Jared Sexton - Black Men, Black Feminism : Lucifer’s Nocturne

Jared Sexton

Black Men, Black Feminism Lucifers Nocturne

Protester rests during a November 2014 demonstration in Oakland, California, against the grand jury decision in the case of Officer Darren Wilson. Image reproduced with permission from Reuters Pictures

To DAS, in memoriam, for a love too big to appreciate in one lifetime.

To CJD, for putting me on a path before I could see my own way.

Black masculinity is always something extraordinary; it is also always something extra ordinary. Whatever it may turn out to be, in any given context or situation, however it is defined or refined, it is never unremarkable, least of all for those living and dying under its heading. It is, from most every vantage, foreign and domestic, the site and sign of ravage and ruin, and of revelation too. Insofar as it signifies the greatest exception to the rule and the furthest deviation from the law, it returns no less to claim or to be claimed by a proof of the rule and an institution of the law. Hyper-masculinity, one supposed characteristic of the forms of life in question, is both abandonment and recuperation of the desire for dominant masculinity, for masculinity as dominance. It misses the mark by overshooting or overwhelming it. Likewise, though, black masculinity is often enough figured as hypo-masculinity, as lacking, as wanting; it would seem to represent a certain failure of masculinity as well. In either case, we find masculinity in and as permanent crisis.

We might wonder how this can be so: a phenomenon seemingly too much and too little of itself by virtue of its most controversial qualificationblack. Would it make a difference to describe black masculinity as an oscillation between surplus and deficit, or even a paradoxical insistence of both less and more at once, or neither? If black masculinity suggests a limit-case, we must ask, what is masculinity at all that one can have too much or too little of it, in turn and in tandem? Is there, by contrast, really such a thing as masculinity that is necessary or needed, one that is indeed proper to anybody? Is black masculinity , then, not a negative instance of the very masculinity to which it lays an illegitimate, even illegal, claim and by which it is claimed, imperiously, as too-much-too-little? What better way to outline its conditions of emergence and contestation than through a figure of ambivalent value?