Decolonizing the Intersection: Black Male Studies as a Critique of Intersectionality's Indebtedness to Subculture of Violence Theory

The last 30 years have seen tremendous advances in gender theory. Despite these advances, which promised a new diagnosis of anti-Black racism through the deployment of a tripartied complexity of race, class, and gender, the interpretation of Black males has remained eerily similar to the racist theories of sociologists and criminologists from the preceding era. This presentation problematizes the continuity between subculture and contraculture theories of violence used by criminologists, sociologists, and (white) feminism from the late 1960s to the 1990s and contemporary intersectional analysis. It is argued that Black Male Studies is a necessary alternative to our current intersectional framework.