Racism and Sexism Questions

“Seduction and the Ruses of Power”

Saidiya Hartman’s

Seduction and the Ruses of Power

• Hartman argues that there is a performance of power, a ruse, which stages the acts of seduction, desire, and willfulness of the enslaved female. • From the cases she illustrates, we can

see that the law neither protects nor guarantees freedom for the slave. • Inasmuch as freedom and protection

are barred, we see that so are the slaves’ notions of agency, will, and consent. • But paradoxically, they are seen to have

“reason.” With this, the courts are able to adjudicate and punish the enslaved as criminals.

Adjudication and Punishment

• Adjudication and punishment are the extent to which the slave is recognized as “a person;”

• Otherwise, because the enslaved is considered to be the property of her slave owner, they are considered to not have the same protection as a citizen under the contract of slavery and the law of property.

• Hartman: “… Repression was essential to the displacement of white culpability that characterized both the recognition of black humanity in slave law and the designation of the black subject as the originary locus of transgression and offense.”

The law as a mechanism of racial and gender difference (through sexual violence)

• Hartman explains how the racialization of slaves is a necessary part of the state and the operation of law. • That is, to uphold the state, there needed (and needs) to be a separation/

segregation through a gendered notion of race. vRecall Davis, here, that the submission of enslaved/ black women are necessary for the

production of power and reproduction of slavery; vBut also that the idea that the enslaved have power is a contradiction– whence they were

established as property and objects of the master and state.

• Hartman points out that there was no protection against sexual violence for the enslaved female, but also that sexual violence was in many ways made permissible to uphold and center white heteropatriarchy and notions of whiteness (such as white female purity).

Alfred v. State • Because slaves could not hold marital

status, there was no means of protection for the slave family;

• There was also no sense of defense against violence or violation for other family members.

• In the case of Alfred versus the State, the protection of one’s wife/ mother— the threat to her body and the endangerment of her life– could not be a justification for “standing one’s ground.”

• We can infer here how in our contemporary climate, how “stand your ground laws” are also (and continues to be) racially biased in its regulation.

Alfred v. State

“In positioning the black as criminal, the state constituted itself as the embodiment of the law, thereby obfuscating its instrumental role in terror, by projecting all culpability and wrongdoing onto the enslaved. The black body was simply the site on which the “crimes” of the dominant class and of the state were externalized in the form of a threat. The criminality imputed to blacks disavowed white violence as a necessary response to the threatening agency of blackness” (540).

Constructing the racial difference

between free white person

and black captives

Constructing the racial difference between free white person and black captives

• “The abjection of the captive body exceeds that which can be conveyed by the designation or different between “slave” women and “free” women.” In this case, what is at issue is the difference between the deployment of sexuality in the contexts of white kinship—the proprietorial relation of the patriarch to his wife and children, the making of legitimate heirs, and the transmission of property— and black captivity— the reproduction of property, the relations of mastery and subjection, and the regularity of sexual violences, rather than the imputed protection and privilege of white women….

• Kinship and captivity designate radically different conditions of embodiment and bespeak the particular mechanisms through which bodies are racialized as well as disciplined.” (541).

Necessary Distinction (and Social Construction) between “Slave” women & “free” women • freedom is structured and positioned differently for the enslaved but, especially for

enslaved women;

• struggle of the enslaved is not recognized nor acknowledged by the state

• as a result, violence, harm, intrusion, and crime are charged terms (remember Higginbotham explaining that race is never a “neutral” concept, but always charged);

• Hartman is explaining how white hetero-patirarchy, the power structure which consists on the belief of 1. heteronormative relation as the norm; 2. the establishment of white men in power… not only maintained in the status quo of the subjection of black women (and perpetuated the racial myth of the black male criminal), but as it is relied upon the disciplining mechanism, the subjection of black women, in order to sustain and reproduce its power and domination.

“In short, black and female difference is registered by virtue of the extremity of power and operating on captive bodies and licensed within the scope of the human and the tolerable. The violence commensurate with the exercise of property rights and essential to the making of perfect submission was dissembled in regard to sexual violation by black female “excesses”— immoderate and overabundant sexuality, bestial appetites and capacities which were most often likened to the orangutan, and an untiring readiness that was only outstripped by her willingness.”

“However, the omissions of law must be read symptomatically within an economy of bodies in which the full enjoyment of the slave (by the state and master) as thing depended upon unbound authority and the totalizing consumption of the body in its myriad capacities.

The construction of black subjectivity as will-less, abject, insatiate and pained, the instrumental deployment sexuality in the reproduction of property, subordination, and racial difference usurped the category of rape. Sexuality formed the nexus in which black, female, and chattel were inextricably bound, and acted to intensify the constraints of chattel status by subjecting the body to another order of violations and whims” (544).

State of Missouri v. Celia

• “The subject formation and object constitution (that is the social and legal construction of the enslaved female and her objectification as property) is no less ponderous than the crime itself” (538).

• The very idea of ”reasonable resistance” was a dubious term deployed by the courts to hold a double standard: as the enslaved had agency even though the law rendered them as property/ an object of the master.

• Sexual domination becomes part of “the differential production of gender and sexuality,” and “the punitive stipulation of agency as abasement, servility, and/ or criminality.”

No Possible Redress for the Enslaved

• “I am not positing that forced sex constitutes the meaning of gender, but the erasure or disavowal of sexual violence engendered black femaleness as a condition of unredressed injury, which only intensified the bonds of captivity and the deadening objectification of chattel status. Unlike the admittedly indispensable and requisite violence of State v. Mann or the protections extended to other forms of injury, and the criminalization of particular acts of violence… rape was unredressed and disavowed.

• ”Ironically, the intervention of affection and the calculation of black sentience intensified the violence legitimated within the scope of the law, and the effort to regulate the violence simply underscored the categories of unredressed injury.”

“In the very effort to recognize the slave as person, blackness was reinscribed as the pained and punitive embodiment of captivity, and black humanity constituted as a state of injury and punishment” (556-557)

Black Freedom Struggles (racial and gender difference)

• Davis and Hartman make clear that the terms “freedom” and “struggles” have a specificity when considering the difference of gender role, racial gender stereotype, and racialized gender ideology that undercut the institution and mechanisms of racial slavery

• “Resistance” was a concept appropriated by the master and the state; therefore, had to be reimagined anew

• The law and the language deployed by the state are deeply charged with a set of racial meaning; “racial meaning is never neutral” and in fact used to perpetuate violence against the enslaved

• Freedom is not tenable within the confines and language of the state as an apparatus and ideology.