Unveiling Our Scars: artist statement

Abstract

ABSTRACT Narrated through a layered account, Unveiling Our Scars weaves back and forth between reflections about the past and present, exploring Black masculine identity through the lens of intimate relationships. Situating my lived experiences within broader conversations about Black masculinity and cultural stereotypes, this narrative short film autoethnographically analyzes how my performance of self, within the context of intimate relationships, supports and challenges the canonical and contemporary hegemonic scripting of Black men as bodies that lack the capability to be emotionally vulnerable and possess a limited range of emotions. Undergirded by a Black masculine theoretical framework, this film complicates the narrow scripting of Black masculine performance and advocates for what communication scholar and Black masculine theorist Ronald L. Jackson II describes as the adoption of a model of Black masculinity that embraces a spectrum of performative possibilities.