ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how slavery affected the experiences and conceptions of enslaved Native Americans and African Americans, slavery is also a primary component in the construction of Euro-Americans’ sexual experiences and gender norms. Coercive sex work is one of the most consistent experiences of enslaved people in the many manifestations of slavery throughout history. Thus, understanding the role of sexuality in the development and practices of slavery has been fundamental to slavery studies. The form of slavery developed by European colonists and traffickers in the Americas was lifelong and inheritable, as well as ethnically and racially based on the enslavement of Native Americans and Africans. The intimate lives of the enslaved reveal how slavery and the slave trade operated on a daily level. Enslaved persons were bound up in a matrix of control and desire that pitted their aspirations for autonomy against slaveholders’ yearning for wealth and domination.
