The Construction of Black Masculinity in Blaxploitation and Hood Movies

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject American Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,7, University of Dusseldorf "Heinrich Heine", language: English, abstract: In this term paper the construction of black masculinity and black male characters in Blaxploitation movies and Hood Movies will be compared to analyze if the two periods of filmmaking have created another view on the black masculine. To make the two genres comparable in such a limited scope I will focus on two movies, each of which can be regarded as prototypical for its genre. Considering the ¿Blaxploitation¿ genre I will focus on the movie Shaft (1971) by Gordon Parks. The Hood movie I chose is John Singleton¿s Boyz N The Hood (1991), which will be called Boyz in the rest of this term paper.

Anybody who has seen movies featuring black male protagonists in major roles ¿ like Bad Boys or Django Unchained ¿ might have noticed that often those black male characters are depicted in certain and often cliche¿d ways. This depiction can be described by another term which is ¿construction¿. What those films actually do is a construction of a black masculinity through means of acting, filming techniques or even the choice of the actor, especially with regard to his outward appearance.

The black male character has been a very central figure in American literature and movies for a long time. Considering movies it can be argued that for roughly one century there have been constructions of African-American males in American cinema starting with the highly racist film The Birth of a Nation. Nowadays virtually everybody will know movies that feature black masculine main protagonists. Two periods which can be considered as highly influential with regard to the construction of black masculinity are the early seventies and the early nineties because they originated two important genres. These two genres will be referred to as ¿Blaxploitation¿ and ¿hood movie¿ throughout this text.