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Chapter 8 - Sex, Kinship, and Other Freedom Practices

Reading Gender and Sexuality in The History of Mary Prince

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2025

By
Anna Feuerstein
Edited by
Nicole N. Aljoe
Nicole N. Aljoe
Affiliation:
Northeastern University, Boston
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Summary

This chapter argues that through narrating the specific experiences of enslaved women and their freedom practices, from alternative kinship practices and strategic sexual relationships to knowledge of the slave economy and its reproductive logic, The History of Mary Prince imagines future freedoms while critiquing white inhumanity and the place of enslaved women within slavery’s rape culture. The chapter examines how enslaved women created and held onto kinship; how they used their sexuality to navigate their confinement and challenge ownership over their bodies; how Prince critiques white supremacy and its practices, including rape culture and the inability of white people to have sympathy for the enslaved; and how Prince imagined future freedoms, such as moving back to Antigua as a free woman, and freedom for all enslaved people. Through this analysis the chapter argues that Prince’s narrative challenges the silence of the colonial archive and allows us to see enslaved women beyond the violence they faced.

Keywords

genderfreedom practicessexualityreproduction
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Mary Prince , pp. 135 - 151
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

Works Cited

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Further Reading

Anonymous. The Woman of Color: A Tale. Broadview Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Beckles, Hilary. Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados. Rutgers University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Berry, Daina Ramey. The Price for the Pound of Their Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. Beacon Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Berry, Daina Ramey, and Harris, Leslie M., editors. Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas. University of Georgia Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bush, Barbara. Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838. Indiana University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Fleischner, Jennifer. Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives. New York University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Penguin, 2000.Google Scholar
Mair, Lucille Mathurin. The Rebel Woman in the British West Indies during Slavery. University of the West Indies Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morrissey, Marietta. Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean. University Press of Kansas, 1989.Google Scholar
Sharpe, Christina. Monstrous Intimacies. Duke University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Walker, Christine. Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire. University of North Carolina Press, 2020.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke University Press, 2014.Google Scholar

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