Leslie Adams: "Performing Strength: Racialized Masculinity and Suicide Risk among Black Men"
This talk examines how masculinity operates as a racialized social structure that shapes emotional expression, help-seeking, and suicide risk among Black men with lived experience of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Drawing on qualitative interviews and an intersectional framework, this talk will demonstrate how norms of strength, stoicism, and self-reliance, produced at the intersection of racism and gender, function less as sources of power and more as constraints in moments of crisis. The findings will highlight suicide risk among Black men as a gendered outcome of structural and cultural pressures rather than individual vulnerability alone.
Leslie Adams is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences (Public Mental Health) and, by courtesy, of Pediatrics.
Clayman Faculty Affiliates are welcome to attend the lunch seminars. All Stanford academics are eligible to become Clayman Institute Faculty Affiliates.
If you would like more details, please email claymanfellowship [at] stanford.edu (claymanfellowship[at]stanford[dot]edu).