Engendering Blackness : Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Douglass, Patrice D.

Series:

Inventions: Black Philosophy, Politics, Aesthetics Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Enslaved women--Violence against--Philosophy.

Enslaved women.

Women, Black--Violence against--Philosophy.

Women, Black.

Slavery--Philosophy.

Slavery.

Rape--Philosophy.

Rape.

Philosophy, Black.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (354 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Redwood City : Stanford University Press, 2025.

Summary:

"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 occurrences 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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Front Cover

Half-title

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

Back Cover.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

1-5036-4162-7

OCLC:

1518281071