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Chapter 1 - The Price of Freedom

Racialized Female Desire in Early America

from Part I - Intimacies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2021

Jean M. Lutes
Affiliation:
Villanova University, Pennsylvania
Jennifer Travis
Affiliation:
St John's University, New York
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Summary

This chapter looks to literary and legal narratives from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century to trace how women’s bodies function as a site where the definitions of slavery and freedom, person, and property, have been continually refined. From the settler era until well into the twentieth century, American readers were drawn to stories – both in law and in literature – that sought to distribute varieties of female unfreedom along a racialized spectrum ranging from private property to articles of commerce. As these stories progress, and insistence on clear racial distinctions becomes ever more explicit, the tropes of prison and pregnancy emerge as two means of rendering women’s capacity to exert her private will a matter requiring public discipline.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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