Scholarship@WashULaw
"Don't Let Nobody Bother Yo' Principle": The Sexual Economy of American Slavery
Document Type
Book Section
Publication Date
2002
Publication Title
Sister Circle: Black Women and Work
Abstract
The organizing essay of the collection presents the important concept of sexual economy of slavery. It examines the ways that slavery's sexual and racial subordination converged around the bodies of enslaved black women. It documents slavery as a "sexual political economy" to make explicit the connections between its markets, labor structure, and sexual exploitation. It designates slavery a sexual economy to foreground slavery's gender hierarchies and mechanisms of subordination as well as to show how slavery offered early illustrations of the social construction and fluidity of gender and the false dichotomy between public and private relations. In sum, the chapter demonstrates that race, sex, and slavery combined to produce an entirely different notion of intimacy and sexual anxieties and how those were managed and reproduced.
Keywords
Legal History, Sexual Economy Of Slavery, Antebellum Southern Political Economy, Reproductive Expropriations And Exploitation
Publication Citation
Adrienne D. Davis, "Don't Let Nobody Bother Yo' Principle": The Sexual Economy of American Slavery, in Sister Circle: Black Women and Work 15-38 (Sharon Harley et al. eds., 2002).
Repository Citation
Davis, Adrienne D., ""Don't Let Nobody Bother Yo' Principle": The Sexual Economy of American Slavery" (2002). Scholarship@WashULaw. 179.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_scholarship/179
Comments
Sharon Harley et al. editors, Rutgers University Press 2002. Reprinted in STILL BRAVE: THE EVOLUTION OF BLACK WOMEN’S STUDIES 215 (Stanlie M. James, Frances Smith Foster & Beverly Guy-Sheftall eds., 2009) (The Feminist Press at CUNY). In Part 2: Foremothers: The Shoulders on Which We Stand