Unrapeable Bodies

The Libidinal Economy of Black Male Sexual Victimization in Criminology and Gender Studies

Introduction

How does the simultaneous Negrophobia and Negrophilia (Curry 2018:149)—that is, the phallic economy of colonial desire—structure the persistent erasure and reproduction of Black male sexual victimization in U.S. criminology and gender studies? While formally organized as a literature review, this paper advances a synthetic theoretical framework that reorganizes existing empirical and conceptual debates surrounding Black male sexual victimization by centering psychoanalytic, historical, and criminological literatures typically treated in isolation. Specifically, it employs racial misandry, homoeroticism, power, and colonial desire as analytic lenses, situating Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytic account as the genealogical foundation for understanding the libidinal dynamics that underwrite contemporary forms of erasure.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon theorizes the Black male body as a “penis symbol,” a construction through which white supremacy produces both terror and erotic fixation. Negrophobia—the fear of the Black male as sexually dangerous—and negrophilia—the libidinal desire for domination, conquest, and annihilation—operate dialectically, rendering Black male vulnerability intelligible only through its denial. Within this framework, racial violence against Black men does not represent a deviation from patriarchal order but rather one of its racialized rituals, wherein sexuality, punishment, and power converge.

Building on this Fanonian genealogy, the paper synthesizes empirical criminological findings from Lara Stemple and Ilan H. Meyer (2014) and Andrew Flores et al. (2017) with theoretical interventions from Tommy J. Curry (2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2023), Curry and Utley (2018), and Shelby Mitchell (2022). While these bodies of scholarship challenge the male-perpetrator/female-victim binary, they remain unevenly integrated and insufficiently theorized with respect to the libidinal and colonial dimensions of racialized sexual violence. This paper argues that such fragmentation is not accidental but reflects enduring epistemological limits within criminology and gender studies that render Black male sexual vulnerability structurally unintelligible.

The analysis proceeds by outlining Fanon’s psychoanalytic framework, tracing its extension through Black Male Studies, evaluating empirical disruptions in criminology, and examining illustrative case studies. The paper concludes by articulating methodological and disciplinary implications, advocating decolonial approaches that center Black male vulnerability without subordinating it to gendered hierarchies of recognition.

The Fanonian Psychoanalytic Framework: Negrophobia/Philia and the Negro as Penis Symbol

Fanon’s psychoanalysis of colonialism provides a genealogical anchor for understanding Black male sexual victimization as a function of libidinal economy rather than individual pathology. In Black Skin, White Masks ([1952] 1967:170), Fanon argues that colonial racism collapses the Black male body into genital symbolism, displacing personhood with sexual signification. The Negro is not merely sexualized but rendered as sex—specifically, as phallus (Fanon [1952] 1967:170)—such that humanity is eclipsed by erotic fantasy and fear.

This reduction produces negrophobia, wherein the Black male appears as a biological and sexual danger, while simultaneously sustaining negrophilia, an erotic investment in domination and destruction (Fanon ([1952] 1967:159, 165). For Fanon (Fanon ([1952] 1967:159), cruelty under colonialism is never devoid of sexuality; violence becomes a mode through which libidinal anxieties are displaced and resolved. Importantly, Fanon ([1952] 1967:155) emphasizes that white sexual fear of Black men is not grounded in empirical experience or trauma but in obsession, projection, and repression; the phobic subject reacts affectively rather than rationally, governed by pre-logical associations that conflate Blackness, sexuality, and threat.

Within this schema, Black male vulnerability emerges paradoxically: hypersexualization does not produce power but rather authorizes violation. Because everything “takes place on the genital level,” (Fanon [1952] 1967:157) the Black male body becomes uniquely available to sexualized forms of punishment, discipline, and annihilation. Fanon’s account thus reveals how colonial sexuality produces conditions under which Black male victimization is both pervasive and systematically denied.

Phallicism and Racial Misandry: Historical Lineages and Theoretical Disruptions in Black Male Studies

Fanon’s Negrophobia synthesizes with contemporary sources to historicize victimization. Curry (2017:4) foundationalizes Black Male Studies as a theoretical field in The Man-Not, theorizing phallicism as the contradictory process that “criminalizes Black males as sexual threats like the rapist, while simultaneously constituting them as the carnal excesses and fetishes of the white libido.” This process appears as a typical feature of racism; as Curry (2017:4) recounts, “there has been a realization that ‘racial hatred is carnal hatred . . . sexualized hatred.’” Phallicism explains the performance of homoerotic rituals during acts of domination (e.g., castration in lynchings), mirroring Fanon’s ([1952] 1967:161-163) observations that “with the Negro the cycle of the biological begins”:

No anti-Semite, for example, would ever conceive of the idea of castrating the Jew. He is killed or sterilized. But the Negro is castrated. The penis, the symbol of manhood, is annihilated, which is to say that it is denied. […][I]t is in his corporeality that the Negro is attacked. It is as a concrete personality that he is lynched. It is as an actual being that he is a threat. The Jewish menace is replaced by the fear of the sexual potency of the Negro.

Fanon’s articulation of anti-Black racism’s biological logics echo that of a carnal or sexualized hatred.

Curry (2017:170) further introduces racial misandry as the pathological aversion toward Black males, denying their vulnerability. Curry (2017:170) remarks that “It is often difficult to see Black males as vulnerable because of their maleness. […]This aversion to Black men that conditions their vulnerability to others is best understood as a particular type of misandry.” Curry (2017:170) continues:

The education theorist William A. Smith has similarly observed: Black misandry is an exaggerated pathological aversion toward Black males that is created and reinforced in societal, institutional, and individual ideologies, practices, and behaviors including scholarly ontologies (or understandings of how things exist), axiologies (or values such as ethics, aesthetics, religion, and spirituality), and epistemologies (or ways of knowing). Like Black misogyny, or aversion toward Black women, Black misandry exists to justify and reproduce the subordination and oppression of Black males while concomitantly erecting edifices of racial and gender inequality.

“Racist, or racial, misandry,” then, refers to the particular form racism takes when it targets Black men and boys; Black male vulnerability names the concrete harms, exclusion, and violence experienced at the intersection of being Black and male, whereas racial misandry captures their exposure to an intense, fixated social animus directed specifically at Black maleness (Curry 2017:170).

In gender studies, Curry (2021) critiques intersectionality’s failure to address this, inheriting Subculture of Violence theories that frame Black males as ontological threats. As Curry (2021:133) argues, “the understanding of Black male patriarchy through violence within intersectional analyses is a product of Black feminism’s reliance on subculture of violence theory and what came to be understood as racial-sexual stratification within racial minority groups” (p. 104). Curry (2021:133) details how “the criminological formulation of Black maleness as a threat to women explains the seemingly fixed perspective of intersectional analyses on the sexual pathology and social deviance of Black men and boys.” He notes that Crenshaw’s intersectionality depends on dominance feminism’s emphasis on physical violence and the criminological construct of the intra-racial rapist (Curry 2021:134-135). Moreover, intersectionality applies a framework of patriarchal privilege to Black males that doesn’t reflect material realities; as Curry (2021:132-133) explains, “the gender category deployed in intersectional analyses of Black males not only asserts intuitively that Black men and boys are privileged compared to Black women and girls, but elide empiricism and sociological contextualization that explain why various forms of evidence continue to demonstrate greater Black male disadvantage.”

Empirical Disruptions in Criminology: Prevalence Data and Methodological Biases

Criminological sources disrupt assumptions of male invulnerability, yet reproduce erasure by sidelining racialized libidinal factors. Stemple and Meyer (2014) analyze the Center for Disease Control’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) and U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) data (2010–2012), finding near-parity in 12-month nonconsensual sex prevalence (1.267 million men vs. 1.270 million women) (p. e19), with biases like inmate exclusion undercounting Black males (p. e21). As Stemple and Meyer (2014:e19) critique,

We concluded that federal surveys detect a high prevalence of sexual victimization among men—in many circumstances similar to the prevalence found among women. We identified factors that perpetuate misperceptions about men’s sexual victimization: reliance on traditional gender stereotypes, outdated and inconsistent definitions, and methodological sampling biases that exclude inmates. We recommend changes that move beyond regressive gender assumptions, which can harm both women and men.

The authors observe how analytical gaps in gender theory and data collection often lead to biases that reproduce the exclusion of males as victims.

In carceral settings, Black males face increased vulnerability to victimization, often by staff exploiting authority. Stemple, Flores, and Meyer (2017) emphasize female perpetration, with 68–79% of male victims reporting women assailants (p. 3), including in prisons where staff perpetration amplifies vulnerability (p. 4). As Stemple et al. (2017:4) observe,

Because men and boys are vastly disproportionately incarcerated they are overrepresented among victims; women are therefore disproportionately represented among all staff abusers[.] Among all adult prisoners reporting any type of staff sexual victimization, 80.0% reported only female perpetrators.[…]Among all juveniles reporting staff sexual victimization, 89.3% reported only female perpetrators.

The authors “found these data to contradict the common belief that female sexual perpetration is rare,” highlighting the chasm between cultural attitudes about victims and perpetrators and realities on the ground (Stemple et al. 2017:1).

Such prevalence consistency across surveys challenges traditional paradigms, but criminology’s actuarial focus neglects the psychosexual realms of coercion. Curry (2017:125) deepens this by historicizing Black males within the caricature of the brute, where he becomes invulnerable to rape:

The hyper-masculinity of the Black male brute resonates in the minds of observers and theorists as a denial of his sexual victimization and rape by women. The idea many hold is that a Black male could never be overpowered or abused by any woman—he is a lil’ Buck. He craves sex; he is the aggressor—the rapist. This overdetermined envisioning of the Black boy makes even his empirical suffering (his stories, the actual facts of the matter) imperceptible to the general public and academic audiences alike.

Curry (2017:125) suggests that more than a mere matter of oversight, this reflects systematic effects of disciplinary priorities, explaining “Many academics not only ignore but also defend this invisibility by suggesting that focusing on male victims—specifically, Black male victims—of rape takes our attention away from the realities of female rape victims.” The implication here is that disciplinary tensions and territorial disputes share some of the blame for the academy’s lack of accounting of Black male victims. Moreover, theoretical disruptions like phallicism highlight gaps: criminology’s empirical focus ignores libidinal historicization (e.g., lynching-to-prison continuity). For instance, staff violations reinforce power/desire asymmetries, yet are rarely theorized as colonial rituals of dominance. This deracialized approach perpetuates Black male invisibility as victims.

Shelby Mitchell’s (2022) “The Societal and Prosecutorial Undervaluation of Sexual Offenses against Black Men” extends this critique into the legal realm, exposing how criminological data on victimization intersects with prosecutorial biases rooted in caricatures of Black males as beasts. Mitchell (2022) historicizes the undervaluation from enslavement’s emasculation tactics—castration and lynching were unrecognized as sexual crimes—to contemporary courtrooms, where stereotypes of Black hypermasculinity lead to disbelief and underprosecution of their claims. As Mitchell (2022:482) argues, “The ‘bestial Black man’ stereotype has perpetuated the denial of Black male victimization,” detailing how Black males are incapable of being perceived as victims—only perpetrators.

This undervaluation of Black males’ claims, Mitchell (2022) contends, manifests in lower conviction rates and lenient sentencing for perpetrators against Black men, reinforcing a racial-sexual hierarchy where Black male bodies are fungible rather than protected subjects. By linking empirical prevalence gaps to systemic racism, Mitchell disrupts traditional criminology, urging reforms like race-blind case reviews to counter misandric biases that silence Black male survivors.

Methodological Implications: Counting, Visibility, and Epistemic Exclusion

The empirical literature reviewed here exposes not only gaps in prevalence data but deeper methodological constraints that shape what criminology can recognize as sexual victimization. Federal surveys such as NISVS and BJS instruments have historically relied on gendered definitions of rape that privilege penetration over coercion, exclude incarcerated populations, and fail to disaggregate victimization by race in analytically meaningful ways. These methodological decisions do not merely reflect technical limitations; they function as epistemic filters that align with cultural assumptions about masculinity, vulnerability, and racial threat.

From a Fanonian perspective, such exclusions can be understood as effects of libidinal denial. The same phallic constructions that render Black men hypersexual also render their violation unintelligible within positivist frameworks that presume male invulnerability. Consequently, criminology’s actuarial focus reproduces a racialized silence, even when aggregate data suggest parity or heightened risk. Incorporating measures such as “made to penetrate,” expanding inmate sampling, and theorizing staff-perpetrated abuse as a sexualized expression of power would represent not only technical improvements but decolonial methodological shifts.

Case Studies in Black Male Sexual Victimization

In “She Touched Me: Five Snapshots of Adult Sexual Violations of Black Boys,” Curry and Utley (2018) dissect historical and contemporary cases where Black boys are assaulted by adult women, yet societal narratives recast these traumas as rites of passage or mutual “pleasure” (p. 205). The authors highlight how statutory rape is masked as precocious desire, erasing the boys’ vulnerability. Analyzing five cases that span from adolescent coercion to institutional abuse, Curry and Utley (2018:205) assert, “Too often the idea of young Black boys as sexually aggressive or criminally assaultive displaces the idea that they can be victims at all[.]” The author’s findings “indicate that Black males are uniquely at risk for sexual impropriety and statutory rape, primarily via older women and teenage girl female-perpetrators (although risk also includes same-sex violations)” (Curry and Utley 2018:205).

Extending this analysis to adult contexts, Curry (2019) in “Expendables for Whom: Terry Crews and the Erasure of Black Male Victims of Sexual Assault and Rape” interrogates the public response to actor Terry Crews’s 2017 groping by a White male executive, Adam Venit. Curry (2019) exposes the hypermasculine perception of Black male bodies in calls for violent retaliation (“You should have knocked him out”) (p. 301), rather than empathy. While Crews’s testimony to Congress that “he too felt anger but did not defend himself against Venit because of what the media and the White world would say about a Black man beating up a White man,” shows the paradox of phallicism—how the construction of the Black male as sexual threat renders him fungible and shapes his worldview (Curry 2019:301).

Curry (2019:292-293) observes that “to gain legitimacy within #MeToo, Crews shifted his rhetoric toward “toxic masculinity” and “patriarchy,” framing his assault as an exception that ultimately spotlighted female suffering. As Curry (2019:293) elucidates, “Crews’s embrace of this particular narrative suggests that #MeToo still lacks a language to describe and center the abuse of racialized men next to women generally”, critiquing how the movement—popularized by Alyssa Milano’s appropriation from Tarana Burke’s original focus on young women of color and inclusion of male victims—individualizes Black male trauma while subsuming it under a universal survivors discourse that privileges white feminist priorities. This erasure perpetuates the disposability of Black males by denying their structural precarity to sexual violence, reducing Crews’s story to a tokenized anomaly rather than a catalyst for theorizing racialized male victimhood.

Implications for Criminology and Gender Studies

The libidinal economy of colonial desire, as historicized through Fanon’s phobia/philia dialectic and Curry’s phallicism and racial misandry, necessitates a paradigm shift in criminology and gender studies toward decolonial methodologies that center Black male vulnerability without subordinating it to female-centered narratives. In criminology, empirical disruptions like those in Stemple and Meyer (2014) and Stemple et al. (2017) expose methodological biases—such as inmate exclusions and narrow definitions of rape—that align with misandric erasures, undercounting Black male victims. This implies the need for inclusive data protocols that incorporate “made to penetrate” metrics and disaggregate by race, challenging normative positivist approaches that neglect homoerotic dimensions of violence.

For gender studies, Curry’s critiques (2017; 2021) can be read as intersectionality’s complicity in Subculture of Violence theory, which overdetermines Black males as aggressors, perpetuating ontological hatred (Curry 2017:170); the field would benefit by operationalizing racial misandry as a parallel analytic to misogynoir, fostering queer integrations that theorize racial homoeroticism. Broader policy ramifications extend to legal reforms, as Mitchell (2022:499) advocates race-blind case reviews to counter prosecutorial undervaluation, while educational interventions—such as Curry and Utley’s (2018:232) call for earlier sex education emphasizing Black male precarity—could mitigate trauma cycles. Ultimately, these implications demand interdisciplinary coalitions that refuse disciplinary territorialism, prioritizing survivor-centered research to dismantle the disposability of Black male bodies in both scholarship and society.

Conclusion

To advance equity in racialized sexual violence research, decolonial praxis must prioritize Black Male Studies’ disruptions, integrating Fanonian libidinal analytics with empirical rigor. Recommendations include: 1) Curricular reforms in criminology programs to mandate Fanon and Curry alongside standard victimology texts, ensuring future scholars confront phobia/philia from the outset; 2) Policy advocacy for federal surveys like NISVS to adopt race-specific protocols, expanding inmate sampling and including phallicism-informed questions on staff coercion; 3) Funding longitudinal studies on female-perpetrated abuse against Black boys, building on Curry and Utley (2018), to track mental health and criminalization outcomes into adulthood; 4) Collaborative initiatives between gender studies and queer theory to operationalize racial misandry in discourse analyses of media and legal narratives, countering #MeToo’s erasures as critiqued in Curry (2019); and 5) Community-based interventions, such as culturally attuned survivor networks and services targeted towards Black males.

Future research directions should pursue comparative global analyses of diaspora victimization, examining how colonial desire manifests in non-U.S. contexts like the Caribbean or Africa; explore AI-driven sentiment analysis of online discourses on Black male assaults to quantify misandric patterns; and develop intersectional alternatives that center outgroup male precarity without diluting misogynoir critiques. By pursuing these avenues, scholarship can transcend colonial legacies, fostering transformative justice that humanizes Black male suffering.

References

Curry, Tommy J. 2023. “He Didn’t Want Any of That: Considerations in the Study.” in Child Sexual Abuse in Black and Minoritised Communities: Improving Legal, Policy and Practical Responses. Cham: Springer International Publishing AG.

Curry, Tommy J. 2021. “Decolonizing the Intersection: Black Male Studies as a Critique of Intersectionality’s Indebtedness to Subculture of Violence Theory.” Pp. 132–53 in Critical Psychological Praxis: Psychosocial Non-Alignment to Modernity/Coloniality. Routledge.

Curry, Tommy J. 2019. “Expendables for Whom: Terry Crews and the Erasure of Black Male Victims of Sexual Assault and Rape.” Women’s Studies in Communication 42(3):287-307.

Curry, Tommy J. 2018. “He’s a rapist, even when he’s not: Richard Wright’s account of the Black male vulnerability in the raping of Willie McGee.” Pp. 132–154 in J. Gordon & C. E. Zirakzadeh (Eds.), The politics of Richard Wright: Perspectives on resistance. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.

Curry, Tommy J. 2017. The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood. Temple University Press.

Curry, Tommy J., and Ebony A. Utley. 2018. “She Touched Me: Five Snapshots of Adult Sexual Violations of Black Boys.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 28(2):205–41. doi:10.1353/ken.2018.0014.

Fanon, Frantz. (1952) 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by C. L. Markmann. New York: Grove Press.

Mitchell, Shelby. 2022. “The Societal and Prosecutorial Undervaluation of Sexual Offenses against Black Men.” Rutgers Race & the Law Review 23(2):479–504.

Stemple, Lara, and Ilan H. Meyer. 2014. “The Sexual Victimization of Men in America: New Data Challenge Old Assumptions.” American Journal of Public Health 104(6):e19–26. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2014.301946.

Stemple, Lara, Andrew Flores, and Ilan H. Meyer. 2017. “Sexual Victimization Perpetrated by Women: Federal Data Reveal Surprising Prevalence.” Aggression and Violent Behavior 34:302–11. doi:10.1016/j.avb.2016.09.007.