Against the Closet

BLACK POLITICAL LONGING AND THE EROTICS OF RACEBy Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5224-2

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………………………………………………ixINTRODUCTION: Against the Closet Racial Logic and the Bodily Basis/Biases of Sexual Identity……………………………….11. “The Strangest Freaks of Despotism” Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African American Slave Narratives……………………..252. Iconographies of Gang Rape Or, Black Enfranchisement, White Disavowal, and the (Homo)erotics of Lynching…………………13. Desire and Treason in Mid-Twentieth-Century Political Protest Fiction…………………………………………………824. Recovering the Little Black Girl Incest and Black American Textuality………………………………………………..114CONCLUSION: In Memoriam Michael Jackson, 1958–2009………………………………………………………………151NOTES…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….157WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………………………………………….181INDEX…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….193

Chapter One

“THE STRANGEST FREAKS OF DESPOTISM”

Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African American Slave Narratives

The full enjoyment of the slave as a thing depended upon the unbounded authority and totalizing consumption of the body in its myriad capacities.” —Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection

In a well-known passage from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the elderly ex-slave Nanny attempts to explain to Janie, her adolescent and newly sexually awakened granddaughter, the plight of African American women and families under slavery to emphasize the necessary, corrective force of sexual repression within nascent free black communities. Nanny wants Janie to understand why the benefits of Janie’s financially stable, virtually asexual marriage to a man three times her age outweigh the prospects of a romantic union and sexual gratification with a man Janie likes. Nanny tells Janie, “Us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come around in queer ways.” What Nanny’s pronouncement means is that slavery had the effect of corrupting and contorting the most basic familial relationships. Not only did the institution deny slaves basic claims to familial, spousal, and hereditary bonds, it also insidiously assaulted their sexuality, robbing them of the basic rights of bodily autonomy and sexual choice. Through Nanny, Hurston describes this violating, soul-shattering feature of slavery and its cumulative generational effects on black identity formation even after slavery’s formal abolition as “queer.”

This chapter reads literary renderings of black enslavement as founding articulations of a plausible connection between the institutionalization of sexual violence and racial subordination in slavery and modern theories of sexual difference. Tracing certain modern epistemologies of sexuality to the era before the late nineteenth century—their acknowledged moment of formal entrance into the ideological order—I suggest that representations of sexual perversity under conditions of enslavement have contributed to notions of sexual alterity and to the ideologies by which aberrant sexual practices were named, domesticated, and policed in the first decades of the twentieth century. In other words, what I intend to demonstrate in this chapter is that the era, institution, and literary representation of slavery helped to shape emergent models of sexual difference. The entwinement of violent racial separatism, sexual regulation, and the discursive production of bodily difference characteristic of the late nineteenth century may be usefully traced back to the institutional patterns of slavery and to the theories of black inferiority promulgated by its proponents and practitioners.

The critical questions pursued in this chapter include: How did the enslaved address the proliferation of nonconformist sexual behavior and attitudes under a depraved institution in which the enslaved body was exploited to fulfill the desires of both slaveholding and non-slaveholding white people? How did both public avowals and literary representations of sexual nonconformity on the plantation serve to curtail the rampant abuse of slaves and further the cause of abolition? And, finally, how did writers of slave narratives subvert existing discursive and narrative modes to describe experiences of such horrific magnitude and deep personal pain that the experiences defied both cultural conventions around what could be said publicly and the language in which to say them at all? I read Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to show the linkage of slavery, sexual nonconformity, and social order in the antebellum period. As canonical exemplars of the slave narrative form, Douglass’s Narrative and Jacobs’s Incidents not only demonstrate the material history of slavery but also manifest the power of literature to shape the cultural construction of identity, fantasy, and ideology. That the written testimonies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs grapple at all with the relation of non-heteronormative sexual practices to (sexual and racial) identity formation suggests that we may productively extend modern theorizations of sexual identity to an earlier historical moment and locate them, at least partially, in the sexual deviance and sexual violence of the slave plantation. This chapter’s main contention is that the brutal enslavement of black people, their legal definition as three-fifths human, and the social, economic, and legislative practices of slavery helped to influence and to institute cultural constructions not only of whiteness but also of the person, the citizen, the normal, and the heterosexual. Despite the importance of late-nineteenth-century medical and legal discourses, which founded theories of sexual perversion and its punitive consequences, racial slavery provided the background—and the testing ground—for the emergence and articulation of those theories.

The specific linkage of homosexuality and blackness in the eighteenth century and nineteenth can be traced not only to the obfuscation, or obliteration, of gender roles in slavery with regard to enslaved persons but also to the widely held belief by Europeans that black sexuality in Africa was so libidinous, so unregulated, so wanton that African men not only kept as many wives as they wanted but there also existed “men in women’s apparel, whom they [kept] among their wives.” As Winthrop Jordan and George Fredrickson have noted, Europeans’ beliefs about black sexuality developed out of their first contact with Africans in the sixteenth century and seventeenth. Upon arriving on African shores and encountering Africans who wore clothing befitting the hot climate and who had polygamous marriages, Europeans formulated the notion that Africans were sexual savages who had not undergone the disciplining regulation that civilization entails. These ideas were further promulgated by scientific investigations in the nineteenth century that alleged that black people had abnormally large genitals and that the size and shape of their genitalia predetermined their illicit sexual propensities. While it would oversimplify the case to suggest that homosexuality encompasses all forms of sexual deviance, the specific resonance of homosexuality within blackness can be traced in part to the belief in slavery that, as descendents of Ham, black people were doomed to generational enslavement precisely for the historical crimes of incest and homosexuality. The unrestrained sexuality of black people was thought to extend beyond promiscuous heterosexuality, by which I mean a rapacious sexual appetite for the appropriate objects of sexual desire (members of the opposite sex but of the same racial group), to include sexual violence, interracial wanting, bestiality, and homosexuality. In other words, racial blackness was believed (throughout slavery and since) to evince, and to engender in others, an entire range of sexual perversities.

Despite the mediated production of slave narratives and their conformity to generic conventions and audiences’ expectations, slave narratives remain useful sources of data on the internal operations of slavery and its harrowing personal and communal effects. Noting that slave narratives document the inner workings of slavery in ways that the official records do not, I use slave narratives for their dual function as both historical documents and a literary genre. To engage theories, as well as the history, of the production of sexuality, this chapter emphasizes the ways in which two slave narratives that have amassed significant cultural capital authorize a particular set of historical race relations and embody and influence sexual ideology. My main effort here is to demonstrate that complex figurations of eroticism and domination narrativized in canonical slave testimonies mark an emerging representational structure that may be traced in modern epistemologies of racial and sexual identity. I read pivotal scenes in Douglass’s Narrative and Jacobs’s Incidents to illustrate how literary constructions of sexuality function as tropes, both politically and imaginatively, to reveal heinous institutional practices within slavery and to decry its personal abuses. As the experiences of human bodies are so intimately connected to individual psyches and to the life of communities, the accounts that slaves provided about the myriad ways in which their bodies were hideously and repeatedly violated became apt metaphors for revealing the gruesome and violent nature of American slavery itself.

I begin by explaining the historical and representational processes by which slaves came to embody various forms of sexual deviance. I read Frederick Douglass’s Narrative to illustrate the overall linkage between enslavement and sexual criminality. Exposing domination and same-sex eroticism as the undeclared basis for heterosexuality and sexual normalization in both enslavement and developing theories of sexual inversion, the chapter moves into the analysis of a much overlooked scene in Jacobs’s Incidents—one in which a male slave, Luke, undergoes extensive sexual abuse by his male master. In reading selections from Douglass’s Narrative and Jacobs’s Incidents, my aim ultimately is to point to the ways in which authors of slave narratives acknowledged the notion that sexual criminality was a racial characteristic but subverted this belief by exposing the sexual perversity not of enslaved black people but of white slaveowners.

The Trope of Silence

My analysis of slave narratives dwells within their sites of omission. To glean rounded, unabashed accounts of the sexual and reproductive lives of slaves from the reports they have left, it is important to interpret sites of suggestive silence and scenes of acknowledged discursive or representational impossibility. Alluding to the position of slaves and their rampant sexual abuse on the plantation, Saidiya Hartman writes, “Blacks were envisioned fundamentally as vehicles for white enjoyment, in all its sundry and unspeakable expressions.” I want to focus on the rhetorical moves Hartman makes in this statement, for I think that some attention to them provides a useful way to introduce in general the focus of this section: the imposition of silence on slaves and their strategic appropriation and management of silence as a discursive measure and as a method for resisting enslavement.

According to the edicts of American slavery, the fundamental status of the black was that of a mindless, will-less, completely abject object to be employed, enjoyed, consumed, or eradicated according to the master’s will. It was the thingness of the slave that made her silence requisite, for her silence corroborated her status as commodity and possession and as non-reasoning object who was socially animate only through the will and wishes of the whites around her. Silence effectively excised the slave from the human family, pushing her firmly and permanently beyond the realm of the civic, the civil, and the socially recognizable. Silence, further, affirmed the slave’s powerlessness to change her condition. Without recourse to language to decry slavery’s fundamental injury to her personhood, the slave could neither effectively resist enslavement nor name its innumerable, intrinsic abuses. To coerce slaves into silence, into a condition of perpetual, quiet acquiescence to their enslavement, a number of legal statutes and plantation codes had to be adopted; slaves’ silence was secured through a range of heinous practices, from the use of instruments of torture that prevented the slave’s physical use of her tongue to laws mandating illiteracy and legal codes that denied slaves the basic right to give legal testimony against whites who unduly harmed, exploited, and violated them.

Slaves, of course, resisted these strictures and used their abilities to communicate, to witness, and to record in defiance of the institution. In the early nineteenth century, when slavery’s endurance as an American institution depended in part on the outcome of a hotly contested national debate, the slave’s voice was particularly potent, for it affirmed the sentience and rationality of the black person. Speech announced the self-willed interior that the process and patterns of enslavement worked to deny, negate, or completely annihilate, but could not. William Andrews posits that the ability of slaves to use language in defense of their humanity and to document their experiences in public records was important for two reasons: “first, language [was] assumed to signify the subject and hence to ratify the slave narrator’s humanity as well as his authority. Second, white bigotry and fear presumably [could] not withstand the onslaught of the truth feelingly represented in the simple personal history of the former slave.” The oral and written narratives of slaves provided evidence that slaves, that all black people, were rational human beings. With the indisputable evidence of personal experience, the enslaved argued most convincingly against the institution that had reduced them to the level of chattel.

But there are, of course, limits to speech. The language in which slaves communicated and testified belonged first and foremost to those who had enslaved them. Moreover, many aspects of enslavement simply defied telling. Specifically, slaves had to contend with the incontrovertible and nonnegotiable fact of regular and severe bodily damage, which not only characterized their enslavement but also compelled their compliance with it. Physical pain—the pain of constant and excessive toil, of starvation, of rape and routine physical torture—falls outside the domain of language and therefore could never be represented in words alone. Slaves could not express linguistically the entire content of their lives, because pain, which constituted so much of it, is ultimately unrepresentable. Slaves incorporated and managed silence as a trope and narrative technique to call attention to what language could not directly relate. In their oral and written reports of life under the regime of slavery, they conjoined suggestive silence to speech to maximize the discursive (or expressive) and political impact of their testimony.

Returning to the statement “Blacks were envisioned fundamentally as vehicles for white enjoyment, in all its sundry and unspeakable expressions,” Hartman asserts that, according to the logics and mandates of slavery, slaves were commodities to be exploited in whatever ways proved pleasing and beneficial to owners. Hartman clearly refers, at least in part, to sexual use; this is signaled initially by her use of the word “sundry,” which connotes activities that are richly varied and beyond the scope of formal or immediately identifiable expectation. Instead of then listing directly the numerous services slaves were obligated to provide their masters, however, she characterizes the extremity, barbarity, and depravity of some of those services by deeming them “unspeakable.” Instead of approximating slaves’ experience by attempting to render it in particular, concrete, ghastly details, Hartman goes a step further and demonstrates that the many uses to which black bodies were put during slavery defy linguistic (and perhaps all forms of ) representation. She uses suggestive silence, or the pronouncement of impossible disclosure, as a figurative device to be decoded, or as a trope.

This rhetorical strategy is common in representing slavery and particularly in representing the sexual dimensions of slavery. Even contemporary black female writers who reinvigorate the slave narrative form to provide more complete accounts of slave life at times use the trope of silence or impossible disclosure to get at the sexual violence at the heart of slaves’ experience. One example from acclaimed recent black fiction is the ominous and undisclosed “lowest yet” sexual experiences of Toni Morrison’s character Ella in Beloved. Ella proclaims to have seen it all: slave torture, slave mutilation, slave rape, and slave murder. But none of these horrendous and, unfortunately, commonplace atrocities on the plantation compare to the repeated sexual torments she suffered as the enslaved captive of a white man and his son. The hint of wounding that is the “lowest yet”—that is essentially unsaid and unsayable—has the same effect as Hartman’s allusion to the “sundry and unspeakable” desires of slaveholding whites. Both phrases activate and depend on the listener’s or reader’s (erotic) imaginary. This is fitting for two reasons. First, slaves’ bodies were subject to the full range of sexual practices that can be fantasized or imagined at all; their bodies were susceptible to all possible violations. And second, some of these experiences were in fact too horrific, grotesque, and traumatic to be captured in language.

Strategic, suggestive silences function in slave narratives as a mechanism for implicating readers in scenes of masked sexual violence by turning them on, so to speak, in order to turn them off. Moments of voluntary omission in passages dealing with sexual violence invite the reader’s own musings or imagings of perversion and sexual debasement. In this way, suggestive silences arouse readers to a conscious experience of their own most repressed and illicit sexual desires by inviting speculation in the form of erotic fantasy. This is followed immediately by the reader’s disgust and outrage at her own phantasmic brutality or perversity. In other words, when the reader finds herself imagining, and being terrorized or even tantalized by, thoughts of sexual deviance that range from the most commonplace and innocuous to the most socially prohibited and injurious, she is prompted to revulsion and indignation that may initially be directed inward but are then transferred to the perpetrator of the (mainly unspecified) sexual crimes in the narrative so that readerly complicity is disavowed.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Against the Closetby Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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