Author: Greta LaFleur, Department of American Studies, Yale University - Academia.edu

Extract: »This scene of Jacobs’s memoir represents perhaps one of the most widely cited depictions of the experience of women living in enslavement by historians, literary critics, and interdisciplinary scholars alike. Jacobs’s relatively unflinching discussion of the sexual exploitation of enslaved Black women for the purposes of both pleasure and reproduction is still, even in the wake of several decades’ worth of recovery scholarship and an explosion of scholarship on the experiences of women living under slavery, one of the most direct, canny, and explicit available today. This article takes this well-read scene in Incidents as a point of departure to explore how centering the experience of enslaved women changes our understanding of the history of sexuality in the nineteenth-century United States. Taking up the question Saidiya Hartman poses in the reading of Incidents that appears in her landmark 1997 study, Scenes of Subjection—“What does sexuality designate when rape is a normative mode of its deployment?”—this article argues that the rampant, pervasive, and deeply quotidian practice of sexual violence under slavery, as well as the strategic use of sexualized violence to enact and enforce white supremacy and other forms of racialized social control, needs to be restored to the absolutely central role it maintained in the sexual cultures in eighteenth-century North America and the nineteenth-century United States. This article is not an effort to revise the generally accepted story of the emergence of modern sexuality as an episteme in the late nineteenth century; instead, it is an attempt to ask how this emergence was shaped by multiple centuries of legally sanctioned and culturally supported racial terror.« (Source: Article, p. 154)

Contents:

	Sexuality under Slavery (p. 159)
	“The Southern States Are One Great Sodom”; or, The Reach of Slavery’s Sexual Culture (p. 171)
	Sexual Modernity, Sexual Liberalism (p. 176)
	Conclusion: A Question of Field Formation? (p. 179)
	About the Author (p. 187)

Wikipedia: History of the Americas: History of the United States | Slavery: Slavery in the United States / Treatment of slaves in the United States | Sex and the law: Rape / Rape in the United States