What's Love Got To Do With It Summary

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In What’s Love Got to Do with It? by Donna L. Franklin, the question of how gender is constructed and ascribed to define humanity resonated with me throughout the text. Through seven chapters from “Breaking the Silence” to “The Path to Healing”, Franklin delves into the dynamics of Black men and women relationships within the United States. Franklin presented a common theme of acknowledging and rebuilding the schism of Black men and women. She traces gender relations from the Middle Passage to the fight of social equality in the Civil Rights Movement to the depiction of the Black family in the twenty-first century in media and popular culture. As a sociologist and African American family scholar, Franklin intended for this work to be a contribution to a needed dialogue about the issues of gender relations through a socio-historical lens considering American economics, Black culture, and societal norms (Franklin 23). Understanding the influence of hegemony has shifted many of us into considering one-singular truth and Western ideologies have led to the shaping of ideas, mindsets, and cultures, all the way to family, gender roles, dating, and sexual patterns. African American culture is in continual comparison to European American culture, which is detrimental to our communities. If Franklin’s goal was to have the readers look into why and how these gender relation patterns exist, she accomplished it by giving me as the reader insight on the historical experience of dismantling Black manhood and womanhood through the

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