Commodification of the Black Female Body (original) (raw)
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Slavery not only impacted the black woman, but also the white mistresses. Through the writings of each of the authors mentioned there are numerous accounts of the detrimental effect that slavery had upon the women exposed and how it changed them emotionally. This essay will examine those various perspectives as well as research the backgrounds and intentions of the authors.
Battling for Control: Exploiting Black Bodies in the U.S. from 1900 to 1945
Since the dawn of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Black bodies have been used to build, stimulate, and promote the American economy. Whether through manual labor or sexual entertainment, Black bodies have been subject to the modes of production that Adam Smith so vehemently argued defined Western society. However, Blacks have fought to regain control of their bodies. In this paper, I argue that Black men and women used various tactics to gain agency over their bodies which often inadvertently reinforced the producer-consumer relationship.
Colonizing Black Female Bodies Within Patriarchal Capitalism: Feminist and Human Rights Perspectives
This article argues that the dynamics underlying the fundamental gendered/raced/sexual relationships that were created under colonialism exist in the same form in global patriarchal capitalism and pop culture, including mainstream music and pornography. It also explores contemporary Black feminist literature that critiques foundational Black feminist thought which views individual examples of ''empowered'' (wealthy, marketed/marketable) women of color as evidence of Black female liberation. Finally, in an effort to bridge foundational Black feminist thought with contemporary critiques, I discuss media representations of the Black female body in the context of human rights and sexual rights, as this offers global and historical perspective without minimizing the agency of those whose bodies have historically been exploited for profit. Public Health Statement: This study argues that hypersexualized and degrading images of women of color in media contradict the World Health Organization's current definition of sexual health and sexual rights. Viewing the history and use of this imagery provides a theoretic framework for understanding the negative mental, physical, and sexual health consequences of degrading imagery and can aid in realizing positive sexual health outcomes for women of color.
The Man That Was a Thing: Reconsidering Human Commodification in Slavery
Journal of Social History, vol. 50, no. 1, 2016, pp. 28-50., 2016
This essay examines a longstanding normative assumption in the historiography of slavery in the Atlantic world: that enslaved Africans and their American-born descendants were bought and sold as “commodities,” thereby “dehumanizing” them and treating them as things rather than as persons. Such claims have, indeed, helped historians conceptualize how New World slavery contributed to the ongoing development of global finance capitalism—namely, that slaves represented capital as well as labor. But the recurring paradigm of the “dehumanized” or “commodified” slave, I argue, obscures more than it reveals. This article suggests that historians of slavery must reconsider the “commodification” of enslaved humanity. In so doing, it offers three interrelated arguments: first, that scholarship on slavery has not adequately or coherently defined the precise mechanisms by which enslaved people were supposedly “commodified”; second, that the normative position implied by the insistence that persons were treated as things further mystifies or clouds our collective historical vision of enslavement; and third, that we should abandon a strictly Marxian conception of the commodity—and its close relation to notions of “social death”—in favor of Igor Kopytoff’s theory of the commodity-as-process. It puts forth in closing a reconstituted conceptualization of the slave relation wherein enslaved people are understood as thoroughly human.
Navigating the sad epoch: sexual exploitation within enslaved communities in the antebellum South
2010
vulnerable to sexual abuse, it is important to explore how this vulnerability affected their lives. Jacobs's description of womanhood as a sad epoch made me want to know more about how enslaved women experienced sexual exploitation; to explore how aware enslaved women were of the possibilities of sexual abuse and harassment; and more importantly, to come to know how they coped with these dangers in their everyday lives. During the last twenty-five years historians have closely examined the lives of enslaved women in an effort to understand how gender ideologies of the colonial and antebellum periods affected their experiences in slavery. Prior to the 1950's, historians like Ulrich B. Phillips argued that slavery was a benevolent institution that civilized Africans. 4 When historian Stanley Elkins published Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1968), he created a major shift in the historiography that had both positive and negative consequences for the attention enslaved women received from the academy. In an effort to refute the benevolent institution argument, Elkins argued that the brutality of slavery robbed the enslaved man of power and led to his "utter dependency upon his master," reducing him to a childlike figure known as "sambo." 5 Elkins's scholarship rendered the enslaved powerless and psychologically changed-docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy. 6 The next generation of historians 4 In the early 1910's, Ulrich B. Phillips established himself as the preeminent historian on southern slavery. Born and raised in Georgia during the era of Reconstruction, Phillips's held the values of the slave-owning planter class of the "Old South" in high esteem. Because he believed that such high values could not produce an institution of corruption or immorality, he developed his study of slavery around the assumption that Africans were inherently inferior to whites, thus naturally suited for a lifetime of servitude. Phillips argued that slavery was a benevolent institution, one that allowed African slaves to "loosen their muscles, and lighten their spirits." For more, see Ulrich B.
Diacritics Blog, 2023
learns that essence cannot appear as itself. The laborer's wage, for example, appears as paid. If the wage invisibilizes exploitation, with the laborer producing more than their cost, the price of labor also expresses a socially necessary truth: labor has been made commensurate (a mass of abstract quantity). As an expression of both commodity-exchange and the juridical relation between buyer and seller, the emergence of generalized equality and freedom is decipherable from within capitalism's one-sided socio-historical formulation of essence. Form, then, tells us something important about its relationship to its content-from "social form" can be excavated both determinant possibilities and limits. Marx frequently underscores capitalism's peculiar combination of emancipatory potential and degradation through a comparison with the slave, whose entire person is commodified and whose labor (dominated by the property form) appears more plainly "unpaid." In order to remain, as Marx writes, "the free proprietor of his own labor-capacity, hence of his person," a worker must keep something in withdrawal. The worker sells only a piece of themselves (their labor-power), parceled through time, "for if he were to sell it in a lump, once and for all, he would be selling himself, converting himself from a free man into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity."[1] Nick Nesbitt and Denise Ferreira da Silva's new books, each synthetic achievements by authors who have long been clearing new pathways for critical theory and black studies, slow down the speed of conversion from slave to laborer, cracking open the formal elements that shape the appearance of slavery in the differentiated unity of Marx's critique. Each book is framed by a figural image composed as part of a broader collage: a woman's bust and outstretched hand overlaying a banknote; a fist, forearm, and lit match graphically arrayed translucent against the background of a book's page. Triangulated between living labor, the commodity, and its monetary price, the banknote of The Price of Slavery registers Nesbitt's reconfiguration of the relationship between the long postslavery present and the specific "social forms" that make up what he rigorously