Unveiling Our Scars: artist statement

ABSTRACT

Narrated through a layered account, Unveiling Our Scars weaves back and forth between reflections about the past and present, exploring Black masculine identity through the lens of intimate relationships. Situating my lived experiences within broader conversations about Black masculinity and cultural stereotypes, this narrative short film autoethnographically analyzes how my performance of self, within the context of intimate relationships, supports and challenges the canonical and contemporary hegemonic scripting of Black men as bodies that lack the capability to be emotionally vulnerable and possess a limited range of emotions. Undergirded by a Black masculine theoretical framework, this film complicates the narrow scripting of Black masculine performance and advocates for what communication scholar and Black masculine theorist Ronald L. Jackson II describes as the adoption of a model of Black masculinity that embraces a spectrum of performative possibilities.

KEYWORDS:

• autoethnography
• Black masculinity
• hip-hop
• spoken-word poetry

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ryan Watson, James Johnson, Jaime Robb, Lemuel Scott, Victoria Williams, Jalyssa Troupe, Tyson Butler, and Chad Jackson for helping make my idea/dream a reality. I would like to thank Robin M. Boylorn for her belief in this project, supportive feedback, and creative-intellectual work that pushes academic boundaries and inspires other scholars to do the same. I would like to thank Sohinee Roy and Kathleen McConnell for their support, editing suggestions, and truly helping make this project stronger. Also, thank you for not holding my junk email’s transgressions against me! Last but not least, I would like to thank Linnsey McFerguson and Aisha Durham for believing in me before I did.

Notes

1 Ronald L. Jackson II, Scripting the Black Masculine Body: Identity, Discourse, and Racial Politics in Popular Culture (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), 75.

2 Tommy J. Curry, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2017), 7.

3 Carol Rambo Ronai, “Multiple Reflections of Child Sex Abuse: An Argument for a Layered Account,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 23, no. 4 (1995): 395–426.

4 Bryant Keith Alexander, Performing Black Masculinity: Race, Culture, and Queer Identity (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2006); Robin M. Boylorn, “From Boys to Men: Hip-Hop, Hood Films, and the Performance of Contemporary Black Masculinity,” Black Camera 8, no. 2 (2017): 146–64; Ronald L. Jackson and Mark C. Hopson, eds., Masculinity in the Black Imagination: Politics of Communicating Race and Manhood (New York: Peter Lang, 2011); E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

5 Jackson, Scripting the Black Masculine Body, 128.

6 bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (London: Routledge, 2004); Michael Eric Dyson, Jay-Z (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 2020); Vershawn Ashanti Young, Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2007); Boylorn, “From Boys to Men”; Javon Johnson, “Blasphemously Black: Reflections on Performance and Pedagogy,” Liminalities 11, no. 4 (2015): 1–13; Curry, The Man-Not; Cornel West, Race Matters, 25th anniversary ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017).

7 Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner, “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject,” in The Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd ed., ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000), 739.

8 Aisha S. Durham, Home with Hip Hop Feminism: Performances in Communication and Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), 19.

9 Miles White, From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 64; Donald Bogle, Blacks in American Films and Television: An Encyclopedia (New York: Fireside, 1989).

10 Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Verso, 2015), xix.

11 Ibid., xxiv–xxv.