ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Frederick Douglass's conflicted construction of his gender, sexual, and religious identities in each of his three autobiographies: the Narrative; My Bondage and My Freedom; and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Despite Douglass's extensively documented championing of women's rights, his view of the feminine reveals his ambivalence. In all of Douglass's antebellum autobiographical narratives and speeches, Christianity figures as the institution that prevents the realization of manhood and as an equivalent to the feminine itself. As the 'feminine', Christianity signals both passivity and promiscuity, a victim of sexually hyperactive males who have systematically raped the institution as if it were a slave woman. By the time Douglass published even his first antislavery narrative, however, the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States had long been accommodating proslavery forces within its ranks, a fact Douglass knew well.
