UC Irvine

This is a work of theory that seeks to conceptualize relations between black and white men through four Blaxploitation films released in the early 1970s in the United States (Africanus Sexualis: Black is Beautiful, Sweet Sweetback’s Badaaassss Song, Shaft, and Lialeh). While Film scholars and cultural critics have tended to read Blaxploitation films as vehicles for celebrating unabashed sexism, homophobia, and patriarchal domination of women, I develop an alternative reading of Blaxploitation films focused on relationships between male characters grounded in feminist and queer theory. I explore how reading for the constructions of manhood and blackness through the heroic male figure of the “stud” nuance anti-sexist and anti-homophobic critiques. To accomplish this reading, I develop a theoretical lens based on what I call “homosocial hunger,” a relationship through which black males desired to be seen ‘as men’ in commercial film products (financed primarily by white men), and for whites males to reap profits through the black male box office by financing successful films featuring manly, stud heroes. I focus on shot compositions, jokes, double-entendres, and plot points to show how homosocial hunger is acknowledged and disrupts stable gender binaries between ‘men’ and ‘women’ in each film.