Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781469672137

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Emily Owens charts a pathbreaking and field-changing route through this nettled path in her luminous new book . . . [and] powerfully calls contemporary theories and critiques of consent into longtime conversations within African American and Black diaspora women's history. . . . [A] call to transform Black women's history, archival and historiographic methods, and, as her powerful conclusion asserts, the grounds on which feminism argues against sexual assault and the cultures of sexual violence that reaffirm the search for a yes or no.""--Signs ""Owens challenges prevailing conceptions of rape law and takes on critical questions regarding the historiography of sexuality and slavery, . . . [offering] scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, feminist theorists, and sexual abuse advocates a powerful reconceptualization of sexual violence and the limits of consent. As our nation continues to grapple with the myriad ways in which sexual violence has shaped our history, this book is sure to inform conversations for years to come.""--Journal of African American History ""Consent in the Presence of Force defies simple categorization. . . . Combining deep archival research and speculative readings with rich contextual detail, Owens destabilizes neat binaries and clear-cut narratives of resistance, accommodation, and survival. With obvious appreciation for, but also critical reading of, foundational Black feminist scholarship, Owens insists on the necessity of rethinking classic formulations about sex in (and out of) slavery.""--Journal of the Civil War Era ""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

Author Information

Emily A. Owens is David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History at Brown University.

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