A “Strange Quirk in His Lineage”:Walter Mosely, Donald Goines, and the Racial Representation of the Penis
Abstract
Men and Masculinities, Vol. 9 No. 2, October 2006 226-235 DOI: 10.1177/1097184X06287757 © 2006 Sage Publications ARTICLES A "Strange Quirk in His Lineage" Walter Mosely, Donald Goines, and the Racial Representation of the Penis PETER LEHMAN Arizona State University, Tempe The mythic, large black penis has been analyzed and talked to death in American society, but perhaps predictably, virtually nothing has been said about the, what must then be, small white penis. Odd, when you realize that something is only big in relationship to something that is small. When I first began working on the male body, sexuality, and the representation of the penis in the mid-1980s, work that eventually led to the publication of Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body (1993b), there was a similar paradox in relationship to the entire question of the representation of the female body in relationship to the male body. What male body? Again, nearly all the critical attention and cultural talk was about femininity and the female body. This state of affairs was well summed up by Rosalind Coward (1985) when she called the male body "the dark continent" and noted that men's bodies and sexuality had