3.1. Davis and the primacy thesis

Such views come across in “Women and Capitalism,” where Davis challenges the feminist primacy thesis. That is, the idea that systems of domination like racism, capitalism, and imperialism are mere symptoms of the older world-historical problem of sexist oppression. Davis not only deems the view unmerited but credits it with alienating the feminist movement from other radical struggles. She argues that the primacy thesis underscores the “inadequate theoretical basis” of feminist single-axis thinking and reflects forms of false consciousness (Davis Reference Davis, James and Sharpley-Whiting2006 [1977], 147). For Davis, false consciousness prescribes worldviews which mystify the nature of domination, including how multiple systems of domination interact. To Davis, antagonisms like imperialism, capitalism, and racism do not originate in the primary antagonism of sexism. They are separately articulated mutually bounded systems whose effects are codetermining. Bereft of this understanding, Davis believes that actors are liable to withhold the forms of political solidarity vital to toppling these systems and to practice the very contradictions which fortify its oppressive effect.

3.2. hooks and feminist struggle

Like Davis, hooks also aims at the primacy thesis, arguing that it has not only thwarted feminist coalition building but that it has also inhibited feminist consciousness raising itself. This practice is vital for hooks as it is through these epistemic encounters that actors cease to view forms of domination as natural and given. hooks argues that the primacy view has diverted feminists from antiracist and anticlassist struggles and has promulgated an agenda which appears refractory to Black women and others, keeping them from joining feminist movements en masse. For hooks, she deems the thesis symptomatic of the wider “mystification of social divisions” which conceals the oppressive social structure and suppresses the modes of thinking conducive to transforming it (hooks Reference hooks, James and Sharpley-Whiting2006 [1984], 134). To hooks, these mystifications have inhibited feminists from fully appreciating the “interrelatedness of sex, race, and class oppression,” leading some to falsely posit the idea that women, by virtue of sexism, share a common lot transcending the divisions of race and class (hooks Reference hooks, James and Sharpley-Whiting2006 [1984], 134). She views this notion as particularly detrimental as it has led many prominent feminist theorists, seeking to clarify this lot, to posit a false universalism and misequate their race and class contingent conceptions of the condition with the essence of sexist oppression as such.

3.3. Crenshaw and intersectionality

This practice is later contested by Crenshaw who sees a prior need to reconceive how categories like race, gender, and discrimination attain their operative conceptions at all. This is because they tend to be underwritten by prototypical instances of their membership classes who, as hooks claims, have their experiences accepted as the mode of domination’s essential character. This site is vital for Crenshaw as such conceptions inform state practices, including how remedies are allotted under civil rights law, as well as how resistance movements set their “theoretical and political” agendas, including which issues they prioritize and deem relevant (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw, James and Sharpley-Whiting2006 [1989], 209). It is equally vital for Crenshaw as Black women are not deemed prototypical under the categories black nor women, thus troubling their efforts to try discrimination cases under the operative conceptions and receive uptake on their specific issues in feminist and antiracist movements. Crenshaw’s analysis is therefore two-pronged. First, it seeks to reveal how the very construction of categories like gender and racial discrimination come to function as politicized sites where contingent meanings are institutionalized. Second, it contests how the interactions of state and nonstate actors generate consensus about these meanings in ways that empower some and disadvantage others.

3.4. Collins and black feminist critical theory

Collins, on the other hand, offers a compelling more panoramic view of these theoretical activities in her “Social construction of black feminist thought.” Collins credits Crenshaw, Davis, hooks, and several others as she seeks to interpret their mutual interventions, not as mere commentaries by feminist thinkers who happen to be Black, but as interrelated views emanating from a shared paradigm. To Collins, black feminist critical theory is characterized by a concerted effort of its thinkers to “reconceptualize all dimensions of the dialectics of oppression and activism” affecting Black women (Collins Reference Collins2009, 16). On her view, these theorists preoccupy themselves with grasping and confronting oppression and the contradictions formed in-and-by the intellectual and political activities of feminist, antiracist, and other radical formations (Collins Reference Collins2009, 16).

Collins goes on to further refine her conception in her essay “Black feminist thought as critical social theory” (Reference Collins1998). In this important statement, Collins seeks to determine black feminist critical theory as such and explain its contributions to critical analysis and resistance. She argues that black feminist critical theory is constituted by its three characteristic activities: (1) “criticizing” institutionalized narratives (Reference Collins1998, 51, 47–56); (2) developing and promulgating subversive modes of consciousness (Reference Collins1998, 56–65); and (3) struggling against all sites and systems of social domination (Reference Collins1998, 65–76). Through these intellectual activities, she argues that black feminist critical theory has managed to form a vital and distinct branch of critical theory and sociopolitical resistance.

3.5. Black feminist critical theory and the Frankfurt School

While black feminist critical theory is united by first principles (e.g., multiple-axis thinking), general themes (e.g., marginalization), and recurring constructs (e.g., social movements, systems of domination), it has not been shown that it bears any explicit relationship to the Frankfurt School, though this tie is commonly purported (Agger Reference Agger1998; Collins Reference Collins1998; Sim and Loon Reference Sim and Loon2001). Without a genetic link, I would be unlicenced to account for black feminist critical theory’s more recent decline in terms of the new materialist turn, and the links I drew between these areas would prove coincidental or utilitarian. Though Davis’s studies under Adorno and Marcuse are well documented, and though Collins makes much of her training in “continental philosophy, especially critical theory as advanced by the Frankfurt School” (Reference Collins2013, 121), these biographical details do not amount to an explicit philosophical tie. What does authorize this link, though, is Horkheimer’s big tent conception of critical theory. His sense of the school as a tradition any “intellectual movement that cares about man converges upon … by its own inner logic” (Horkheimer Reference Horkheimer2002a [1937], 232).

Under it, black feminist critical theory proves compatible and contributory to concepts of critical theory advanced by philosophers like Horkheimer and Marcuse. Under these (Outlaw Reference Outlaw2005), critical theory is characterized by the careful use of dialectical thinking (Marcuse Reference Marcuse, Arato and Gebhardt1978) and the “critical attitude” (Horkheimer Reference Horkheimer2002a, 207–9). For Horkheimer, this attitude was not a disposition or a temperament but a principled stance that the intellectual assumes toward the social structure and prevailing order of class-based society. The critical attitude calls on the intellectual to use her work as an organ that first calls the order’s legitimacy and prescriptions into question and, through developments in consciousness, depreciates the willingness of others to comport with it. It is one that underscores the need to reconceive humans as the proper ends of social organization and position industry and the state as its instruments. The critical attitude therefore directs the attention of the intellectual toward the suffering of the masses and makes the “abolition of social injustice” the key theme of her work (Reference Horkheimer2002a [1937], 242). For Horkheimer, this stance was not a free-floating posture but a principled one bolstered by an underlying “structure” (Reference Horkheimer2002a [1937], 209). This structure is characterized by certain preoccupations and a logic that ties them all together.

Although a comprehensive overview of this structure is beyond the scope of this paper, what is most important here is their unifying “logic.” This is because Marcuse defines “dialectical logic” as the very essence of the critical attitude (Marcuse Reference Marcuse, Arato and Gebhardt1978, 449). For Marcuse, dialectical thinking is essential in a stage of human development where “slavery,” toiling, mass suffering, the “gas chamber,” and the threat of nuclear annihilation are the background conditions of technological progress, consumer satisfaction, and widespread capital accumulation (1978, 450). Therefore, the object of the dialectical logic is to harness and apply “the power of negative thinking” to reveal the presence of these contradictions, how the mass of humanity remains unfree amidst unprecedented advancements in human development (Marcuse Reference Marcuse, Arato and Gebhardt1978, 450). Dialectical thought thus confronts the “appearance” of a free liberal democratic society with its true “essence,” its unceasing dependence on violence, mass suffering, and oppression (Horkheimer Reference Horkheimer2002b [1937], 270). Its goal therefore is to unrelentingly stress the inadequacies of this social structure and how we remain unfree underneath it. It seeks to do so by revealing and contesting sites of domination, undermining the triumphant narratives of the state and its ruling classes, confronting the social structure with the mass suffering it denies, and revealing the modes and contents of thought conducive to these subversive practices. The goal of dialectical thinking is not the mere reform of “one or [an]other abuse” (Horkheimer Reference Horkheimer2002a [1937], 207) but to underscore the need and recourses for “abolishing” the entire nexus of “domination of man [] by man” altogether (Marcuse Reference Marcuse, Arato and Gebhardt1978, 445).

If we accept Horkheimer’s view of critical theory as “a theory dominated at every turn by a concern for reasonable conditions of life” (Horkheimer Reference Horkheimer2002a [1937]>, 199); and if Marcuse defined existence as one’s “life-and-death struggle” with their “situations and conditions” (Marcuse Reference Marcuse, Arato and Gebhardt1978, 446); black feminist critical theory targeted social and political contradictions because the “synthesis of these oppressions create[d] the conditions of [Black women’s] lives” (The Combahee River Collective Reference Taylor2017, 15). This conception was bolstered by their view that, without negative theorizing and ideology critique, aimed at the distinct contradictions and forms of false consciousness within antiracist and feminist resistance, Black women would remain oppressed as agents would not contest these forces independently nor form the analysis or coalitions needed to topple these interlocking forms of domination. Horkheimer believed such thematic expansion was the ideal trajectory of critical theory, moreover. He believed that critical theorists would need to continue introducing “more specific elements” to sustain the project and portended that this development, over time, would naturally lead “to a reassignment of degrees of … importance to individual elements [in critical] theory” (Reference Horkheimer2002a [1937], 225, 234).

3.6. Overview

Following the new materialist turn, and its reactions against negative theorizing and ideology critique, it is unsurprising then that black feminist critical theory would gradually decline. Black feminist scholars, alert to this development, began expressing worries about the school’s widening gaps in analysis and declining explanatory power (Davidson Reference Davidson, Guadalupe Davidson, Gines and Marcano2010; Marcano Reference Marcano, Guadalupe Davidson, Gines and Marcano2010; Nash Reference Nash2013; Cooper Reference Cooper2015). It failed to put forth a sufficiently positive account of black female subjectivity, they held, and could not resolve the theoretical issues wrought by criticism and theory’s turn to the body. Therefore, this led them to conclude that black feminism would need a theoretical response to the new materialist turn.

4.1. Wynter and “the human”

The pillars of black feminist new materialism go back to Sylvia Wynter. It comes through in her efforts to reinterpret the patriarchy thesis and embed it in the modern world-historical struggle over the standard for who-and-what-we-are as human beings. Wynter’s most fundamental view is that modernity provoked an epochal shift and redescription of the human being through the combined forces of secularism, feudalism’s decline, the rise of the European middle class,Footnote ³ and the early modern discourses on humanism (Wynter Reference Wynter1984). She insists that what emerges following the disenchantment of nature, and the gains of Western Europe, is the free rights-bearing subject of liberal humanism, an intellectual product of the bourgeois middle class. She contends though that the “seedbed” of these forces and their world-historical ramifications were not autochthonous in the internal development of Europe, but begat and embedded in the dialectics of the Americas (Wynter qtd. in Scott Reference Scott2000, 194).

She maintains then that the standard’s condition of possibility is in fact the so-called discovery of the Americas, the ravaging of its Indigenous nations, the rise of the colonial empires and white settler polity, and importantly, the entry of the enslaved African into its body politic. For it is this black enslaved figure who serves as the negation upon which the white free can consolidate themselves across status divisions including gender and anchor their self-placement in the great chain of being. Because it is through these enabling conditions that the bourgeois free rights-bearing subject of liberal humanism emerges, she argues that it is upon his surface (and presuppositions) that the emerging free female subject of modern feminism asserts and claims herself (Wynter Reference Wynter2018 [1982], 1997). Wynter thematizes this finding, leading her to conclude that feminism must extend itself into this world-historical struggle over the standard of who-and-what-we-are as human beings. It must also construe how this redescription shaped conceptions of human gender (Wynter Reference Wynter2018 [1982]).

Wynter contends that this understanding must involve grappling with the “special position of Black women” (Reference Wynter2018 [1982], 48) in this dialectical process, a position she moves to clarify in her “Beyond Miranda’s Meaning”. Here, Wynter investigates racialized feminist standpoints and why they resonate so strongly with afrodescendants throughout the Americas. Wynter contends that standpoints like “black feminist,” “womanist,” and “decolonial feminist” are not so much about political or ontological specificity, that they in fact betray a category error between Black women and feminism qua the category of gender. Black women must determine their feminism because it is not coextensive with the category woman as such. This claim is genetic to her first principle that the bourgeois free rights-bearing subject is the standard measure of who-what-we-are as human beings. Insofar then as womanhood forms a marked category, de-humanized qua gender domination, it is either through the negation of gender difference or its conception as difference that the feminist qua woman can coemerge as an equally free rights-bearing subject. Her claim then is that the modern category woman is parasitic on the prevailing bourgeois standard of who-and-what-we-are as human beings and that, left uncontested, it is to this category, and its presuppositions, that the category gender qua woman appeals for its liberation.

Wynter’s unintuitive idea is supported by the fact that philosophers like Kant believed that proper gender distinction was an achievement of European civilization. Kant argued that in “unrefined nations” there is “no difference in the character of the man and the woman,” suggesting that for groups like black Africans, “the woman is not at all to be distinguished from the man” (Kant qtd. in Pascoe Reference Pascoe2022, 28). This amounts to the idea that “woman” can only truly reify against the enabling conditions that permitted the bourgeois standard of who-and-what-we-are as human beings to emerge as an intellectual product of the European middle class. Wynter’s contention is also supported by concepts of liberation in the history of feminist thought, namely those terminating in calls for unmarking female gender ascription.

Such feminists have developed “liberal” and “radical” spins on the call. The former proposes that female gender can be unmarked by making “sexual difference politically irrelevant” (Pateman Reference Pateman1988, 17). Gender ascription should prevail, but the ascription should not shroud women’s equal worth. Others have called ascription itself into question. Such feminists compare the idea to class struggle, asserting just how: “the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be … the elimination … of the sex distinction itself” (Firestone Reference Firestone1970, 11). But in Wynter’s idiom, this amounts to the idea that feminism would concertedly fail to challenge the bourgeois standard of who-and-what-we-are as human beings. Though this concept would unmark female gender, it would not alter the prevailing standard of who-and-what-we-are. It would only challenge male gender ascription as a precondition for its entitlements.

This, Wynter believes, is the essential issue feminist liberation presents Black women. Its master category “woman” is parasitic on the category human, a category Black women qua black and slave were abjected out of during the epochal shift to modernity. She goes on to explain: “In other words, with the shift to the secular, the primary code [for de-humanization] now became that between ‘men’ and ‘natives,’ with the traditional ‘male’ and ‘female’ distinctions now coming to play a secondary—if none the less powerful—reinforcing role” (Wynter Reference Wynter, Davies and Fido1990, 358). With this shift, Wynter continues:

For Wynter, this state of abjection then is the “special position of Black women” under the dialectics of modernity. She is female configured but not woman as her blackness and slaveness abjected her outside of its prerequisite form, the human. Earlier, we saw how this basic idea was supported in Kant who argued that “woman” and proper rights-bearing freedom shared the same background conditions in European political organization (Pascoe Reference Pascoe2022).

Wynter believes though that “[n]owhere” is the abjection of the black female “more powerfully enacted than in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest” (Reference Wynter, Davies and Fido1990, 358). For in this play, not only is Caliban, the enslaved native, not classified as human, but nor throughout the play is he shown to have a female “complementary” (Wynter Reference Wynter, Davies and Fido1990, 360). To Wynter, “the absence of Caliban’s woman” is at once the “ontological absence” of the Black woman since, at modernity’s onset, binary gender distinction was a privileged status reserved for the human being as such (Wynter Reference Wynter, Davies and Fido1990, 361). Since the category woman was parasitic on this very conception, Caliban simply could have no “female equivalent” (Spillers Reference Spillers2003 [1987], 204) nor could a Black woman be depicted because Blacks were construed as property, beasts, and objects but not humans as it were. Because the category was simply unapplicable, the representation could not obtain. For her then, if the abjection of the black female was a “founding function” of the dialectics of the modern order, this problem raises both “a new question” and a “new project” for black feminism (Wynter Reference Wynter, Davies and Fido1990, 360). She argued that this venture must focus on the category error between woman/human and black female gender which inaugurated modernity.

4.2. Spillers and the flesh

If Wynter was able to intuit the category error between black female gender and the woman category, Hortense Spillers is notable for narrating this process and proposing some of the earliest and most influential categories for interpreting it. For Spillers, the significance of the error thesis, its influence on “black female gender” (Spillers Reference Spillers2003 [1982], 156), and its ramifications demanded that we develop an alternate conceptual system which spells out new terms and analytic protocols that can be carried out in the ontological and symbolic realms where the privations occurred. The goal is to form a device that can capture black female gender and its abject situation. Spillers conceives ontology as an interpretive realm where ontic sites converge to effect subject formation. For her, these sites include collective transactions, material processes, bodily properties, symbolic interactions, and repetitions of acts. Crucially, they also include histories, kinship ties, and civil affiliations. She argues that events collectively unfolding across these ontic sites can converge to habituate subjects, prescribe self-understandings, inscribe on the body, and signal broader relationships to the social structure. For Spillers, one of the vital tasks of the “new project” is to convey the link between the ontological and the conditions of the social structure. This is how formations in one transact with formations in the other. Ontology finds its significance therefore in the workings of this dialectic and what it contributes to interpreting black female gender and its modes of inscription.

To Spillers, ontology is politicized by the fact that processes that occur in ontic sites can aggregate in such a way that they begin to track and shape “equations of [actual] political power” in the material world (Spillers Reference Spillers2003 [1982], 168). This means that the workings of the symbolic ontological realm can take on organizational, prescriptive, and transactional relationships with material practices, processes, and conditions. What is more for Spillers, these symbolic activities are binding, and they do not wither with the original bodies upon which they were first inscribed. They endure through kinship ties and conjugal relations which beget like kinds who inherit the branding. For Spillers, this means that, if modernity secured itself through the category error between black female gender and woman, then the “misfortunes, facilities, abuses, [and] absences” of the affair are the inheritance of black female gender today (Spillers Reference Spillers2003 [1982], 153). Spillers argues that the affair left ontic remnants which “travel[ed] from one generation of kinswomen to another” and continue to affect Black women (Spillers Reference Spillers2003 [1982], 153, 155). She argues that these remnants best explain why “the daughters labor even now under the outcome” of these past symbolic forces (Spillers Reference Spillers2003 [1982], 153, 155).

Spillers sees a causal relation between abjecting black female gender out of the category woman and later material developments. For example, why the feminist cogito fails to capture black female gender or how the state has further mangled it through discourses like the federal Moynihan Report. In this sense, insofar as the “new project” is defined by the situation of black female gender, Spillers believes that its main task is to conceive it “ontologically,” to apprehend it not as a state of “inferiority” but as a “paradox of non-being,” and to counter this imposition by replacing this paradox with immanent conceptions and forms of “being-for-self” that can be willed down to black female gender in its place (Spillers Reference Spillers2003 [1982], 155–56, 165).

One influential way that Spillers contributes to this counter is through narrating how black female gender emerged as non-being, establishing the realm of the privation and its significance. Although a full account of this narration is beyond the scope of this paper, there are some significant elements that we should consider. Most important is Spillers’s turn to the Middle Passage as a site of ontological formation for black female gender. She argues that it is here that “[e]very feature of social and human differentiation” was ripped from “African Americans” including the robust conceptions of sexual dimorphism which ground the Western gendered body (Spillers Reference Spillers2003 [1987], 224). She contends that this formation is a transaction between symbolic and material processes, so tightly knit that they must be conceived in tandem. These material processes were the mutilations and torture that threatened the corporeal integrity of the black female body and the captivity that displaced her as subject of her own wills and desires. These privations broke the black female body down to mere “flesh” and sentient matter, purging it of past African symbolic inscriptions, and exploiting its remains and figurative capacities as a terra nova for white settlement (Spillers Reference Spillers2003 [1987], 205).

To achieve this, black female flesh had to be materially and symbolically torn asunder. What tortures and absolute servitude achieved in the material sense, ontological privations achieved in the symbolic sense. Black female flesh was thus stripped of autochthonous African gender conceptions and abjected from analogous bourgeois conceptions, leaving black female flesh effectively “ungendered” (Spillers Reference Spillers2003 [1987], 207). As a result, black female gender came to be defined not by the “proper relations” available to bourgeois womanhood (Hartman Reference Hartman2022, 176), but instead by the “property relations” that debased the black female down to flesh and the body’s figurative capacities (Spillers Reference Spillers2003 [1987], 218). This essentially meant that the black female body could be harnessed in any direction between gender, sentience, and objecthood be it bed maiden, manpower, currency, cadaver, or anything circumstances found most expedient. To Spillers then this meant in part that the new project had to conceive how these “prior acts” of inscription stood to inform black female gender today (Spillers Reference Spillers2003 [1982], 168).

4.3. Hartman and Black female gender

Saidiya Hartman’s work builds on this groundwork and represents an important achievement in the interpretive effort Spillers foretold. If Spillers narrates how the black body was torn asunder and ungendered in the process, Hartman sought to understand how both “selective” recognition of slave humanity and “circumscribed” entrance into the human fold stood to “engender” it (Hartman Reference Hartman2022, 53, 137–38, 145). This is because these selective and partial recognitions prompted important efforts to clarify just what sort of “humanity” slaves enjoyed and in what relation it stood to political right and free personhood. These efforts to clarify slave humanity and its distinctions were ultimately secured against the gender ascriptions and prescriptions which helped distribute political right among the white free. In this sense, Black gender emerges not so much as the way that some bodies appear but the negation of the tolerable and permissible as enacted through and upon the bodies of white gendered subjects. What is important then is not so much the nomenclature applied to captive genders. But instead, where their operative definitions emanated, why they were most meaningfully gleamed against these practices, and how these gendered meanings contrasted with those ascribed to the white free. Hartman maintains then that the engendering of black flesh was best tracked through violence in slavery’s erotic theater. For through it, sexuality became a focal point for “divergent methods” of social control and exercises of political right (Reference Hartman2022, 146).

To ascribe the erotic this priority then is to say that gender, including its black female sense, was best tracked by the distribution of sexual licenses and the effective use of political right. As such, “gender” most meaningfully became a proxy for permissible ways to use and punish the body relative to affects and transgressions. She argues that miscegenation was one of these erotic sites that helped engender both the black and white body. Such conventions made it both permissible and (potentially) profitable for the white male to willfully carry out illicit relations against the black female. Yet it formed a capital offense for the white female to perform similar acts with black males of any status. Fraternization placed the white female outside “the protection of the law”; assault (real or perceived) wrought the might of the state (and white fraternity) upon the black male body (Hartman Reference Hartman2022, 173). The white male then claims dominion over these bodies—and the freedom to set their erotic uses and transgressions—as his gendered meaning and proper use of political right. It is in and through these very “uses” then that “gender” coheres to the flesh and takes on its meaning. Here then gender does not track the configuration of the body as much as it delimits its proper and tolerable use.

At the center of this erotic theater stood black female flesh engendered. For its constituent elements positioned it apart from all other racialized and gender differentiated bodies within this “arena of affect” (Hartman Reference Hartman2022, 164). Against free female flesh, the gender of the captive female came to be defined by inaffection to sexual violence, as her assaults (by males of any sort) were disavowed and deemed not liable for redress. Unlike the male slave meanwhile, the captive female could not give birth to a freeborn child in any circumstance. It is in this sense then that sexuality and the erotic became a locus where law, captivity, property rights, violence, consent, desire, submission, and intimacy acted concertedly with race to secure gender and gender differences (Hartman Reference Hartman2022, 138–40, 145–50). For Hartman, it is important to understand how selective recognitions of humanity did not emanate from but in fact facilitated this engendering of the captive female. To understand why this is so, she contends that one must grasp the “double bind” of selective recognition and how it was harnessed in slavery’s erotic theater (Reference Hartman2022, 92). To Hartman, selective recognition denotes how the non-presumption of slave humanity denied black female flesh protection under common law and white female chivalry. Yet at once, it held the captive female responsible, blameworthy, and “criminally” liable in ways that implied human reason and intent (Hartman Reference Hartman2022, 173). She argues that it is this very partial recognition that led to the constitution of black female gender as inaffection to rape and the ravished body which could testate this condition to its descendants.

This is because selective recognition gave rise to a “discourse of seduction” which saw her assaults methodically disavowed under the titles of passion and intimacy (Hartman Reference Hartman2022, 141). With her limited recourse to reason and intent, it was said that the captive female enticed her perpetrators. And thus, “the captive female” was at once deemed “will-less” yet “always willing” for her assaults (Hartman Reference Hartman2022, 141). The ramifications were threefold. First, this ability to assault with impunity help secured the “full enjoyment” of human property and “perfect submission” of the captive female (Hartman Reference Hartman2022, 150). Second, it effaced the role and prevalence of sexual violence and the erotic in the engenderment of the black body. Still yet, it also concealed the “antagonisms” which permeated every dimension of the slave order (Hartman Reference Hartman2022, 153). Without a view of sexual violence, these illicit acts appeared as pastoral relations beset by passion, reciprocity, kindness, affection, attachment, and mutual regard.

This intimate view of erotic terror thus wrought two issues. It prompted the idea that mere sentiment not law was sufficient for the slave’s “protection.” That sentiment could effectively regulate master–slave relations. But this pastoral view of slavery could not withstand the “murder, torture, and maiming” that was ever common (Hartman Reference Hartman2022, 36–48, 157). As such, the slave’s humanity had to be defined by law. Cobb’s Law of Negro Slavery (1858) helped provide such definitions and was legally cited with alarming frequency. Cobb argued that “penalties for rape would not and should not … be made to extend to carnal forcible knowledge of a slave,” with “that offense not affecting the existence of the slave, and that existence being the extent of the right which the implication of the law grants” (Cobb qtd. in Hartman Reference Hartman2022, 167). Rather than securing slave humanity, this definition merely underscored its negation. Cobb’s Law reveals then how inaffection to rape helped engender black female flesh and did so, more specifically, as a negation of the tolerable and permissible for the white gendered body. In doing so, it evinces how “gender” was not merely relational with violence but constituted through it.

For Hartman, the implications of this sort of engenderment were twofold. First, it underscored the “disjunctive” and “differential production of gender” for black and white bodies (Reference Hartman2022, 174). The notion of black and white gender captures then how each was generated by divergent forms of violence and social control. This view thus stresses “gender’s” hermeneutic effects over its descriptive and membership tracking ones. Under it, gender is not taken to denote a set of “given characteristics,” bodily “attributes,” or common “circumstances,” as much as it underscores the disjunctive ways that flesh, property relations, violence, political right, and the erotic limits and figurative capacities of the body assembled to affect subject formation (Hartman Reference Hartman2022, 176). Hartman believes that to deem Black women “genderless” under slavery, a customary view attributed to her identical labor patterns with men, would be to effectively miss how gender itself is configured in violence, property relations, racialization, sexual terror, and enslavement.

What is more, she contends, if affects like enjoyment, passion, sentience, flesh, use, and intimacy were essential in the engendering of black female flesh, this raises questions about the limits of black feminist critical theory which fails to adequately address this aspect of Black women’s subject formation, positioning, and subjectivity. For in attributing Black women’s conditions to the significant though limited roles of single-axis thinking and marginalization, these added elements can only configure as the symptoms of race and gender, not the very processes which prefigure and engender them. She contends that: “[t]he task of describing the status of the emancipated” that is, the situation and conditions of black female gender today, “involves attending to the articulation of various modes of power, without simply resorting to additive models of domination or interlocking oppressions” (Hartman Reference Hartman2022, 207). These “various modes of power” in her appeal are the diverse affective forms (property, flesh, passion, thingification, etc.) in which power has been shown by Hartman to operate on the black female body.

She argues that in relegating these modes of affectation in favor of ideology, discourse, and systems of oppression, black feminist critical theory has failed to consider and theorize their roles, leading to gaps in analysis and the omission of important social conditions. Failing to account for them, Hartman contends that these affective forms come to be treated “as if they were isolated elements” that can be alternatively tracked and exhausted through mere social categories like “race, class, gender, and sexuality” (Reference Hartman2022, 207). This ensemble of sociological categories then comes to gain an outsized and mechanical role in criticism, analysis, and interpretation. They begin to function as if the “mere listing” or combination of them creates an analytical “recipe” which stands to disclose all the relevant phenomenon to the interpreter (Reference Hartman2022, 207). This is not plausible to Hartman when first, these categories are parasitic on the affects (passion, violence, property, etc.) that configure them and because merely recounting a list of social categories is not a sufficient procedure to bring these affective forms into view.

4.4. Overview

If Hartman’s criticisms appear familiar in form, this is because they model broader new materialist reactions to critical theory. Hartman raises questions about the limits of black feminist critical theory, charging that it has not sufficiently addressed the engendering of black female flesh. Hartman then links this gap in analysis to the school’s underlying theory of affectation, its preoccupation with social constructions like race, class, and gender which leave affective forms like intimacy and passion unaccounted for. Traced back to philosophers like Spinoza and Deleuze, these influences are notable in black feminism’s new materialism. Spinoza’s affectus and “nature of the emotions” prefigure in Hartman’s “arena of affect” and view to passion, while Deleuze is cited outright. These moves are built on the groundwork laid by Spillers and Wynter. Spillers’s notion of flesh opens the body for investigation, granting it affective power. Meanwhile, Wynter’s turn to rights externalism and subhumans captures the new materialism’s insistence on other-than-human forces. Together, these interventions proved essential and compelling in a shifting intellectual climate where ideology critique and negative theorizing were falling out of favor. In response, black feminist new materialism met the external and internal calls of the day, helping effect the gradual decline of black feminist critical theory. Focusing on the engendering of black female flesh, it proposed a positive account of black female subjectivity, and managed to unify its contingent (abjection, law, etc.) and material moments (flesh, bodily uses, etc.) underneath a single concept.