Sex, Politics, and Manuscripts

In the rabbit hole of libertine sexual relations in slave-holding societies, white and black disappeared into one another. Frederick Engels’ precept on the production and reproduction of “immediate life,” with its “twofold character,” meaning “on the one hand, the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing, and shelter and the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species,” has long been applied to the problem of the exchange of women, or what Luce Irigaray called “Women on the Market.” In slavery, where the exchange of human beings as goods was not veiled by sentiment or familial consent, the obvious potential for the sexual use of human goods—a kind of “abuse value” overlapping with the Marxian “use value” of the human commodity—had the predictable yet paradoxical repercussion of bringing those defined as persons and those defined as things into the same colonial family. The category of the mulâtresse became iconic as a subversive chess piece on the board of colonial race relations. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby analyzes the condensation of myth and meaning involved: “The Mulatta incarnated empire; she was its sign because she was its product.”

This is the “productive paradox” of creolization, as Doris Garraway notes in The Libertine Colony: “the notion that a common culture may be constructed in a social system marked by asymmetrical power relations and the threat of violence.” For David Geggus, the exploitation of female slaves was facilitated by the conjunction of their comparatively small numbers and their lack of “legal personalities”: “the paucity of females in both the white and the black communities in Saint Domingue evidently put the sexual favors of slave women at a premium. Lacking legal personalities, female slaves were exceptionally vulnerable to rape, and sexual harassment by whites occasionally extended to the most vicious sadism.”