info@woodslane.com.au
Contact us on (02) 8445 2300
For all customer service and order enquiries

WOODSLANE

Popular Subjects

Woodslane Online Catalogues

9781469670515 Academic Inspection Copy

Consent in the Presence of Force

Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans
Description
Author
Biography
Reviews
Google
Preview
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.
Emily A. Owens is David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History at Brown University.
Consent in the Presence of Force joins robust scholarly conversations about the problem of the archive for understanding the experiences of enslaved Black women and girls. . . [it] situates itself as an essential point of departure for scholars committed to taking Black women at their word."--Journal of American History Scholars of slavery, legal history, and cultural history, especially graduate students who plan on working with legal records, will benefit from reading Consent in the Presence of Force. Its frank, explicit prose combined with its emphasis on the lives and experiences of enslaved women makes for an especially significant contribution to how we understand and study sex, violence, and freedom."--Journal of Southern History
Google Preview content