1. ‘‘The Strangest Freaks of Despotism’’. Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African American Slave Narratives

Abstract

In a well-known passage from Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God the elderly ex-slave Nanny explains to Janie, her adolescent and newly sexually awakened granddaughter, the plight of African American women and families under slavery. She emphasizes the necessary, corrective force of sexual repression within nascent free-black communities. Nanny wants Janie to understand why the benefits of Janie's financially stable, virtually asexual marriage to a man three times her age outweigh the prospects of a romantic union and sexual gratification with a man Janie likes. Nanny tells Janie that us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come around in queer ways (16). What Nanny's pronouncement reveals is that slavery had the effect of corrupting and contorting the most basic familial relationships. Not only did the institution deny slaves basic claims to familial, spousal, and hereditary bonds, insidiously it also assaulted their sexuality, robbing them of the basic rights of bodily autonomy and sexual choice. (1) Through Nanny, Hurston describes this violating, soul-shattering feature of slavery and its cumulative generational effects on black identity formation even after slavery's formal abolition is queer. This essay reads literary renderings of black enslavement as founding articulations of a plausible connection between the institutionalization of sexual violence and racial subordination in slavery and modern theories of sexual difference. Tracing certain modern epistemologies of sexuality to the era before the late nineteenth century--their acknowledged moment of formal entrance into the ideological order--I suggest that representations of sexual perversity under conditions of enslavement have contributed to notions of sexual alterity and to the ideologies by which aberrant sexual practices were named, domesticated, and policed in the first decades of the twentieth century. Many scholars, including Lisa Duggan, Siobhan Somerville, and Sander Gilman, note that the development of discrete sexual categories in the late nineteenth century coincided with the discursive and legislative deployment of racial theories to support coercive regimes of race-based social stratification between black and white citizens at the turn of the twentieth century. (2) Discourses of racial and sexual pathology contributed significantly to juridical measures (like legal segregation) and acts of racial terrorism (like lynching) that prevented black Americans from accessing the full entitlements of citizenship after slavery's formal end. Here I show that the era, institution, and literary representation of slavery helped to shape emergent models of sexual difference. The entwinement of violent racial separatism, sexual regulation, and the discursive production of bodily difference that characterizes the late nineteenth century may be usefully traced back to the institutional patterns of slavery and to the theories of black inferiority promulgated by its proponents and practitioners. This paper reads Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to analyze the interrelation of sexuality, race, identity, and social order in the middle of the nineteenth century. As canonical exemplars of the slave narrative form, Douglass's Narrative and Jacobs's Incidents not only evidence the material history of slavery but also manifest the power of literature to shape the cultural construction of identity, fantasy, and ideology. That the written testimonies of Douglass and Jacobs grapple at all with the relation of nonheteronormative sexual practices to (sexual and racial) identity formation suggests that we may productively extend modern theorizations of sexual identity to an earlier historical moment and locate them, at least partially, in the sexual deviance and sexual violence of the slave plantation. (3) This paper contends, then, that the brutal enslavement of black people, their legal definition as three-fifths human, and the social economic, and legislative practices of slavery helped to institute not only whiteness but the very notions of the person, the citizen, the normal and the heterosexual as well. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 50 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.