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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.
"Perhaps the most poignant observations in Engendering Blackness are simple ones relating to the permanency of sexual abuse and the scale unearthed through the archive. This rethinking is as exhaustive and harrowing as it is bold. Douglass's exploration of antiblackness, sexual violence, and racial slavery, is paradigm-shifting." —Tracy D. Sharpley-Whiting, Vanderbilt University
"Engendering Blackness is unflinching in its interrogation of Foucauldian claims that the juxtaposition of sex and violence is, essentially, productive. Douglass stands gender studies' assumptive logic on its head by demonstrating that, for slaves, 'sex is the marketplace of flesh.'" —Frank B. Wilderson III, University of California, Irvine
"Douglass presents a complex and compelling argument involving the sexualization of the enslaved past and present.... Recommended." —L. L. Lovern, CHOICE
"Patrice D. Douglass's astounding, and difficult, Engendering Blacknessattempts what only the rarest first book dares: the radical critique of an entire field of study. This feat is particularly remarkable given that the field in question is gender and sexuality studies, hardly a recondite academic enclave, but one of those select 'areas' with reach and implications so vast, they cannot really be said to be confined to a discipline or academic subject at all – bearing upon totally what, for convenience, we customarily call the world." —Parisa Vaziri, Ethnic and Racial Studies
1. Slavery, Racial Sexuation, and the Death Drive
2. Suspended Absences and the Substrates of Naming the Female Slave
3. Aborting the Slave Mother
4. On Historicizing Sex and Sexual Sense Making
5. Manning Black Gender
6. Toils of Flesh
Conclusion: After/Wards: Notes on Representing Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence