ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates the long history of rape and sexual trauma experienced by African American women, rooted in enslavement and reinforced by its ongoing legacies. In antebellum practice and law, enslaved women were denied bodily ownership and, therefore, the right to (refuse) consent; later, Reconstruction Era prejudices reconfigured male-imposed injustice as female-driven immorality, creating the myth of the (‘always consenting’) ‘black Jezebel’ that persists in twenty-first-century America. Drawing attention to a wealth of black female survivor testimony and pairing screen portrayals of enslavement with comparatively understudied YouTube video uploads, this chapter scrutinises enslavement’s complex and conflicted afterlives. Where nineteenth-century female slave narratives ultimately reinstate the right to (refuse) consent, screen and online portrayals of enslavement frequently either silence suffering or perpetuate antebellum and postbellum definitions of African American women as both (white) male sexual property and as sexuality’s slave; both always denied and always giving, consent, for black women in the US, becomes a contradiction. Resonating with the values of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, this chapter interrogates this conflict, uncovering the enduring influence of enslavement on African American female experience and representation.
