Rape

by

Patrice Douglass

• LAST MODIFIED: 20 August 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190280024-0140

Introduction

Rape, as it relates to Blackness, charts a long and vexed historical and contemporary arch. The interplay between the two is highlighted by the structural denial of Black sexual vulnerability, the profound hyper-prevalence of Black sexual violation, and the projection of the rape fantasy as the quintessence of Black sexual ontology. Historians, novelists, artists, journalists, and theorists have sought to demystify the paradoxical relationship between the absolute vulnerability of Black people to sexual violation and the projected myth of Blackness as that which wills and desires its own rape and the rape of others, namely the rape of white women by Black men. Historians have marked the emergence of Black sexual vulnerability in perceptions of the unbound character of Black bodily expressions, as noted by early European explorers on the African continent. The transatlantic slave trade instrumentalized these perceptions into a structural paradigm that forced the absolute submission of Black people to innumerable instances of rape and other forms of sexual vulnerability. This history is charted from the slave castles along the coast of western Africa, through the door of no return while embarking upon the treacherous terrain of the Middle Passage, and upon arrival in the New World. The formations of the Early American colonies inaugurated a profound shift in the experience and structural components of anti-Black rape, with the enactment of the Virginian Act XII of 1662, a legal doctrine that mandated that all children born of a slave mother would inherit her status as slave. Furthermore, while the history of enslavement and rape is most often gendered female, male slaves were neither protected nor immune from sexual violation. The legal abolition of slavery enacted a recapitulation of the relationship of Blackness and sexual vulnerability. The history of lynching, the production of urban space, and the constitution of identities in the afterlife of slavery are riddled with the sediments of the historical marking of Black bodies as hypersexual and thus inviolable. Furthermore, the afterlife of slavery produced the entrenchment of new forms of sexual vulnerability that complicate the relationship between Blackness and rape further, including those produced by the state and expanded forms of anti-Black gendered and anti-queer violence.

General Overview

These texts offer theoretical engagements with anti-Black rape and sexual violence that move beyond narrating the experience of rape as individual, into an articulation of what structures of power suture these repeated violations. Each connects the foundational relationship between rape and Blackness to slavery. However, there are divergences taken in each to demonstrate how these connections expand beyond the quotidian and spectacular terror of the plantation into other realms. Written by a historian, Morgan 2018 closely analyzes how reproductive capacities of enslaved women shaped the brutality of enslavement. Hartman 2008 argues that the opaque and incomplete historical record make the lives and desires of the captive female (im)possible to narrate outside of the scant references to her sexual violation found in the historical record. Thus, Hartman 2016 asks what it means to write the story of the dead who go unaccounted for in history. Sexton 2010 argues that the reproductive enslavement of the captive female not only frames the productivity of slavery but is also the foundational violence of modernity. For Davis 1983, capitalism frames explorations into both Black female rape and the myth of Black men as wanton rapists. Lastly, the question of how to link the historical machinations of rape to the present lived experiences of Black life, consent as a political framework, policy imperatives, and narrative perceptions of Black sexuality guide the additional texts represented here in the arguments expressed in Collins 2005, Owens 2019, Spillers 1987, Roberts 1999, and Threadcraft 2016.

• Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2005.

  In Black Sexual Politics, Collins argues that images of deviant Black sexuality constitute “the new racism,” which threatens the safety and psychic well-being of Black people. Thus, these images are trafficked around the world, making them powerful, gripping, and seemingly impossible to break. Collins contends that rather than responding to the hypersexualizaiton of Black images with heteronormativity, Black people have the opportunity to advance a new Black erotics that challenges and destabilizes the link between the past and the present.

• Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.

  Davis offers readers an in-depth history of racism, misogyny, and capitalist exploitation in the United States, from slavery into the 1960s. She argues that slavery constituted standards for a new womanhood, which racially classified women in relation to forms of violence. The chapters offer insights into the history of rape and slavery and the myth of the Black male rapist, as well as critical insights in ways to destabilize systems of control.

• Giddings, Paula. “The Last Taboo.” In Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Construction of Social Reality. Edited by Toni Morrison, 441–470. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992.

  Using the case of Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas as an example, Giddings discusses the persistent issues that exist among Black people because of the culture of silence that exists around rape. She argues that discourses surrounding gender and sexuality are unmediated by race. This, for Giddings, is the last taboo, a pervasive and harmful silence around the sexual vulnerability, rape, and harms experienced by Black women at the hands of white and Black men.

• Hartman, Saidiya V. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 26 (2008): 1–14.

  DOI: 10.1215/-12-2-1

  In this groundbreaking essay, Hartman examines the ubiquity of the absent-presence of Black women in the historical record of slavery. Using the story of two slave girls whose sexual violation only appears in passing in the records kept by their enslavers, Hartman recasts their stories using what she terms “critical fabulation” to imagine the impossible stories of the enslaved. The complications of this practice demonstrate that even our strongest desires cannot undo the grip of sexual violence and historical erasure.

• Hartman, Saidiya V. “The Dead Book Revisited.” History of the Present 6.2 (Fall 2016): 208–215.

  DOI: 10.5406/historypresent.6.2.0208

  This essay ponders a series of questions regarding Black death and sexual violence. Hartman asks what the value is of retelling the stories of the dead and sexually maimed that can never be told. The essay asks the reader to take seriously the importance of sitting with the irreconcilable loss produced at the nexus of Black death and sexual violation. Hartman argues that this space is of the Black ordinary, though escape is always desired.

• Morgan, Jennifer L. “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery.” Small Axe 22.1 (2018): 1–17.

  DOI: 10.1215/07990537-4378888

  The Virginia Act XII of 1662 established that enslaved children inherited the condition of their mother. American slavery was built upon a structure of matrilineal heredity, which in practice predated the Virginia act but was solidified with its passage into law. Morgan argues the law of heredity was invested in racially classifying children born of the rapes of Black women by white men.

• Owens, Emily. “Consent.” Differences 30.1 (2019): 148–156.

  DOI: 10.1215/10407391-7481316

  Owens argues the logic of consent used in contemporary anti-violence movements must be historically situated. Specifically, this article considers how the assumption of shared power to agree to enter into sexual relation is also shaped by race, gender, class, and sexuality. As such, Owens contends that the freedom sought by logics of consent are often made legible and aspirational because of their unspoken relationship to more grave unfreedoms.

• Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

  Roberts examines how the racist tropes of the welfare queen and crack babies are used to proliferate policies that extend the systematic abuse of Black women. Killing the Black Body demonstrates how Black women’s sexual vulnerability under slavery provided the conditions of possibility for contemporary racist and misogynoir policies to take root. Furthermore, she demonstrates how policy rationales mirror the logic used to justify the rape and torture of Black women during slavery.

• Sexton, Jared. “People-of-Color Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery.” Social Text 28.2 (2010): 31–56.

  DOI: 10.1215/01642472-2009-066

  Sexton argues that Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe ignore and miscalculate the primacy slavery played in the violent constitution of modernity. To chart this, Sexton employs the work of Saidiya Hartman to argue that the female captive elucidates the violence of anti-Blackness through her status as a breeder. She is structurally denied any imaginable right to sovereign protections over her body and reproduction.

• Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 64–81.

  DOI: 10.2307/464747

  This essay marked a foundational shift in how slavery, Blackness, and gender were thought through and against one another. Spillers weaves a complex argument about the sheer powerlessness of the enslaved to name and claim their genders. “Pornotroping,” for Spillers, marks the misuse and misrecognition of the presumed sexual power of Black people with the ongoing and pervasive use of Black gendered tropes to advance gratuitous sexually

• Threadcraft, Shatema. Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

  DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190251635.001.0001

  Intimate Justice charts how Black women’s bodies have been subjected to rape, racial terror, sterilization, and other sexually violent practices. Threadcraft demonstrates how, from the antebellum period to the women’s movement era, the various ways of redressing sexual violations of Black women have been neglected. The book also details the ways Black women continue to fight and imagine forms of freedom and corrective justice within struggles for racial and gender justice.