ward off the anxiety of second class status. It provides a mask that suggests competence, high self-esteem, control, and inner strength. It also hides self-doubt, insecurity, and inner turmoil (5).

Cool pose, as posited, suggests that masculinity is performance. The hyper-masculinity of the cool pose further asserts a violence and class specificity to a particular black man and practice of masculinity. The cool pose and Moynihan’s “Report” are linked by their mutual engagement with the discourses of masculinity, black masculinity, and family. On the one hand, “The Moynihan Report” figures masculinity as an American ideal that black men fail to achieve, because of matriarchal family structures, crime, unemployment and the history of racism. On the other hand, Cool Pose figures a “pose,” a performance of masculinity, inspired by the failure of and loss of an idealized masculinity which cannot be achieved because of the second class status of black men.³

Both the criminal and victimized black man and the cool posed black man are each others’ shadow figures, reflecting a layered and embedded gendered racial performance, a masculine performance which emerges from a public self that confronts race at the same time that it maintains masculinity as a force of identity and control. Granted, cool pose is but one figure of black masculinity; nevertheless, as a problematic of identity, it is paradigmatic of an intersection between race and gender and performance (Beavers 1997).

RACIAL PERFORMATIVITY

I use two notions of performance. The first refers to sets of actions which one is assigned to play (in theatre, film, music, etc.); this performance is an artist’s performance (Sayre 1990). I will elaborate this more with Sidney Poitier and Blaxploitation. The second performance refers to performance as an aspect of performativity and self-presentation. For this idea of performance I draw on Judith Butler’s (1993a and b; and 1990) elaboration of performativity. Butler’s use of performativity describes a mode of discursivity in the production of gender. Indeed, Butler makes a distinction between performance (as theatrical performance and acting) and performativity (as a mode of discursive production).

Butler’s performativity is derived from several theorists: First, the notion of the performative can be traced to linguistics and philosophy through J.L. Austin (1962) and his use of the performative as an utterance, as a speech act, as a form of authoritative speech, which in its uttering also performs an action (e.g., “I promise,” “I apologize,” or in Austin’s example of I do, in a wedding ceremony; utterances, which in their utterance, construct an object, the promise or apology).⁴ Butler then argues that, even though there is the first person singular, “I,” the performative does not presuppose or come from a subject, as much as it is a citation in a chain of citational power. In other words, for example, in the performative, “I sentence you …,” the “I” receives its binding power and authority, not from it subjectivity or subjective intention, but from its citation of the law which is applied from a prior authority which authorizes the “I.” Or as Butler elaborates:

If a performative provisionally succeeds …, then it is not because an intention successfully governs the action of speech, but only because that action echoes a prior action, and accumulates the force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices … [A] performative ‘works’ to the extent that it draws on and covers over the constitutive conventions by which it is mobilized. In this sense, no term or statement can function performatively without the accumulating and dissimulating historicity of force [original italics] (1993b, 18).

In other words, the performative is always a ruse of naturalness. Discursive performativity problematizes notions of agency and subjective agency because in this moment of performativity the “I” emerges as a nexus, a point in a chain of signifiers. The subject is then part of a re-signification practice, which in its very signification constitutes the subject at the same time that it conceals its constitution:

[P]erformativity … consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer’s ‘will’ or ‘choice’; further what is ‘performed’ works to conceal, if not disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, un-performable (1993b, 24).

Butler earlier uses this idea of discursive performativity to look at gender, arguing that gender is not constituted through an essence or self but through performativity, and specifically through gesture. Drawing on Esther Newton’s (1972) work on female impersonation and Ervin Goffman’s (1959) work on the presentation of the self, Butler suggests that gender’s gestural enterprise creates an illusion of naturalness, interiority and gender subjectivity. Furthermore, as Harper (1994b) notes of Butler’s notion of gender, as a performative, gender is disciplinary and regulatory in that the illusion of gender as an internal, natural core or self functions within the regulations of reproductive heterosexuality.

The elaboration of performativity is also, methodologically, an exploration of the Foucaultian concept of the statement and discursive formations:

This repeatable materiality that characterizes the enunciative function reveals the statement as a specific and paradoxical object, but also as one of those objects that men produce, manipulate, use, transform, exchange, combine, decompose and recompose, and possibly destroy. Instead of being something said once and for all—and lost in the past like the result of a battle, a geological catastrophe, or the death of a king—the statement, as it emerges in its materiality, appears with a status, enters various networks and various fields of use, is subjected to transferences or modifications, is integrated into operations and strategies in which its identity is maintained or effaced. Thus the statement circulates, is used, disappears, allows or prevents the realization of a desire, serves or resists various interests, participates in challenge and struggle, and becomes a theme of appropriation or rivalry” (Foucault 1972, 105).

As discursive formations, and as in performativity, statements are contingent and re-iterable within difference.⁵ Foucaultian “statements,” their discursivity, cultural and historical contingencies, and differential truth statements are implicit in Butler’s notion of gender and performance:

In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency. Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary [original italics] (Butler 1990, 137–138).

However, Butler’s severe bracketing of gender away from other interconnected discourses that empower it leaves it as a concept and discursive practice that is overdetermined by and discursively bounded by sexual difference. Conceptions of race and gender meet in numerous scientific discourses, colonial discourse, and psychological discourse; in genetics and eugenics; in ideas of intelligence; and in theories of criminology, social degeneracy and pathology.⁶ One of the recurring points of my discussion is that gender and race are inextricable in discussion and explanation of each other.⁷

In drawing on Butler’s work on gender and performance it, therefore, becomes necessary to augment the theory of gender performativity.⁸ In order to do so, I expand on performativity as racial performativity. Racial performativity is distinguished as a performance of the self and presentation of the self, as a process of socialization in which the performance of the self negotiates societal expectations and standards, as they are derived from racial and gender sedimentations. This is a slightly different idea of performativity, more akin to Goffman’s notion of idealization, more a routine or ceremony (Goffman, 34–51). Racial performativity is a more subjective practice than Butler’s gender performativity in that it is often more consciously deployed, more a question of intentionality and subjective agency.⁹

To clarify the distinction and overlap between gender performativity and racial performativity, it is important to note racial performativity as a critical performance of the self. Here again I draw on Goffman’s “presentation of the self” in two aspects: First is his distinction in performance, especially as this performance is informed and performed in relation to external stimuli and subjective engagement of these stimuli.¹⁰ For Goffman performance is a form of accentuation and concealment (67). As such performance is a mediated expression of standards and limitations, regulatory and restrictive. Furthermore, performance is situational involving “settings” and “fronts”:

‘Performance’ [refers] to all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers. It will be convenient to label as ‘front’ that part of the individual’s performance which regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance. Front, then, is the expressive equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unwittingly employed by the individual during his performance (22).

Goffman further constructs performance as “impression management,” a dynamic, controlled mediation of the expressions individuals give and the expressions individuals give off (impressions) (2; and 238–239). In more ocular terms of race, there is the dynamic of seeing and being seen, which I insert, through the notion of the veil, into Goffman’s performance. The notion of the veil as a performance mediator provides an understanding of “front” as a projection of a divided self. Indeed it is the specularity of race, the doubleness of seeing and being seen that is linked to Goffman’s personal front and the ideas of accentuation and concealment. As conceived, the notion of racial performativity is an exploration and elaboration of a “personal front,” a “front” which is informed by and engages the phenomenal, social, and historical legacy of racial categories:

… [O]ne may take the term ‘personal front’ to the other items of expressive equipment, the items that we most intimately identify with the performer himself and that we naturally expect will follow the performer wherever he goes. As part of personal front we may include: insignia of office or rank; clothing; sex, age and racial characteristics; size and looks; posture; speech patterns; facial expressions; bodily gestures and the like. Some of these vehicles for conveying signs, such as racial characteristics, are relatively fixed and over a span of time do not vary for the individual from one situation to another. On the other hand, some of these sign vehicles are relatively mobile or transitory, such as facial expression, and can vary during performance from one moment to the next (24).

The situational aspect of Goffman’s performance allows for the elaboration of the notions of front region and back region within racial performativity as sites, negotiable sites which are delimited by perceptions of racial difference. Personal front generates expectation and engages these expectations from both the perspectives of the observer and observed. In other words, the specularity of “race,” racial characteristics and racial difference inform racial performativity from both sides, the sides of the seer and the seen and the seeing and the being seen, initiating performative responses of self-presentation which are reflective and expressive of received and perceived notions of race.

The most prominent instance of performance and impression management as racial performativity, thus far in the discussion, is cool pose:

Cool pose is a carefully craft...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halfitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Spooks in the Mirror: Racial Performativity and Black Cinema
• Chapter Two: “Stand up, boy!”: Sidney Poitier, “Boy” and Filmic Black Masculinity
• Chapter Three: Super Bad: Jim Brown, Blaxploitation and the Coming of Boyz
• Chapter Four: Boyz, Boyz, Boyz: New Black Cinema and Black Masculinity
• Chapter Five: “Untitled”: D’Angelo and the Visualization of the Black Male Body
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index