Consent in the Presence of Force
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19th century slavery
A01=Emily A. Owens
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antebellum slavery
Author_Emily A. Owens
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black women's history
black women's sexuality
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBJK
Category=HBTS
Category=JBFK2
Category=JBSF1
Category=JBSL1
Category=JFFE2
Category=JFSJ1
Category=JFSL3
Category=NHK
Category=NHTS
consent
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
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eq_history
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
everyday life of enslaved women
exchange
feminist theory
freedom suits
gender and sexuality
gender and slavery
gender history
intellectual history
intimate life
intimate violence
Language_English
law
legal history
Louisiana history
mistress(es)
New Orleans
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placage
Price_€20 to €50
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race
rape
rape in slavery
sex and the law
sex work
sexual labor
Sexual violence
sexuality and slavery
slave mistress
slaveholder's sexual violence
softlaunch
urban slavery
US slavery
US South
violence
violence against black women
violence against enslaved women
violence against women
women of color
women's history
Product details
- ISBN 9781469672137
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 155 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 10 Jan 2023
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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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 this vividly rendered book, 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.
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.
Emily A. Owens is David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History at Brown University.
