I n American cinema of the early 1970s, there is perhaps no more revealing (if ideologically complex) forum for the analysis of the “crises of masculinity” of the decade than blaxploitation cinema. If cinema and culture of the period were addressing, critiquing, and even assaulting white patriarchal masculinity—due in part to the fallout from Vietnam, the economic crisis, and the social critiques coming from feminism, the counterculture, gay liberation, and the Black Power movement—blaxploitation cinema both shifted and exaggerated the discursive parameters of this debate through its presumed enactment and visualization of black male empowerment. Most overviews of the blaxploitation genre agree that the common ideological structure of the films involves a reversal of the racial hierarchies that have so oppressively anchored the history of American cinema since its inception. 1 Thus, whiteness (particularly white masculinity) is villainized, made deviant, mocked, feminized, and brutally punished as black men are given representational primacy.

And yet, contrary to popular belief (and the general critical history of the genre), the films of the blaxploitation era are actually marked by an equally substantial crisis in black masculinity that works to unsettle the racial, gendered, classed, and sexualized codes that appear to define the genre. As Marlon Riggs has suggested,“By the tenets of black macho, true masculinity admits little or no space for self-interrogation or multiple subjectivities around race”(474). But closer examination of the blaxploitation genre (and the Black Power era) reveals diverse visions of black masculinity that confound the presumed cultural “authenticity” of