This talk takes stock of the legal and ideological underpinnings of violence against enslaved women. Here, Dr. Emily Owens unpacks the legal doctrine of rape law to elaborate what Harriet Jacobs knew almost two hundred years ago, that is, that “no shadow of law” existed to protect black women from “from insult, from violence, or even from death… inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men.” In addition to analyzing the legal structure that invited sexual contact with black women under any circumstance, she returns to Jacobs to think through the cultural value of consent. She shows that the legal impossibility of rape and the slaveholders’ insistence on black women’s utterance of consent together unlock the puzzle of (slaveholding) sexual violence: when sex is articulated as a transaction, women become imagined as culpable for the harm done to them.
Dr. Emily Owens works on the history of sexuality and slavery. Her current book project, Fantasies of Consent: Sex, Affect, and Commerce in 19th Century New Orleans is a cultural and legal history of the sex trade in antebellum New Orleans. This project explores the lives of women of color who sold (or were sold for) sex in that market, as well as the legal, economic, and affective structures that determined much of their existence. Owens has received support from the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Charles Warren Center for American History, and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF). In addition to her appointment in the Department of History at Brown, Owens also joins the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice as a faculty fellow.
The Program in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and the Mahindra Humanities Center present “New Directions in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality,” a forum for discussing new interdisciplinary scholarship in the field of women, gender, and sexuality studies. The series features innovative work that speaks to multiple academic disciplines, methods, and traditions while forging an engaged and vibrant intellectual community.
This seminar series is sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center and the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
LOCATION:Barker Center, Room 133 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20220915T210000Z DTEND:20220915T220000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR