Sex, Violence, and Human Ownership
Human bodies fueled the Atlantic slave trade and slavery. For more than three centuries slavers captured African men, women, and children who were sold and transported to the Americas by slave traders.
Slave owners purchased these captives and held their descendants in bondage. This process entirely relied on the physicality of bodies, transformed into the exemplary locus where human ownership triumphed. Africans and their descendants performed coerced work in rural and urban areas. But being the master of their bodies also meant their owners could use them to gain physical pleasure. Thus, sexuality was a significant part of the institution of slavery, marked by a persisting tension between slavers and enslaved. Slave traders, ship captains, and crewmen sexually assaulted enslaved men, women, boys, and girls while they were confined in trading structures along the African coasts and in the holds of slave ships. In all parts of the Americas, enslaved men and women, no matter their sexual orientation, engaged in sexual encounters with other bondspeople.Bondspeople had sex with their owners, and these exchanges were coercive by nature because enslaved people were legally conceived as movable property and rarely had the ability to refuse these their owners’ advances.83 As we have seen in this chapter, a great amount of evidence produced by enslavers and enslaved people confirms that sexual violence against enslaved women, men, and children predominated in the Americas. Although not all sexual exchanges between slave owners and enslaved women were based on explicit violence and some liaisons may have been based on mutual agreement, the power imbalance between enslavers and bondspeople was too huge to assume that sexual relations that may have looked consensual were based on mutual agreement—unless, as in rare instances, slave owners decided to free their sexual partners.