Consent in the Presence of Force (eBook)

Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans

Emily A. Owens (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022
244 Seiten
The University of North Carolina Press (Verlag)
9781469670522 (ISBN)

Infos

In histories of enslavement and in Black womens history, coercion looms large in any discussion of sex and sexuality. At a time when sexual violence against Black women was virtually unregulatedeven normalizeda vast economy developed specifically to sell the sexual labor of Black women. In this vividly rendered book, Emily A. Owens wrestles with the question of why white men paid notoriously high prices to gain sexual access to the bodies of enslaved women to whom they already had legal and social access.Owens centers the survival strategies and intellectual labor of Black women enslaved in New Orleans to unravel the culture of violence they endured, in which slaveholders obscured the presence of force with arrangements that included gifts and money. Owenss storytelling highlights that the classic formulation of rape law that requires the presence of force and the absence of consent to denote a crime was in fact a key legal fixture that packaged predation as pleasure and produced, rather than prevented, violence against Black women. Owens dramatically reorients our understanding of enslaved womens lives as well as of the nature of violence in the entire venture of racial slavery in the U.S. South. Unsettling the idea that consent is necessarily incompatible with structural and interpersonal violence, this history shows that when sex is understood as a transaction, women are imagined as responsible for their own violation.

Autor

Emily A. Owens is David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History at Brown University.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 10.1.2023
• Zusatzinfo: 12 halftones, 4 maps, notes, index
• Verlagsort: Chapel Hill
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 160 x 160 mm
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
• Schlagworte: 19th century slavery • antebellum slavery • Black Women's History • black women's sexuality • consent • everyday life of enslaved women • Exchange • feminist theory • freedom suits • Gender and Sexuality • gender and slavery • Gender History • Intellectual history • intimate life • intimate violence • Law • Legal History • Louisiana History • mistress(es) • New Orleans • placage • race, sex and the law • Rape • rape in slavery • sexuality and slavery • sexual labor • Sexual Violence • Sex Work • slaveholder's sexual violence • slave mistress • urban slavery • us slavery • US South • Violence • violence against black women • violence against enslaved women • Violence Against Women • Women of Color • Women's history
• ISBN-13: 9781469670522 / 9781469670522