When Jeremy O. Harris wrote his 2018 play Slave Play as a student at Yale University’s David Geffen School of Drama, a supervisor told him that writing the play was “a vile, vile thing to do.” “And, by the way”, Harris recalls the supervisor saying, “other people think so too, but they’re too afraid to tell you.”Footnote 1 Harris has received similar criticism for Slave Play since it has been produced. Upon Slave Play’s debut on Broadway in 2019, a petition was circulated calling for the show to be shut down. The petition’s author, who called the play “one of the most disrespectful displays of anti-Black sentiment disguised as art that I have ever seen,” wrote that she was “terribly offended and traumatized by the graphic imagery mixed with laughter from a predominantly white audience.”Footnote 2
Discomfort is a natural, and indeed invited, response to Slave Play. The play follows three interracial couples who undergo the experimental “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy” to address the Black partners’ inability to feel sexual attraction to their white partners. The therapy, which takes place on a southern cotton plantation, requires the couples to engage in role-play which entails Black partners acting as the enslaved, and white partners as their overseers. Slave Play stages this role-play explicitly, particularly in its first and third acts, forcing audiences to witness these Black partners experiencing sexual satisfaction not only in being degraded and violated, but also in acting out stereotypes of Black sexuality as excessive, aggressive, and deviant. In the “Notes on Style” which precede the play-text, Harris is explicit that it “should not work to make the audience feel comfortable with what they are witnessing at all.”Footnote 3
It is no surprise that Slave Play has challenged audiences and reviewers alike. To consider sexual relationships which center subjugation, terror, and captivity as anything but violating and unnatural does not accord with any of the mental shortcuts and heuristics that we routinely apply to Black sexuality. In the cultural imagination, Black bodies have been transformed into objects of intense but violent erotic interest, with little room left to consider the humanity and subjectivity that those bodies house. How can we look upon images of terror and domination and seek to view pleasure and agency within them? And can we emerge from the discomfort of this representation with a better understanding of Black subjectivity?
In what follows, I argue that, by making Black sexuality difficult, illegible, and indeterminate, Slave Play resists the sense of stability and certainty that stereotypes of Black sexuality erroneously promise. In doing so, the play humanizes Black subjects and urges a reconsideration of the complexities of Black sexual experiences. In other words, I argue that Slave Play’s challenging representation of Black sexuality allows audiences to see characters who would otherwise by dehumanized by stereotypes as human. My claim here is not that Slave Play merely subverts stereotypes about Black sexuality or counters them with positive representation – the work of this play is far more complex, and I do not suggest that Harris represents such confronting sexual encounters as straightforwardly empowering. Rather, I examine how dehumanization can be resisted through representations which, by squeezing stereotypes to the point of incoherency, force audiences to reconcile the coexistence of violation and subjectivity and, thus, to see Black characters as human.
I structure this argument in three parts. First, I foreground the dehumanization that Slave Play resists by considering the history of stereotypes of Black sexuality and how they are deployed by Harris. Then, I argue that Slave Play’s depiction of Black sexuality as difficult, illegible, and indeterminate tests the hold of stereotypes by resisting the erroneous sense of stability and certainty that they provide. I conclude by examining the rethinking of sexual choice and empowerment that the play’s dismantling of stereotypes demands. I argue that humanizing characters who experience pleasure in complex and unconventional ways exposes the limitations of seeing consent and self-mastery as the sole determinants of good sex.
By arguing that Slave Play resists the dehumanizing function of stereotypes, I resist readings which construe the play as distasteful or needlessly controversial. Although relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to Slave Play, reviewers and theatre critics have vociferously criticized Harris’s treatment of Black sexuality as degrading. In his review of Slave Play’s 2018 off-Broadway production, for example, Hubert Adjei-Kontoh criticized the play for “simply [giving] white people another platform to gaze on Black bodies exposed to physical and sexual violence.”Footnote 4 In an op-ed for Color Lines in 2019, theatre critic Juan Michael Porter similarly complained that Slave Play “strips the darkest-skinned Black woman on stage of agency by reducing her fetishes and desires to subservience.”Footnote 5 “In this and many other ways,” Porter wrote, “Slave Play just feels like a provocation for the sake of titillation.”Footnote 6 While critics such as Porter and Adjei-Kontoh treat the discomfort of the play as an endpoint, I consider what sitting with this discomfort might afford.
While the subject of this paper is the play-text of Slave Play, rather than specific live performances, it is important to the analysis that follows that this is a written text which anticipates liveness. Play-texts both describe a fixed event and provide the materials to create a live event – as such, both readers and live audiences can respond to them. Rather than attempting to disentangle the written dimension of Slave Play from its potential for liveness, I treat its dual function as a text to be read and as a script for performance as an important part of Harris’s work. The analysis that follows is applicable to a reading or a viewing of Slave Play and, as such, I use the term “audiences” to refer to both readers and live audiences. Where features of Slave Play have specific significance either in writing or performance, I refer specifically to “readers” or “live audiences.” At points, I refer to reviews of live productions – I am interested in how these reviews understand how audiences may engage with the narrative, characters, and language of these plays, rather than individual directorial decisions.
Stereotypes of Black sexuality and their dehumanizing function
Before turning to the complex resistance against stereotypes of Black sexuality that, as we will see, Slave Play undertakes, let us first consider the power of these stereotypes. Ideas about Black sexuality as primitive and exotic developed out of Europeans’ first contact with Africans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These stereotypes were promulgated by pseudoscientific findings which forwarded the idea that Black people’s alleged unrestrained sexual promiscuity was predetermined by the size and shape of their genitalia. Highly constructed colonial photographs displaying naked Black bodies and caricatures of large Black buttocks were widely circulated in travel documents, books, newspapers, and magazines, emphasizing the supposed primitivism of Black sexuality.Footnote 7 As Rachel Engmann explains, these images were “needed to define and maintain hegemonic constructions of difference between those in the colony and the metropole.”Footnote 8 The transformation of Black bodies into hypersexual and animalistic oddities requiring civilizing justified relentless abuse and exploitation under colonialism.
During the period of American slavery, sexualized racial stereotypes transformed the Black body into an object not only to be possessed and its labor deployed, but also to be enjoyed according to the enslaver’s will. As Hartman writes, “the full enjoyment of the slave as a thing depended upon the unbounded authority and totalizing consumption of the body in its myriad capacities.”Footnote 9 The ritualization of sexual violence against the enslaved bolstered white dominance and reaffirmed the seeming givenness of Black subservience and usability. During this period, a belief in Black women as sexually insatiable and incapable of decency displaced enslavers’ culpability for assault by constructing an image of Black sexuality in which rape was unimaginable.Footnote 10 These assumptions about Black hypersexuality were not limited to Black women; they also spawned fears of sexual violence against white women by Black men as a form of retaliation against enslavers. As Susan Brownmiller explains, “aware of his wholesale transgression against the Black female slave, which he refused to conceptualize as criminal rape, the slaveholder was eternally vigilant against a reverse.”Footnote 11
Such vicious tropes of a rapacious Black sexuality have held power long after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. At the turn of the twentieth century, the myth of the Black male rapist served as a rationale for policies that sought to ensure racial purity. This myth was disseminated through filmic and literary representations, most notoriously in Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan and its 1915 blockbuster adaptation, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.Footnote 12 Beliefs about the excess and inherent deviance of Black sexuality supported Jim Crow race segregation legislation, prohibitions against interracial marriage, and the use of lynching as a punishment for the supposedly rapacious Black man.Footnote 13 By preventing Black social, economic, and political advancement, these policies continued to enshrine white supremacist ideology.
Popular culture today continues to exploit images of the sexualized Black body. Images of Black women’s buttocks, for example, dominate films and music videos. In such representations, as Aliyah Abdur-Rahman writes, “Black women are wholly genitalized, visualised as manifestly sexual and debased.”Footnote 14 Similarly, the insinuation in popular culture that Black men have larger genitals than white men corroborates their characterization as “beastly, brutal, sexually rapacious, and dangerous.”Footnote 15
Stereotyped images of Black sexuality, circulating over centuries in both mass and high culture, dehumanize Black subjects. These stereotypes, and their constituent erotic tropes and symbols, have a particularly powerful hold on the collective imagination because of sexuality’s affective dimension. As Abdur-Rahman’s work on the erotics of race explains, “a fundamentally irrational force, sexuality has the power to wrest individuals from their ideological investments.”Footnote 16 Saidiya Hartman similarly explains that sexuality intersects with ideological beliefs because “pleasure is central to the mechanisms of identification and recognition that discredit the claims of pain but also to those that produce a sense of possibility.”Footnote 17 In other words, the domain of sexual pleasure powerfully controls not only what we are willing to believe is possible, but what we are willing to feel is acceptable. Sexuality also plays an important role in shaping individuals’ sense of identity in relation to the world around them. Indeed, as Ariane Cruz explains, the realm of sexual fantasy is one of “self-making”; “we produce fantasy and are produced by it.”Footnote 18 By erroneously communicating the perversity, strangeness or incorrectness of such a fundamental component of human experience, stereotypes of Black sexuality generate a widespread investment in the notion of Black subjects as less human.
Moreover, such stereotypes are effective precisely because they are reductive and, therefore, override Black subjects’ ability to represent their experiences of sexual agency and pleasure with depth or nuance. Stereotypes shroud complexity and unpredictability, replacing it with shallowness. As Homi Bhabha’s account of the colonial stereotype explains, the internalization of stereotyped images relies on fixity and simplification. As Bhabha writes, “it is the force of ambivalence that gives the colonial stereotype its currency and ensures its repeatability.”Footnote 19 Stereotypes are not only reductive because they are “a false representation of a given reality” but because they are “an arrested, fixated form of representation.”Footnote 20 The stereotype claims to know a subject in advance, promising that they will display a set of predictable, and thus controllable, traits. The fallaciousness of this sense of certainty also creates the impetus for the stereotype to be repeated and emphasized at every opportunity – it must be repeated endlessly and unquestioningly because it can never secure the identity it claims to fix. In other words, stereotypes dehumanize Black subjects not only because they associate Black sexuality with depravity and barbarism, but because they depict it as singular and fixed. Construed as entirely knowable, Black sexuality is considered unworthy of space for evolution, unpredictability, and nuance.
Slave Play not only stages stereotyped images of Black sexuality but depicts their conscious and desired inclusion into modern characters’ sex lives. The play opens with a montage of vigorously simulated onstage sex scenes, in which the three interracial couples engage in slavery role-play. Jim, acting as Kaneisha’s overseer, berates her for not cleaning the floor properly before initiating sex with her; Alana penetrates Philip, who acts as enslaved, with a dildo; and Gary forces Dustin, who acts as a white indentured servant, to lick his boot clean. While it is later revealed that this role-play is part of the experimental “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy,” over the course of this first scene, it is initially unclear whether the characters are role-playing or whether these scenes are taking place in the antebellum South. The play is set on an antebellum plantation, which stage directions indicate is “literalized with deep verisimilitude.”Footnote 21 In this opening montage, Harris gives no other indication of period or setting beyond those directly related to the verisimilitude of the role-play. The stage directions also introduce the characters as their fantasy roles – Kaneisha is “a slave” and Jim is “the overseer,” Philip is “a young mulatto man with imposing countenance” and Alana is “Mistress Macgregor,” and Dustin is “a white indentured servant” while Gary is “a slave wearing a straw hat.”Footnote 22 It is worth noting that these descriptions draw on dated language – particularly Harris’s decision to use the term “mulatto.” Without a clear indication of time, place, or context, Slave Play opens by absorbing audiences entirely into the realm of sexual fantasy.
Each of these opening role-play scenes draws on highly charged stereotypes of Black sexuality. Kaneisha and Jim’s role-play, in which he acts as her overseer and punishes her for dancing like “a dog wagging her tail,” stages a charged image of Black hypersexuality.Footnote 23 As Kaneisha dances while Jim remains stern, Harris exploits representations of purported Black lasciviousness which, as Hartman explains, historically presented rape as implausible and unimaginable.Footnote 24 Specifically, the focus on Kaneisha’s “ass,” which “moves up and down in revelry as she hikes up her coarse cotton dress,”Footnote 25 centers what Abdur-Rahman describes as the “purported anality of Black sexual desire.”Footnote 26
Similarly, Alana and Philip’s role-play stages stereotypes of Black sexuality as deviant and beguiling. In this scene, Alana acts as “Mistress MacGregor,” while Philip acts as an enslaved “mulatto” man, “gifted with music to woo whites away from they God-given paths.”Footnote 27 As Philip plays the violin, his music casts “some sort of mulatto spell” over Alana and she “sits on the bed as Philip turns over and begins to slowly lick and kiss his bottom.”Footnote 28 The notion that Black sexuality could be so excessive and deviant as to tempt white people away from their ordinary sensibilities was used to explain mixed-race sexual relationships and, often, to evade accountability for sexual violence enacted against Black people.Footnote 29 Abdur-Rahman explains that “the unrestrained sexuality of Black people was thought to extend beyond promiscuous heterosexuality” and, therefore, this narrative provided cover for even the most socially unacceptable forms of sexual expression.Footnote 30 Alana and Philip’s role-play centres these stereotypes of Black sexuality as a corrupting force as Alana succumbs to Philip’s “spell” and penetrates him with a “large ebony dildo.”Footnote 31
Gary and Dustin’s role-play draws on stereotyped images of Black male violence. Gary and Dustin are the only queer couple in Slave Play. While the full significance of Harris’ exploration of queerness and Black sexuality is beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth noting that Gary and Dustin’s role-play draws on particularly charged imagery of aggression and insatiability, which have long been crucial to the policing and degradation of Black bodies and desire. As Susan Brownmiller writes, “in the slaveholding South, revolt and rape by dehumanized black hordes was the classic white male nightmare.”Footnote 32 This nightmare was used as a justification for punishment, as well as bolstering the erotic charge of White heroism by comparison. Harris’s rendering of Gary and Dustin’s role-play, which is more overtly aggressive than the other two couples, draws on this nightmare scenario – throughout the scene, Gary, who is Black, is “angry and annoyed” and the pair “wrestle and fight for control.”Footnote 33 These images also intersect importantly with queerness – as Abdur-Rahman explains, the widely held belief that Black sexuality was “so libidinous, so unregulated, so wanton” that Black men also desired to sleep with other men.Footnote 34 The gay Black man, therefore, represents the most lascivious and perverse kind of Black sexuality. The explicit aggression and violence in this scene draw directly on these erotic tropes. The depiction of Gary, the Black partner, in a position of dominance over Dustin, the non-Black partner, also speaks to fears of retaliatory Black violence against white slaveowners.
At this stage in the play, it might be easy to dismiss these depictions of Black sexuality as condemnatory, as an historical reenactment designed to show the violence and depravity of racial fetishization. Harris, however, grants audiences no such comfort. Rather than dismissing this opening montage as a negative portrayal of Black sexuality, Harris forces audiences to contend directly with these stereotyped images when it is revealed that this opening montage is not only set in the present but is a carefully curated part of the experimental “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy.” The play’s first act ends abruptly when Jim, in “a full British accent,” tells Kaneisha that “this doesn’t work for me” and says the safe word “Starbucks.”Footnote 35 At this point, two young psychologists “rush in” and all three couples are forced to stop their role-play to participate in a group therapy session.Footnote 36 This moment is jarring, interrupting the momentum of the sexual fantasy both for the couples and audiences. Importantly, for audiences, this transition shatters the illusion that these sexual fantasies are taking place in any time but the present. As Act Two begins with the characters “in modern-day leisure wear eating snacks and drinking water” and audiences are forced to contend with the fact that the characters they have just witnessed engaging in violent race play are average, modern couples.Footnote 37 Avgi Saketopoulou astutely expresses that “the controversial claim mounted by Slave Play is that the erotic life of racism inflects not just the oppressors’ psychosexuality but also the oppressed’s.”Footnote 38 Slave Play does not merely suggest that bondage and degradation might be pleasurable for Black subjects, but that they are so pleasurable that they would be incorporated actively into their sexual lives.
To understand the discomfort that this depiction of stereotypes generates, it is important to consider how evolving social and political discourses have approached stereotypes of Black sexuality. As progressive social-justice movements have sought to reduce the power of stereotypes, they have often done so not by suggesting that stereotypes are reductive or unnuanced, but by suggesting that they are false or indecent. Ariane Cruz describes a tendency, programmed by the approaches of progressive social movements, to look away from sexual experiences associated with perversity.Footnote 39 A “politics of respectability,” rooted in Progressive Era African American social-justice organizing, sought to counteract stereotypes about deviant Black sexuality by promoting images of Black temperance, sexual restraint, and virtue. As part of this strategy, which Cruz describes as a “sexually implemented racial uplift,” depictions of Black sexuality that intersected with stereotypes were often concealed or downplayed.Footnote 40 More recently, this has been reinforced by modern progressive discourse’s broader desire, often criticized by conservatives as “political correctness,” to entirely avoid representation considered biased, stereotyped, or exclusionary.Footnote 41 As Cruz explains, these strategies for addressing stereotypes of Black sexuality have had a silencing effect, figuring certain experiences unspeakable, indecent, and unworthy of representation or deeper consideration.Footnote 42
The silencing effect of these strategies has intersected with feminist and sexual liberation discourses’ focus on consent to bury sexual experiences associated with stereotypes. The prevailing modern understanding of sexual consent follows from the neoliberal view of people as “rational, adult, contract-making individuals in a free market of options.”Footnote 43 As such, feminist advocacy against sexual violence has typically emphasized the importance of enthusiastic displays of willingness and explicit agreement to sexual acts. Educational resources created by anti-rape advocates, to proffer a contemporary example, have analogized sex to tea-drinking, bike-riding, or even milkshake-sharing.Footnote 44 These analogies, designed to simplify the moral wrong of rape, present the offer of sex as uncomplicated and logically assessable.Footnote 45 In its various manifestations, the modern feminist belief that morally permissible sex requires its participants to be in full, rational control often dismisses nonnormative sexual experiences as coerced or illegitimate. Cruz describes the way in which “sexual consent functions as a political tool of morality and state regulation.”Footnote 46 Greta LaFleur, similarly, describes sexual liberation discourses’ focus on rational choice as “an anachronistic and alarmingly ahistorical understanding that seeks to understand sex as only liberatory.”Footnote 47 Sexual experiences that encounter stereotypes are automatically deemed disempowering because they are construed as experiences that people would logically or rationally consent to.
It is significant, therefore, that Slave Play’s characters are modern, well-educated individuals who, in every sense we tend to consider meaningful, can make autonomous choices about their sexual lives. They exist in a political and social context where stereotypes are broadly accepted to be reductive and misleading and yet, they appear to self-select into their own degradation. In a context where stereotypes of Black sexuality are routinely silenced or obscured, it is easy to believe that they no longer hold any power. As we have seen, many reviewers of Slave Play have echoed these questions, believing the play’s depiction of Black sexuality to be needlessly and distastefully explicit.Footnote 48
The discomfort created by the transformation of symbols of violation into sources of eroticism reveals the lingering belief that there is something perverse and unspeakable about Black sexuality that needs to be policed. Indeed, Harris’s sardonic portrayal of the experimental “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy” anticipates the politically correct response to his unflinching portrayal of the erotic charge of stereotypes. A sense of outrage at the correctness of the role-play is voiced by the play’s two white characters, Alana and Jim.
During the group therapy session after the role-play, Jim complains that “this was not hot. You made me call my wife, who I love, a… And that’s… She’s my queen.”Footnote 49 Alana, who is similarly obsessed with correctness, frets, “did I mess up? I tried to do everything you said right. I just … I read about this in the New Yorker. I wanted to help him.”Footnote 50 As these characters’ dialogue satirizes progressive American social discourse, referring to Kaneisha as a “queen” and to the therapy as something Alana has read about in the New Yorker, Harris highlights the failings of dominant progressive approaches to stereotypes of Black sexuality.
In a context which privileges political correctness as an important component of social justice, sexual experiences which encounter and intersect with stereotypes become unspeakable, automatically presumed to be perverse, indecent, and irrational. The power, and indeed the challenge, of Slave Play is that it resists the impulse to look away from experiences which do not align with straightforwardly positive and empowering representations of Black sexuality.
Slave Play’s illegible pleasure
Having first resisted the urge to look away from stereotypes of Black sexuality, Harris resists their dehumanizing function by making sexual pleasure illegible and indeterminable. Experiences of sexual pleasure in Slave Play are entangled with discomfort, often without resolution or clear explanation. By challenging audiences to harmonize an understanding of subjectivity and violation, Harris reopens opportunities to perceive Black humanity and interiority which, as we have seen, stereotypes shut down. It is by refusing to grant certainty or straightforward explanation in his portrayal of Black sexuality that Harris tests the explanatory logic and, therefore, the hold of stereotypes. I focus particularly closely here on Kaneisha and Gary. Not only are Kaneisha and Gary the only two “dark, Black” characters (as opposed to being “mulatto” or “off-white”), but they also participate most wholeheartedly in role-play, often to the dismay and concern of their respective non-Black partners.Footnote 51
As we have seen, Slave Play depicts stereotypes about Blackness as a source of erotic pleasure, particularly for both Gary and Kaneisha. In the play’s stage directions, Harris takes great care to describe this pleasure in explicit and unambiguous terms. In the play’s opening montage, Kaneisha is “nearing a state of ecstasy” as she asks Jim, who acts as her enslaver, to degrade her with racial slurs.Footnote 52 In the same montage, as Dustin licks Gary’s boot clean while Gary acts as his aggressive and domineering overseer, Harris writes, “Gary is shivering intensely now. It is about to happen. He is fully erect in his little undies at this moment.”Footnote 53 At the end of this scene, Gary climaxes, we are later told, for the first time in months. The vivid and explicit detail of these moments of race play denies audiences the ability to ignore or misconstrue the fact that Black partners are aroused by images of enslavement and bondage.
However, Harris complicates a straightforward reading of characters’ sexual encounters by showing the entanglement of this pleasure with pain, anguish, and confusion. Immediately after climax, Gary “falls down and begins to weep.”Footnote 54 The ambiguity of this emotional release, particularly following such a highly charged sex scene, makes it difficult for audiences to interpret Gary’s sexual pleasure. Moreover, in the therapy session that follows, unpacking their feelings about the role-play leads to the breakdown of Gary and Dustin’s relationship. Frustrated by his inability to communicate his experience of race to Dustin, Gary concludes by the end of the therapy session that “I don’t think you have any worth to me.”Footnote 55 Whether this realization is a productive and necessary one, or a decision made in an irrational state of heightened emotion, is difficult to discern. For Gary, therefore, these sexual experiences, inflected with the erotic charge of bondage and enslavement, generate both pleasure and pain. For audiences, the difficulty of extricating or understanding the two renders his precise experience of sexual pleasure unknowable.
The entanglement of pleasure and pain culminates in the play’s final (and most controversial) scene in which, after the therapy session has finished, Jim finally acquiesces to Kaneisha’s request that he degrade and control her. In this scene, even as Kaneisha utters the couple’s safe word and “begins to fumble and fight,” Jim does not relent or stop.Footnote 56 Harris writes, “Jim forcefully flips Kaneisha over, spreads her legs, and plunges forward. He’s clutching her throat and pushing her head against the pillow.”Footnote 57 By the end of the role-play, Kaneisha is left screaming and “shivering from groin to skull.”Footnote 58 Importantly, the format of live theatre denies audiences the comfort of looking away from the characters’ vulnerability and distress. The play ends ambiguously with Kaneisha thanking Jim, “thank you, baby. Thank you for listening.”Footnote 59 This final line, which follows such a highly affective and graphic sex scene, is difficult to interpret. It is unclear whether Kaneisha has experienced pleasure or pain, or a combination of the two. It is also unclear what will become of Kaneisha and Jim’s relationship. The ambiguity of this moment in the play is heightened by Harris’s stage directions, which defer control of the scene to the actress playing Kaneisha, instructing her to do “whatever she feels is right before she looks at [Jim].”Footnote 60 Without a straightforward resolution or explanation, Kaneisha’s experience of sexual pleasure becomes indeterminable and unknowable.
Witnessing these dizzying and conflicting emotional responses, it is hard to view these sexual experiences as empowering or liberatory. Were these encounters ill-advised, or coerced? Have characters been violated in some way? And, if they have, why was it so pleasurable? Slave Play provides no straightforward answer.
Characters’ descriptions of their own experiences do not provide clarity either, even as the group therapy session in Act Two prompts them to unpack and elaborate their feelings. Kaneisha, for example, vocalizes her feelings almost exclusively through metaphor and imagery. Describing her experience of the role-play, Kaneisha explains that she feels “as though, constantly, subterfuge is the engine of my subconscious, as though, it’s constantly driving the vehicle of my psyche, and so I’m never sure that I’m totally in control.”Footnote 61 Throughout the play, she expresses empowerment as being “in control of that engine”, her confusion as “fog, that’s been blurring [Jim’s] face,” and understands her anger towards Jim by telling him “you’re a virus, you’re THE virus.”Footnote 62 These descriptions, although poetically powerful, deny straightforward interpretation of her sexual experiences. Gary, similarly, refuses to speak at the end of the therapy session. While Dustin shouts at Gary to “SPEAK,” he does not respond, and while Dustin is “up and pushing Gary” to generate a response, Gary “isn’t pushing back.”Footnote 63 Gary’s withdrawal in this moment complicates audiences’ ability to apprehend his sexual experience.
The illegibility of sexual experiences in Slave Play erodes the fixity of stereotypes about Black sexuality. Importantly, as we have seen, stereotypes of Black sexuality survive, and achieve such profound dehumanization, because they offer an arrested and unambiguous portrayal of Black sexuality. As Bhabha explains, stereotypes are predicated on a false sense of fixity and knowability.Footnote 64 Not only do these images represent Black sexuality as perverse and indecent, but they also suggest that it is uncomplicatedly so – they program a belief that there is no need to seek to view nuance in Black sexual experiences, because none will appear.
By rendering Black sexuality as ambiguous and indeterminable, Harris restores an understanding of Black characters’ unknowability, and thus resists the sense of certainty that stereotypes erroneously promise. Importantly, in Slave Play, it is not just that characters’ sexuality in general becomes unknowable, but specifically that the bearing of race on their sexual lives is figured as indeterminate and ambiguous. John Brooks’s analysis of illegibility in Black literature is useful here. Brooks explains that illegibility provokes audiences to question how they think and see race by disrupting conventional interpretive processes. According to Brooks, illegibility does not just render individual experiences unknowable, but casts doubt on the very existence of Blackness.Footnote 65 By making sexual experiences which explicitly center race illegible, Harris taps into the potentials of illegibility that Brooks outlines – not only does sex become illegible, but the straightforward interpretability of race itself is revealed as unstable as audiences can no longer rely on their presumptions about race to interpret characters.
Importantly, Slave Play resists pathologizing Black sexuality, and thereby compromising a nuanced recognition of the play’s Black characters, by disrupting any notion of an uncomplicated relationship with sex and race. Harris’s explicit and unabashed depiction of sexual taboos risks construing only Black sexuality as dizzying and complex, which might play into stereotypes of Black sexuality as perverse and nonnormative that, as we have seen, are dehumanizing. However, Harris emphasizes that experimentation with the erotic charge of race is equally emotionally tumultuous for non-Black characters. In the therapy session, a distressed Dustin laments, “I don’t know if what I did caused you that release or if what I did caused you those tears, or if it was some fucked up combination of both.”Footnote 66 Similarly, the therapy leaves Alana and Jim, the play’s two white characters, in a state of emotional overwhelm. As Alana and Philip discuss their role-play in the therapy session in Act Two, Alana “stands up and begins to shake” and her “tears start slowly but build.”Footnote 67 In broken sentences, Alana chokes out “I just – this doesn’t feel right this doesn’t feel. Is this even?”Footnote 68 After degrading Kaneisha in Act Three, Jim cries “an ocean of tears with waves, convulsions.”Footnote 69 Although Alana and Jim are, up to these points in the play, vocal and outspoken, audiences last see these characters in a state of incoherent emotional overwhelm. Ilka Saal and Jade Thomas read the final image of a broken and wailing Jim as his full libidinal, emotional, and psychic exposure to the concept that his preferences do not equate with “epistemological certainty that the world can be seen, grasped, and retained according to his perception of things.”Footnote 70 No character – Black or white – is exempt from the emotional complexity of confronting their sexual preferences. By implicating non-Black characters, as well as Black characters, in the challenge of navigating sexual taboo, Slave Play resists construing Black sexuality as singularly problematic.
Slave Play’s interest in color play also resists singling out Black sexuality by emphasizing that all characters’ sexual preferences are influenced by their place on a spectrum of race. Slave Play elucidates how each character’s particular experience of their position on this spectrum shapes their sexual preferences. For Philip, described by Harris as “mulatto,”Footnote 71 arousal is directly connected to his perception of his own Blackness. Recalling how he and Alana began their relationship as an affair because her husband wanted to “get off to watching a black man fuck his white wife,” he ponders, “maybe my dick only works when I know I’m black.”Footnote 72 Similarly, Gary believes that Dustin, who is mixed-race Hispanic, finds him attractive because he bolsters Dustin’s sense of racial marginalization. Gary laments feeling like “a comfort object, placeholder, a tool by which your difference can finally be seen.”Footnote 73 Jim and Alana, the play’s two white characters, are obsessed with the absence of race in their sexual lives. It is by contrast to the spectrum of racialized sexual preferences that this obsession, too, is revealed to be a preference shaped by racism and white supremacy. Harris emphasizes that Jim’s reluctance to acquiesce to Kaneisha’s request that he degrade her using racial slurs, as well as Alana’s insistence that her attraction with Philip has “nothing to do with race” and her plea for him “to just be my Philip,”Footnote 74 represent a desire for a particular racial dynamic. The narrative of Slave Play stresses that this desire is not a natural or correct one.
In short, audiences are prompted to respond to Slave Play’s Black characters – who might otherwise be dehumanized by stereotypes of Black sexuality – as complex thinking and feeling persons. By holding space for Black subjectivity and interiority even under conditions of non-freedom and imperfect consent, Slave Play invites a response to characters that is fundamentally humanising. The discomfort and challenge of the play are not needless but, rather, fundamental to this dynamic – it is by refusing straightforward condemnation or explanation that Harris forces audiences to contend with the nuance and humanness of Black sexual experiences.
Rethinking sexual choice
By forcing audiences to harmonize an understanding of subjectivity and violation, Slave Play urges a rethinking of conceptions of sexual empowerment centered around choice and consent. Harris entertains the possibility that his characters may desire things that they would not rationally consent to – experiences that are confusing, violating, and upsetting. This kind of pleasure is almost unthinkable under frameworks which see consent as the sole constraint on good sex, wherein the value of a person’s sexual experiences is determined by the extent to which they have chosen to be empowered by them. The flatness of stereotypes about Black sexuality, and their legacies within many modern social and political discourses, make it easy to dismiss ambiguous experiences as illegitimate. By inviting audiences to respond to these characters as people, merely with separate and unknowable lives, Slave Play problematizes the narrow view of sex which requires epistemological certainty.
Scholars have noted the incongruity of sexual liberation discourse’s narrow focus on consent and the libidinal hold of racial trauma. In Scenes of Subjection, Hartman argues that the idea of freedom, as well as its constituent ideological parts (consent, will, agency, and ownership) problematically infuses our modern conceptions of sexuality. For Hartman, modern understandings of sexuality erase Blackness, which is itself is constructed in opposition to notions of self-expression and choice.Footnote 75 Similarly, Darieck Scott writes that “to speak of black sexuality is to do so unaccompanied by the pleasurable illusion of choice or self-mastery.”Footnote 76 While sexual-liberation discourses which focus solely on choice would discount the sexual experiences shown in Slave Play as illegitimate or wrong, the understanding of characters that the play invites audiences to develop makes this position untenable. This reveals the rigidity of mainstream conceptions of sexual liberation and emphasizes the need to pursue a more nuanced framework for understanding sex as a vehicle for self-determination.
Harris also engages directly with the ways in which the dizzying ambiguities of racial trauma problematize the over-focus on choice as a metric for good sex. The indelibility of history in the formation of sexual preferences is emphasized throughout the play, particularly by Kaneisha. In a monologue in Act Two, Kaneisha tells Jim, “there’s no way I can unknow, as you wipe your dick across my lips, that when your people landed on this land, a third of the indigenous population died of disease.”Footnote 77 Later, she tells him that her elders “are watching me lay in bed every night with a demon who thinks he’s a saint” and notes that “they lay with them too.”Footnote 78 The weight of history is emphasized by the play’s setting, “MacGregor Plantation, a few miles south of Richmond, Virginia.”Footnote 79 Before the US Civil War, Richmond was the site of the confederate capital. The fact that Harris uses this location as the setting for racial sex therapy stresses the importance of this history to his characters’ experience of sexuality. By emphasizing the ways that history and sexuality are deeply enmeshed, Harris introduces the possibility that his characters’ preferences are, to an extent, pre-determined or outside of their control.
Moreover, Harris’s exploration of the way in which all sexual preferences are racialized emphasizes that sexual choice is always, to some extent, constrained. This is important to the rethinking of sexual agency that Slave Play prompts – rather than suggesting that there is something specifically broken or nonnormative about Black sexuality, Harris frames its complexities as a small part the nuances of sexual identity and agency. As such, the constraints imposed on Black sexuality by a history of racial trauma are not dehumanizing.
Queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton once described becoming a lesbian as “against my will – though in accord with my desire.”Footnote 80 Stereotypes of Black sexuality, and the ways in which they have been handled by progressive discourses, have construed any separation of will and desire as perverse and unspeakable. In Slave Play, Harris resists the urge to look away from sexual experiences where the relationship of will and desire is not straightforward. This refusal to look away is not needless or self-serving but is indeed the key to humanizing Black subjects who are construed as perverse or unnuanced by stereotypes. Ever since the play debuted, Harris has been extremely forthcoming about his indifference to the controversy surrounding the play. Asked in an interview with Dazed to respond to Black audiences who found Slave Play uncomfortable, Harris responded that “it’s cool that Black people can have different opinions about things, because we’re humans.”Footnote 81 To reckon with Black sexuality outside the stability of stereotypes is to hold space for Black experiences to resist categorization, predictability, and homogeneity – as Slave Play shows, allowing discomfort can lead us to see the fundamental separateness of individuals. Refusing to look away from versions of Black sexuality that are difficult to apprehend, Slave Play instead invites audiences to reimagine pleasure, consent, and partnership in the wake of a history of sexual violation and degradation.
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