Embracing Tender Masculinities: The Power of Intimacy
By Keon M. McGuire, Wilson Okello, and Charles H.F. Davis III
At any given moment, we can observe the ways patriarchal masculinity is death dealing. The ways it literally destroys, harms, and deteriorates individuals and communities. Those who bear the burden of being marked as other-than-cisgender-heterosexual-man are exponentially rendered vulnerable and disposable. Social media has made a spectacle and profit of antiBlack patriarchal terror; it platforms and archives various forms of violence at a critical historical moment where we can no longer pretend that the digital world is anything less than real.
Though patriarchal masculinity is not unique to any specific racial group, we join this conversation as Black men. We join as Black men who were reared across various sites of patriarchal (re)production: the Black Church, same-gender sports teams, and Black Greek Letter fraternities. Through our experiences we are intimately and painfully aware of the ways patriarchal masculinity takes more than it promises to give:
Promises that domination would lead to acquisition and acquisition to accumulation until we had acquired enough ownership of people and things that we might feel less powerless in an anti-Black world…
Promises safety and a secure sense of self, while stripping the self and others of deep connection, and the possibility of being known…
Promises…
Promises…
Promises…
We share an aspiration to live our masculinities otherwise. Our living, in part, is guided by an important question: are there ways of being with our Blackness and masculinities that transform our relationships to the systems of power that we are so intimately familiar with? We believe that intimacy and tenderness offer a possible pathway for Black men to interrogate and destabilize the entrenched structures of hierarchical masculinity.
Intimacy as Possibilities
In addition to being shaped by many models of patriarchal Black manhood displayed in hip-hop, film, and Black political organizations, we are also fortunate to inherit a world shaped by Black feminist and Black queer brilliance and struggle. Professionally, we came into the academy ‘proper’ — or graduate school — when Black feminist and Black queer contributions seemed to be everywhere; though often uncited and uncredited. Academia’s conditional inclusion of (some) Black women’s ideas–such as intersectionality –has led to their appropriation and often baseless scrutiny across the disciplines while also being both heralded and criticized for their ubiquity. Like other Black men who are the children of bell hooks, James Baldwin, and The Combahee River Collective, we found in Black feminism and Black queer studies more than theories, concepts, and methodologies to anchor our scholarship and analyses. More profoundly, we were given the grammar of intimacy that offered new possibilities for living lives in relationship with our communities through more progressive masculinities and otherwise.
Despite often being reduced to a spectrum of sexual activities, intimacy offers us a more liberatory way for Black masculinities. In his article, The Queerness of Touch: Mutual Recognition and Deep Intimacy in Moonlight, Marlon Bailey suggests that mutual recognition is a precondition for intimacy; or “the way in which Black people — in this case mostly Black men — see, recognize, and connect with each other”. For Bailey, it is a deeply sensory experience; or as he argues “touching is seeing”. Though the context of Bailey’s analysis emerges from a sexual encounter, we would benefit to take up this sense of intimacy more broadly. Considering the ways antiBlackness and anti-queerness cut Black men off from one another — literally and figuratively — Bailey offers caring, considerate, patient, and affirming touch-and-seeing as a possibility for Black men to find in their masculinities a place to live and love more freely.
For us, as Black men, intimacy also offers a portal to radical softness. Afro-Queer playwright, poet, and filmmaker Donja R. Love, explains during an interview that radical softness preserves him:
We live in a world that tell you, you can’t do this, this, this and that and that you have to do this, this, this and the other . . . And why? Like why can’t I smile? Why can’t I laugh? And so much as possible I try to smile.
To embrace softness is not to perform a flat, predictable aesthetic. Rather it is a political act of resisting the restrictions of antiBlackness and anti-queerness on how Black masculinity is often embodied. It is through radical softness and mutual vulnerability that we might find a home in our tenderness.
BEING AND DOING SOFTNESS, INTIMACY, AND TENDERNESS
In 1932, singer and songwriter Otis Redding, set to rhythm and beat a meditation on otherwise Black masculinities that may provide insight into our conceptualizations. To be clear, Redding’s (1932) original song is particularly gendered. In what follows, however, we consider what it could
mean for “Try a little tenderness,” to set as its intention, Black men, asking specifically, how might performance methods, as primarily a question of ‘how to be’ and ‘how to do’ help us consider what it means to do softness, intimacy, and tenderness. A portion of the lyrics recite:
It’s not just sentimental no, no, no
[He] has [his] grief and care, yeah, yeah, yeah
But the soft words they are spoke so gentle, yeah
It makes it easier, easier to bear, yeah
You won’t regret it no, no
Young [boys] they don’t forget it
Love is their whole happiness, yeah, yeah, yeah
Redding is clear that experiencing tenderness has both intra- and interpersonal attributes, including love, connectivity, and deep forms of care, further legitimizing the need for Black men to be and do tenderness. Following Redding’s insights, intimacy emerges as a central theme concerning individuals’ willingness to interrogate their lives deeply. Expressions of intimacy, often praised for their public nature, are primarily a quiet pursuit that requires earnest, intentional engagement. The quality of this introspective pursuit directly impacts possibilities and the revelations it provokes. Intimacy, thus, becomes an interior landscape where individuals confront the self, and ask questions; it’s a process of unlearning the self to achieve a fuller sense of being, transcending established frameworks of reflective practice.
Moreover, doing softness, intimacy, and tenderness is the commitment to understanding the self in relation to others, toward a relational sense of oneness; it is how one orients themselves in the world in a manner that gives into mutuality and openness. Doing softness, intimacy, and tenderness is malleable, unfolding and taking shape, as the capacity to know others and be known, to meet and be met. In order to be engaged, to do, is to refuse enclosure. Embodiment collapses inward knowing and outward expression, and takes seriously notions of touch as in deeply felt, experienced.
TOWARDS TENDERNESS
It is not incidental that the possibility models we draw from are offered by Black feminist and Black queer scholars, artists, and activists. Importantly, it has always reminded us that this work is a political project. Tender Black masculinities is not simply about offering “positive” visual counter-narratives racist tropes of Black masculinities. It is a pursuit of freedom to live beyond the antiBlack and anti-queer confines of patriarchal masculinity. It is a reminder that the stakes are high; especially for those who are marked as other-than-cisgender-heterosexual-man.
The truth of the matter, as Black feminist scholar Jennifer Nash (2019) reminds us, “If our survivals are mutually dependent, we are, then, mutually vulnerable“ and that through “commitment to mutual vulnerability constitutes a commitment to be intimately bound to the other (or to others), to refuse boundaries between self and other.” (p. 116).
Intimacy allows us to be tender. It allows us to trade in isolation for deep relationality and intimate touch; and exchange emotional callousness for softness. Intimacy, as a relational endeavor, is a pathway and opportunity to transform structures of hierarchical masculinity.
Keon M. McGuire (he/him) is an associate professor of Higher Education Opportunity, Equity, and Justice in the College of Education at North Carolina State University. Dr. McGuire is an interdisciplinary scholar who draws on Africana studies frameworks to examine how race, gender, and religion shape minoritized college students’ identities and their everyday experiences.
X Handle: @yngblkscholar
Wilson Kwamogi Okello (he/him) is an assistant professor of higher education at Penn State University, a research associate at the Center for the Study of Higher Education, and director of the Black Study in Education Lab. Dr. Okello is a transdisciplinary artist and scholar who is concerned with how Black critical approaches make visible the epistemic foundations that structure what it means to be human and imagine otherwise possibilities for Black being therein.
X Handle: @wilson_okello
Charles H.F. Davis III is an assistant professor in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan and founder and director of the Campus Abolition Research Lab. Dr. Davis uses ethnographic and visual methods to explore how Black campus and community activists build and exercise political power to drive social and institutional change.
X Handle: @hfdavis
