The Scholars Network on Masculinity and the Well-Being of African American Men kicked off its 2025 seminar series with a vibrant conversation on gender fluidity and the future of research on Black Men and Boys, featuring Dr. Tanya L. Saunders. Dr. Saunders is a sociologist at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County exploring the ways in which the African Diaspora throughout the Americas uses the arts as a tool for social change, specifically through decolonizing systems of thinking and knowing. The Network’s own Director, Dr. Alford Young, Jr. moderated the conversation. This discussion was guided by the following overarching question: How should scholars reframe the research surrounding Black masculinity to accommodate and adapt to the emerging scholarship on gender fluidity?
Dr. Saunders began by encouraging members of the network to think globally about the relationship between race, gender, and sexuality. Dr. Saunders posed the question: what would happen if Black folks in the United States looked to Latin America and the Caribbean to understand gender and sexuality? In past and present work, Saunders documents how Brazilian artists and scholars redefine and remember a plurality of physical embodiments that enslaved Africans brought with them to the Americas during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Pushing back against a Eurocentric approach that deploys binary, gender categories, Saunders argues that by looking beyond U.S. borders, scholars of Black masculinity can open up new concepts and epistemologies of embodied expression that are not constrained by categories of gender specific to particular histories and cultures. As a complement to a global approach to studying race, gender, and sexuality, attendees also reflected on the ways that gender fluidity was rejected and embraced within domestic Black cultural spheres, as well.
Dr. Saunders and attendees also wrestled with the consequences of the Western gender binary, especially the gendered scripts it produces, and the challenges that emerge in scholarship as a result. One attendee highlighted that by adopting a gender binary in U.S. research, the kinds of research inquiries that scholars can take on regarding gender and power are inherently limited. They encouraged scholars to think of the gender binary not as fact, but as social construction. Following this line of discussion, another attendee expressed a desire for more scholarship on Black masculinities outside of the Western context, to better understand what is expected of Black men and boys in other cultural settings not defined by gendered and racialized scripts of protection and provision, as is often true of Black men and boys in the U.S.
The conversation concluded with an acknowledgement of the complicated tensions facing scholars of Black masculinity in contemporary times. Dr. Young summarized one of the primary tensions in the field as trying to make sense of the eternally evolving social construction of Black masculinity over time, with the durability of the social facts around how Black men are treated. In sum, scholars of Black masculinity, and race, gender, and sexuality more broadly, must continue to be open to what Black masculinity is and how it changes. You can watch the full webinar above.