Player FM 앱으로 오프라인으로 전환하세요!
Emily A. Owens, "Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans" (UNC Press, 2023)
Manage episode 352919576 series 3381768
In histories of enslavement and in Black women's history, coercion looms large in any discussion of sex and sexuality. At a time when sexual violence against Black women was virtually unregulated—even normalized—a vast economy developed specifically to sell the sexual labor of Black women. In Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans (UNC Press, 2023), 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. Owens's 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 women's 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.
Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
369 에피소드
Manage episode 352919576 series 3381768
In histories of enslavement and in Black women's history, coercion looms large in any discussion of sex and sexuality. At a time when sexual violence against Black women was virtually unregulated—even normalized—a vast economy developed specifically to sell the sexual labor of Black women. In Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans (UNC Press, 2023), 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. Owens's 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 women's 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.
Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
369 에피소드
Alle episoder
×플레이어 FM에 오신것을 환영합니다!
플레이어 FM은 웹에서 고품질 팟캐스트를 검색하여 지금 바로 즐길 수 있도록 합니다. 최고의 팟캐스트 앱이며 Android, iPhone 및 웹에서도 작동합니다. 장치 간 구독 동기화를 위해 가입하세요.