Engendering Blackness

Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence

Patrice D. Douglass

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9781503641617
  9781503630819
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781503641624
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

In this incisive new book, Patrice D. Douglass interrogates the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness in the present. Douglass contends that the sexual violability of slaves is often misappropriated by frameworks on sexual violence that privilege its occurrence as a question of ethics, sexual agency, and feminine orders of gendering. Rather, this book foregrounds Blackness as engendered by sexual violence, which forcefully (re)produces Blackness, corporeally and conceptually, as a condition that lacks the capacity to ontologically distinguish its suffering from what it means to be human. By employing and critically revising Black feminist theory and Afro-pessimism, Douglass reveals that engaging primarily with the sexualization of the slave forces theories of sexual violence to interrogate why this violence—one of the most prevalent under slavery—continues to lack a grammar of fundamental redress. There are no reparations struggles for the generational transfer of sexual violation and the inability of present frameworks to rectify the sexual stains of slavery lies precisely in the fact that what made this history possible continues to haunt arrangements of life today. Engendering Blackness urgently articulates the way our present understandings of Blackness and humanness are bound by this vexed sexual history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One. Slavery, Racial Sexuation, and the Death Drive
• Two. Suspended Absences and the Substrates of Naming the Female Slave
• Three. Aborting the Slave Mother
• Four. On Historicizing Sex and Sexual Sense Making
• Five. Manning Black Gender
• Six. Toils of Flesh
• Conclusion. After/Wards: Notes on Representing Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List