Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence

by Patrice D Douglass

In this incisive new book, Patrice D. Douglass interrogates the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness in the present. Douglass contends that the sexual violability of slaves is often misappropriated by frameworks on sexual violence that privilege its occurrences as a question of ethics, sexual agency, and feminine orders of gendering. Rather, this book foregrounds Blackness as engendered by sexual violence, which forcefully (re)produces Blackness, corporeally and conceptually, as a condition that lacks the capacity to ontologically distinguish its suffering from what it means to be human. By employing and critically revising Black feminist theory and Afro-pessimism, Douglass reveals that engaging primarily with the sexualization of the slave forces theories of sexual violence to interrogate why this violence—one of the most prevalent under slavery—continues to lack a grammar of fundamental redress. There are no reparations struggles for the generational transfer of sexual violation and the inability of present frameworks to rectify the sexual stains of slavery lies precisely in the fact that what made this history possible continues to haunt arrangements of life today. Engendering Blackness urgently articulates the way our present understandings of Blackness and humanness are bound by this vexed sexual history.

Genres: Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

Published June 24, 2025

Reviews

[Luke Blanchford · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a profound scholarly work that looks at the genocidal aspects of slavery through the lens of sexual violence. The work disrupts all tropes of multi-cultural feminism, queer theory, white fragiity and also black masculinity studies through its close material readings of the background of rape on the plantation. I especially appreciated its keen criticism of the slave film genre, for occluding the unrepresentable violence down to slave women, through Hollywood tropes of production value and liberational fantasy. In this sense, I find the book to fit very well into the lineage of Afro-pessimism, from Du Bois to Fanon, but taken to new depths via black feminism.

[Sinem Esengen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easy read but content wise very deep - and a full of telling narratives.