Toward Black Men Embodying Black Feminisms

Much of the existing scholarship regarding the lived experiences of college men’s gender identity development focuses on how conceptualizations of masculinity are influenced by contextual factors such as campus culture, peer groups, and socialization as well as the ways individuals and groups of men perform various, situated masculinities that are constantly evaluated based on their relationship to perceived notions of traditional masculinity. Notwithstanding, an understudied developmental pathway that we argue is increasingly important in our sociopolitical moment, is how do cisgender Black men develop progressive masculinities. To attend to this knowledge gap, the authors collected data over a semester on the experiences of two Black, cisgender, heterosexual, undergraduate men who were enrolled in a Black Feminisms course.