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Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson

Searching for Climax:Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom

Abstract

In August 2013, the newly launched YouTube channel, All Def Digital, posted a video entitled “The Harriet Tubman Sextape.” Reactions to the tape were swift and overwhelmingly negative. Decrying the desecration of the iconic Tubman and the positing of sexual transac-tions as a liberatory tool for enslaved black women, responses to the digital short shed light upon uncomfortable and complicated interpretations of the role of sex, sexuality, sexual economies, and sexual violence played in black lives during chattel slavery. Situating Tubman at the center of these dialogues offers an opportunity to pose new questions about the erotic life of slavery.

This essay is a call to explore and a foundational excavation of the sexual lives of black women during slavery, and more specifically, historical narratives of pleasure. Grappling with the erotic lives of black women during slavery offers a new lens with which to comprehend the lived experience of chattel slavery. Uncovering sensation, intimate interiority, and erotic experiences challenges a historiographical approach rooted in a twentieth century black liberation ethos and demands that we take seriously the erotic subjectivities of black women during slavery as part of an emancipatory politics. Using “The Tubman Sextape” as a point of entry, this essay examines how to create erotic maps of Tubman, and black women during slavery more broadly by engaging the historiography of slavery, popular representations of bondage, and emergent theories and conceptualizations of erotics.

On August 14, 2013, the All Def Digital YouTube channel launched with a

video titled “The Harriet Tubman Sex Tape.” Mogul and former Def Jam

170 meridians 12:2

President Russell Simmons founded All Def Digital as a space for “show-

casing the best in comedy, music, and animation,” a digital platform

reflecting the “incredible diversity of the new America” (Billboard Staff

2013).1 The three-minute-and-thirty-three-second “parody” attempts a

comedic, historical approach to Harriet Tubman’s efforts to free enslaved

black people. The plot features a fellow slave filming Tubman engaging in

several sexual acts with a white plantation owner. After her accomplice

captures these encounters on film, Tubman threatens to expose the “nigga

loving” plantation owner if he does not free those he enslaved. The

anachronistic use of modern technology, as well as words and phrases

derived from contemporary African American vernacular English, coupled

with Tubman and the slaveowner’s garish sexual acrobatics, result in a

bold but failed comedic venture.

The sketch garnered significant backlash. Criticism ranged in content,

pivoting around Tubman’s legacy as a righteous heroine and sacred

historical icon, as well as the short’s thinly veiled racism and misogyny.2

For many, depicting Tubman as a sassy, full-bodied, dark-skinned black

woman using sex as a tool pandered to enduring racialized gender stereo-

types of black women as lascivious and hypersexual. Sexualizing her and

her efforts to free slaves perverted the historical record and trivialized the

myriad strategies she used to secure freedom for enslaved blacks.3 Terms

such as “Jezebel” circulated among the digital short’s detractors as they

strove to locate this representation of Tubman within the subordinating

context of what Patricia Hill Collins has identified as the controlling image

(Collins 2008, 76–106). On the whole, critics admonished the short’s

creators for daring to find humor in the sexual horrors of chattel slavery

and the historical legacy of “Black Moses.”

In less than twenty-four hours, Russell Simmons issued an apology and

removed the video from All Def Digital. His statement explicitly con-

demned violence against women in any form (Simmons 2013). He spoke

directly to the critique that, because the video depicted Tubman as a sexual

aggressor and complicit in her own sexual exploitation, it erased or made

light of the pervasive sexual violence and exploitation black women faced

during slavery. In the video, Tubman’s sexualization involved both sexual

exchange/quid pro quo and the performance of nonnormative sexual acts.

Fictional Tubman’s complicity in and consent to this activity overshadowed

the realities of sexual violence against enslaved black women, violence that

Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson • Searching for Climax 171

included forced breeding, rape, and sexual assault by slave owners (Davis

1972; Jones 1985/2010; White 1985/1999; Morgan 2004; Glymph 2008).

Poor execution of parody aside, responses to the video suggest a collec-

tive contempt, discomfort, and disdain among African Americans for

eroticizing liberatory struggles and sexualizing revered historical figures

such as Tubman. The notion that sex could exist as a liberatory tool or as

an act of resistance for enslaved black women did not factor into the

critiques offered. For many, the positioning of Tubman as an erotic and

sexual subject was read as disrespectful and challenged a collective desire

to wholly historicize and memorialize US chattel slavery as a site of

suffering, violence, death, trauma, dehumanization, and exploitation.

This essay challenges this desire by introducing the possibility of an

erotic mapping of slavery and resistance. Tubman’s symbolic and iconic

status in American history limits exploration of what, if any, role sex and

sexuality played in her life as a revolutionary liberator. Visualizing en-

slaved blacks, and more specifically “Black Moses,” as sexual subjects

introduces sexuality, intimacy, pleasure, and erotics into a historical era in

which dehumanization and dispossession messily complicate the meaning

of consent, complicity, and agency for enslaved black people.

Through close readings of the “Harriet Tubman Sex Tape” and other

recent popular-culture narratives engaging United States slavery and

interrogating the complex interplay of ecstasy, exploitation, and sensation

immanent in the experience of slavery and freedom, this essay contends

that the iconicity of Tubman demands a limited erotic imagination in

which her sexual subjectivity becomes a casualty of her canonization as a

revolutionary historical figure. We suggest that reimagining Tubman, and

enslaved black women and free women of color more broadly, as historio-

graphically erotic subjects opens narratives of slavery to a radical black

sexual interiority. While conceding the sex tape’s failed, even offensive

execution and entrenchment in misogynistic and racist stereotypes, this

essay pushes back against an outright dismissal of the tape’s content.

Instead, this essay uses the video as a point of departure for critical

considerations of the complexities of the erotic life of enslaved blacks, an

excavation of radical black sexual interiority during chattel slavery that

contends with the erotophobia so deeply entrenched in our collective

historicization of US slavery (Rogers 1972). Moving beyond the silences

surrounding the erotic lives of enslaved blacks, we acknowledge that,

172 meridians 12:2

although the tape was problematic, it prompts necessary conversations

about black female sexuality during slavery and ways in which contempo-

rary cultural narratives can intervene.

Tubman Uncensored

The Tubman Sex Tape commences with a conversation between a fictional

Tubman and an enslaved black man. With a fictive but contemporaneous

video-recording device, an unnamed male slave and fictional Tubman

discuss whether their “plan” to gain freedom will work. The male slave

questions the plan and also offers a brief speech about his detesting being a

slave and of slavery’s enduring legacy of racial inequality that remains intact

162 years after the 1851 date in which the “plan” is set to take place. At this

point in the digital short, it remains unclear what their exact plan is;

however, the breaking of the fourth wall and the stated knowledge of what

inevitably becomes one of the many legacies of slavery, systemic racial

inequality, indicates that temporal collapsing will serve as a primary

parodying theme. The enslaved black male subject proceeds to hide in the

closet and quietly sing the Negro spiritual, “Wade in the Water.” His singing

promptly ceases upon the arrival of the white male slave master.

Upon entry, the slave master notes fictional Tubman’s friskiness, to

which fictional Tubman replies that over the years she pretended as though

she did not enjoy their special times. Although subtle, fictional Tubman’s

statement implies that the master serially rapes and sexually assaults her,

her lack of consent explicit in her subject status, and also in her expressed

lack of enjoyment. The terrain of struggle in past interactions is left

unspoken—perhaps previous attacks by the master precipitated verbal

rejection, violent struggle, or stoic endurance. Regardless, to assuage his

trepidation, fictional Tubman convinces the slave master that in this

particular encounter, she will initiate and enjoy the sexual acts.

This brief, almost buried moment in the digital short haphazardly

acknowledges the real sexual violence enslaved black women endured.

When fictional Tubman reveals that these “encounters” occurred over

several years, the short speaks back to what is often unspeakable—the

daily, lived terror of sexual violence against black women at the heart of

systems of slavery. Serial rape of enslaved black women by slave owners/

masters and forced sexual activity of all kinds, from breeding to coerced

Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson • Searching for Climax 173

intimacy, was deeply embedded in the institutionalization of white

supremacy and domination, and has become central to how we imagine

the period of slavery.4 The vast historical record of sexual violence against

enslaved black women, which informs our understanding of slavery,

renders the digital short’s project of depicting an enslaved black woman

choosing to have sex a challenging and potentially vexing cultural narrative.

Capitalizing on what the digital short identifies as the master’s desire

for fictional Tubman, the video also misses another opportunity, a moment

to situate this desire in corporeal yearning and its relationship to power. It

was possible, for example, for slave owners to desire both power over their

slaves and sexual encounters with enslaved black women. Such lusts

converge at the intersection of the erotics of power and erotic sexual

desire. Understanding the desire(s) of the master/owner within the context

of slavery places “the erotic—the personal and political dimensions of

desire,” as argued by Sharon Patricia Holland, “at the threshold of ideas

about quotidian racist practice” (Holland 2012, 9). The sex tape skirts this

terrain to its own detriment and leaves unanswered the question of how we

begin to imagine the erotic within the broader historical context of

systemic and far-reaching subjugation.

When the sexual acts commence between fictional Tubman and the slave

master, the lighting changes and a somewhat aggressive sexual encounter

transpires. The first sexual position portrayed is that in which fictional

Tubman lies on her stomach while slightly elevated and the slave master

penetrates her vagina from behind while on his knees.5 He rapidly enters

her during this first sexual act while asking if fictional Tubman “likes it”

and commanding her “to pick dat cotton.” Tubman’s affirming responses

appear to further excite the slave master. The next position, arguably a

queer act deviating from the roster of “acceptable” heteropatriarchal sex

acts, is one in which fictional Tubman appears to use a strap-on and anally

penetrates the slave master. She penetrates him vigorously and rapidly

while also asking him “Who’s massa now” and exclaiming “I’mma set you

free.” The final sexual act features fictional Tubman on her knees on top of

the slave master as he vaginally penetrates her. Her body writhes as she

appears to reach a sexual climax.

The digital short recounts a sexual encounter that includes sexual

pleasure, consent, and “humorous” references to both the slave master’s

and fictional Tubman’s positions within chattel slavery. Swiftly moving

174 meridians 12:2

from the acknowledgment of ongoing rape and sexual exploitation, the

Tubman Sex Tape depicts seemingly consensual sex acts between fictional

Tubman and her slave master. Immediately after the sexual encounter,

fictional Tubman directs the satiated slave master to free the slaves on his

plantation. He attempts to remind fictional Tubman that she is still his

property and that no one would believe her if she publicly recounted their

tryst. His confidence in societal disbelief is palpable, and his assertion is

prescient. Racial and sexual norms then and now continue to identify

black women as undesirable, animalistic, and unattractive while also

presuming black female sexual availability and licentiousness. The

moment also gestures toward a slave owner’s ultimate power over his

chattel, which included sexual access (Jacobs 1861; McLaurin 1993; King

2007; Glymph 2008; Jones-Rogers 2012).

Given the power dynamic, fictional Tubman and the enslaved black

male’s decision to document the encounter becomes a shrewd strategy that

harkens back to slaves’ determination to seek justice for assaults on their

person. By presenting evidence—in the form of the film in the digital short

and in the form of testimony or through direct appeals to white and black

allies in historical reality—slaves could expose the prurient acts at the

heart of bondage (Schafer 1987; McLaurin 1993; Rothman 2003;

Schweninger 2009). When the male slave in the closet peeks out with the

camera, the slave owner recognizes what is now at stake. With this sex

tape, Tubman and the enslaved black male have what she identifies as

“leverage.” The slave master appears compelled to free the slaves. Fictional

Tubman uses the slave master’s sexual desire for her to negotiate emanci-

pation for herself and others. She purposefully enters into a sexual

micro-economy to secure freedom.

Although much is known about Tubman’s life in comparison to what we

know about most enslaved black women, the historical record does not

indicate that she exchanged sex for freedom, material goods, or social

status. Sex was not a tool historically associated with Tubman’s liberatory

strategies.6 Her name does not come to mind even when scholars discuss

the black family in slavery and freedom. She is not known for being a wife,

although she entered into two long-term unions with black men. In 1849,

when she escaped the first time, she left behind a husband, John Tubman, a

free man of color. Two years later, she returned for him only to discover he

had remarried. Her second marriage did not occur until after the Civil War

Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson • Searching for Climax 175

had ended and John Tubman had died. In 1869, she married twenty-five-

year-old Charles Nelson Davis, a man twenty years her junior. Their

marriage lasted almost twenty years and also only ended with his death

(Clinton 2004; Larson 2004).

Tubman’s sexual subjectivity and erotic life remain, however, largely

unrecovered. These formal relationships, culled by historians from her

1869 authorized biography (Bradford 1869), subsequent narratives of her

life, archival sources, and interviews with her descendants, do not provide

insight into how and if sex and sexuality played a major role in her life as a

slave, freedwoman, or liberator. Tubman did not draw great attention to

either sexual violence enacted on her as a slave or to her sexual or domestic

life with John and Nelson.7 In comparison, Tubman’s contemporary,

Sojourner Truth, describes her forced marriage to Thomas, a slave of her

owner, despite her long-term relationship with a slave on a neighboring

plantation (Gilbert 1850; Washington 2009, 52–55). In the narrative of her

enslavement, Harriet Jacobs described sexual violence at the hands of her

master and his wife, as well as negotiations she made to escape from his

grip, even entering a sexual liaison with another white man. As Aliyyah I.

Abdur-Rahman notes, Jacobs “presents her experiences in and escape from

bondage as a tale of sexual pursuit, sexual harassment, sexual compro-

mise, and sexual freedom” (Abdur-Rahman 2012, 2).

Tubman’s position as a sacred historical figure limits our ability to think

about her as an erotic subject with desires and intimate needs situated in

the profane. Public outcry against any suggestion that sex may have served

as a liberatory tool for enslaved blacks or, in related fashion, that sexual

exchanges among slaveowners and enslaved blacks blurred boundaries

among consent, power, pleasure, desire, coercion, and violence obscures

the real possibility that sex could function as a tool of resistance as well as

a vehicle for affirming humanity. Although we do not know if Tubman ever

exchanged sex for freedom while enslaved or during her escape and rescue

missions from slavery, what roles did sex, intimacy, and desire play in how

she sustained and affirmed her humanity? What roles can contemporary

cultural narratives play in examining sex, intimacy, and desire in her life

and during slavery?

176 meridians 12:2

Sex, Family, and History

Visceral reactions to cultural narratives suggesting enslaved women took

pleasure in or initiated sexual intimacy stem in part from ways in which

United States histories of slavery, emancipation, and black political

consciousness have invested in circumscribing black female sexuality to

heterosexual family units. In history and memory, the enslaved black

family is abused but resilient, violated but transcendent, heteropatriarchal

but content to be so. Visualizing an enslaved black woman choosing to

engage in sex acts outside of a committed union with a black man, even if

for an emancipatory purpose, betrays the supposedly inviolate slave family.

This outrage, however, and the straight, nuclear enslaved family it is

meant to protect or defend, is a construction that crystallized in twentieth-

century policy-makers’ condemnation of matrifocal black family units

(USDOL 1965; Reid-Pharr 1999; Miller 2008; Nyong’o 2009). Idealized, in

part, as a contrast to the history and memory of chattel bondage, slaves and

free people of color may have envisioned themselves as part of far more

expansive kinship networks and theorized intimacy beyond the bounds of

heteronormative desire (Potter 1859; Jacobs 1861; Abdur-Rahman 2006;

Winters 2009; Foster 2011). Unfortunately, a particular vision of black

liberation remains tied to a cultural-nationalist and state-sanctioned model

of sex and family, informing both historical memory and the methodologies

we use to interrogate the lived experiences of slaves and free people of color.

Remapping Tubman as an erotic subject requires unpacking and

rejecting the heteropatriarchal black family as morally ascendant and

idyllic for enslaved blacks and free people of color and understanding

slavery’s sexual economy of desire, exploitation, power, and pleasure

(Davis 2002). Even Tubman’s documented partnerships, which appear to fit

neatly within a heteropatriarchal imagining of black families, trouble

idyllic models of the nuclear family. In the historiography of slavery, some

of the most contentious debates have centered around sex and the black

family in bondage. Just as with the Tubman Sex Tape, discussions re-

sponded as much to current events as to the reality of kinship and commu-

nity among enslaved and free people of color in the United States.

In 1965, when Daniel Moynihan published the controversial report, “The

Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” he argued that the black

population in the United States existed in a “tangle of pathology” inherited

Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson • Searching for Climax 177

from “three centuries of unimaginable mistreatment” (USDOL 1965).8

Slavery, the report noted, prevented black laborers from forming stable

households, which, in their instability, took on “a fatherless matrifocal

(mother-centered) pattern.” Slaves’ inability to form two-parent, male-

headed households led to the prevalence of female-headed households in the

black community, stunting modern black socioeconomic advancement.

The Moynihan Report encouraged an outpouring of critique and a burst of

fresh historical writing on slave family life.9 Moynihan intended to draw

attention to the economic plight of black families, but the report’s assertion

that female-headed households created pathology, degraded personality,

and prevented slaves from forming stable kinship connections caused

immediate outrage. Writing against the report, historians John Blassin-

game, Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman, and, later, others like Brenda

Stevenson, Deborah Gray White, and Ira Berlin, produced a canon of work

revisiting the experiences of enslaved and free black families during slavery

and into emancipation. Basing their studies on nineteenth-century slave

narratives, archival research in federal and state census records, Freedmen’s

Bureau records, and Works Progress Administration interviews with

ex-slaves, historians outlined the central role family played in slave life.

For these revisionist scholars, defining the slave family while avoiding

pathologizing black households proved difficult. Historians and policy-

makers wrote in the face of stereotypes of black families and communities

as disorderly, subservient, indecent, and immoral (Odum 1910; Gutman

1975, 184). Many remained attached to the underlying assumption behind

Moynihan’s thesis: that family stability required family structures to be

comprised of two-parent (male-female) households headed by men. Slave

family proponents labored to prove that bondspeople formed such nuclear

unions in the face of great hardship. In the most well-known study from

this period, Herbert Gutman argued that most enslaved families formed

two-parent households and maintained connections with surprising

success, even after one or the other parent was removed beyond the

plantation on which his or her family resided. Naming patterns and the

presence of grandparents or other extended family members further

suggested that family remained central to black life despite the very real

violence of bondage (Gutman 1975). At the time, illustrating the impor-

tance to slaves of nuclear and extended family offered the most direct and

178 meridians 12:2

effective challenge to Moynihan proponents. Alternative models of family,

such as matrifocal family units, remained much maligned.

Implicit in the revisionist challenge to the Moynihan Report was the

toxic nature of matrifocal family structures, which itself spoke to a larger

theme in policy, history, and sociology at the time: the presumed emascu-

lation of black men. It was not uncommon to find prominent sociologists

concluding, “The Negro male has, in a sense, been the victim of social and

economic emasculation which has perpetuated and reinforced the matri-

archal Negro family structure created by slavery” (Hauser 1965). Scholars

were preoccupied with what they perceived as the threat of black matriar-

chy and lascivious morals of black women. At best, slaves went to superhu-

man lengths to form large, male-headed, two-parent households of

extended kin. At worst, slaves attempted to form two parent-households

under fathers but survived female-headed households as best they could.

Black feminist thinkers, including scholars like Angela Davis, Deborah

Gray White, and Darlene Clark Hine, deconstructed the concern with

matriarchy by attacking stereotypes and posing new methodologies for

studying black women’s lives. A landmark study exposed the illicit sex at

the heart of the “myth of the matriarchate.” According to the myth,

enslaved women emasculated enslaved men by denying them their sexual,

reproductive, and physical labor and engaging in illicit sex with slaveown-

ers for easy workloads. Far from emasculating black men, Davis argued,

the gender dynamics of skilled enslaved labor afforded men more opportu-

nities for mobility off plantations, higher income, and special favor within

plantation hierarchies. As women, enslaved women could not occupy

similar positions, leaving them more likely to engage in grueling field

labor, and they did not have the protection of their femininity when labor

was demanded. Enslaved women also continued to perform the bulk of

domestic labor within slave families. For Davis, far from emasculating

black men, enslaved women suffered under multiple tiers of oppression

unique to their gender and status, including rape by owners.

Deborah Gray White likewise dismantled the related trope of the

licentious “Jezebel in the United States.” White located Jezebel as part of a

gendered racial ideology born of three related historical processes—Euro-

pean writers’ bias when encountering African women on the African

continent; enslaved women’s subject position as laborers and chattel; and

racialized standards of propriety meant to maintain slave order (White

Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson • Searching for Climax 179

1985/1999). According to White, respectable women were “covered”

physically and legally by their husbands, but enslaved women were

“handled” by owners, purchasers, white male consorts, and those awaiting

their opportunity to be one or all of the above.

Covering and handling defined the distance between propriety and

respectability, access and availability. Instead of being seen as an unjust

fact of black women’s lives, the exposed nature of black life confirmed

stereotypes of black women as oversexualized, titillating, and threatening.

Sexual violence so pervaded black life from slavery’s inception unto its

conclusion, Darlene Clark Hine has argued, that a necessary “culture of

dissemblance,” or secrecy and silence, emerged among black women. This,

Hine suggested, was why it remained difficult to tear down myths of

matriarchy and to uncover more complicated stories of black women’s

survival both in the archive and in real life (Hine 1997, 47).

Struggling to recover sexual violence and center it in histories of bondage,

Angela Davis, White, Hine, and those who followed emphasized the

brutality of rape and its impact on enslaved and free women of color. At its

heart, gendered violence was fundamental to maintaining slave-owner

power over slaves and made enslaved and free women of color violated

products and producers of tangled genealogies. However, theses of black

women as victims left little room for exploring black women in the throes of

sex acts ranging from outright violence to consensual couplings. Davis’s

analysis of sexual assault is instructive of these tensions. For Davis, slave

owners broke enslaved women who were central to nurturing revolutionary

spirit in slave communities by “subjecting [them] to the most elemental form

of terrorism distinctively suited for the female: rape,” but her challenge

transformed all sex acts with slave owners into degradation (Davis 1972, 96).

In truth, black women’s erotic lives do not stand apart from a project of

liberation. During slavery, by law and fact, their sexual selves remained

harnessed to the communities they were part of, subject to and challeng-

ing unspoken polemics of heteropatriarchal community politics. Enslaved

and free women of color’s encounters with slave owners’ phalluses were

never just encounters between him as master and her as bonded subject.

Such encounters occurred between him and her as a black woman repre-

senting the enslaved community, as a black woman already claimed as

wife, mother, sister, and daughter by a broader network of chosen kin. But

180 meridians 12:2

this tension returns us to the importance of excavating enslaved and free

women of color’s erotic lives during the period of slavery.

To find intimate encounters beyond the dialogic of slave-owner power is

to envision enslaved and free black female sexuality as a thing beyond the

Encounter, a thing belonging to itself, whether stolen away, self-purchased, or

manumitted (Tinsley 2008). It is to reject the characterization of sex acts by

or perpetrated on enslaved and free women of color as betrayals of invisible

black men or of embodied communities in bondage. It is instead to

visualize black female sex as flesh and sensation in bodies betrayed and

violated, participating and initiating. To know when and where she

climaxes, the whole race may climax with her.

Sex suffused the history of slavery, both in the contemporary moment and

in theories of emasculating black matriarchy centuries later. Jennifer Mor-

gan’s history of women and reproduction stated outright the distressing

reality of bondage—that across the diaspora, black women performed and

embodied the symbolic labor necessary for the reproduction of slave laborers

because slave status was literally made in their wombs and followed their

mothers (Morgan 2004). Joseph Miller, drawing connections between

“slaving” on the African continent and its emergence in the Americas,

described slavery and slave trading as a “history of women” kidnapped,

“domiciled and dominated” across oceans and continents (Miller 2008). Work

by Dylan Penningroth problematizes the extent to which kinship between

family or community members could be assumed based upon biological ties.

In Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-

Century South (Penningroth 2004), Penningroth suggests biological and

marital ties played an important role, but individuals also made distinct

“claims of kinship” well beyond nuclear and extended units, institutions of

marriage, or genealogies. Centering a figure such as Tubman in Pennin-

groth’s thesis, we might more thoughtfully engage when, how, and why she

married both of her husbands. Tubman’s notions of kinship also expanded

well beyond that of her biological and marital ties to encompass elders,

orphans, freedpeople, and runaways with a desire for liberation.

Many are likewise returning to the question of sexual violence during

slavery. Studying sex across race and status, Tiya Miles, Joshua Rothman,

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, and Jennifer Spear reject binaries of consent or

nonconsent (Rothman 2003; Miles 2006; Spear 2009; Myers 2011). Work by

Trevor Burnard, Thomas Foster, and forthcoming work by Stephanie

Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson • Searching for Climax 181

Jones-Rogers interprets intimate violence during slavery along a further

spectrum of straight and queer acts (Burnard 2004; Foster 2011; Jones-

Rogers forthcoming). Such scholarship takes seriously slave-owners’

desire and slaves’ affective experience of bondage, employing microhis-

torical analyses to penetrate slave and free households, workspaces, and

bedrooms. Provocative and challenging, it moves questions of rape and

consent beyond slave-owner–slave binaries, into a terrain of intimate

violence that crosses gender, race, and status.

To those impressed with binaries of liberation or exploitation, this more

recent work gives the appearance of messiness or exceptionalism. It does not

resound with clear political goals. It suggests collaboration with masters

and overseers, despite reflecting humanity and life. Those ambivalent about

or even outright hostile to the turn toward chronicling the erotic life of

slavery may concede that perhaps some individuals operated along a terrain

of pleasure and consent, but certainly not most slaves or most families.

Despite the increasing rigor with which scholars are approaching slavery and

erotics, the pervasiveness of intellectual skepticism reflects how deeply

entrenched narratives of violation, violence, and trauma are to our under-

standing of black female sexuality. Emphasizing subjugation, exploitation,

and dehumanization, however, cannot preclude fuller incorporation of

pleasure and erotic possibility in the lives of enslaved black women.

If we take black female sexuality seriously, we end up at two substantive

conclusions. First, present-day constructions of black female sexuality are

inextricably tied to slavery. The ravages of blackness, the notion of race and

its existence, are wrapped up almost entirely with the afterimage of

slavery’s “monstrous intimacies” and the shackling of black female

reproductive power to labor needed to produce plantation commodities

(Sharpe 2010). The grammar of slavery conceived in black women’s wombs

spilled outward into social and political institutions, as well as ideologies

of heredity and identity (Spillers 1987). Second, black women had sex, and

not just with the heads of their households, whether white or black

men—not just, even, with men.

The archive is self-evident. Sex acts happened often during slavery.

Political goals of the moment do not rewrite the sexual lives, desires, and

choices of enslaved and free women of color, but they can obscure those

lives to our detriment.

182 meridians 12:2

Imagining Sexual Subjects: The Unnamed, the Mandingo, and the Sugar Sphinx

Along with historical studies based in archival research, fiction, film, art,

and digital or new media offer expressive mediums and unique points of

entry for an erotic mapping of chattel slavery. The Tubman Sex Tape, an

example of digital or new media grappling with histories of slavery, repre-

sents a failed mapping. Other texts, however, may provide incisive insights.

These texts can range from the cinematic to the popular and comedic, and

even to large-scale art installations grappling with the enduring legacies of

chattel slavery. Three recent texts have reckoned with how to engage black

female sexuality even as they too risk failed erotic mappings: the release of

the film 12 Years a Slave (2013), Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update Skit

on slave rape featuring staff writer Leslie Jones, and the opening of artist

Kara Walker’s A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby.

Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave touches upon this complicated terrain of

erotic possibility. Released two months after the Tubman Sex Tape digital

short, the award-winning film retells the 1853 slave narrative of Solomon

Northup, a free man of color kidnapped and enslaved for twelve years in

the Red River region of Louisiana (Northup 1853). Although largely

pivoting around Northup’s experiences, the film narrates the sexual

experiences of a number of enslaved black women. During his ordeal,

Northup encounters Eliza, once favored by her owner but sold south

together with their two children. He also meets Patsey, a woman serially

raped by her master and subject to daily, jealous assaults from his wife.

Mistress Harriet Shaw, a third character, describes using her lurid sexual

partnership with her owner to secure status for herself within the bound-

aries of the plantation.

However, the film departs from the narrative in depicting Northup in a

prurient sex act with an unnamed enslaved woman. In the very first scene

of the film, the audience encounters an enslaved woman lying beside

Northup in what appears to be mass housing of some kind. She turns to

him and initiates an act of mutual masturbation, forcefully guiding him to

please her sexually with his hand or hands. After some resistance, he

acquiesces, bringing her to climax. The sight of her, anonymous and

silently demanding to be pleasured, is visually unfamiliar and a departure

from the original text.

Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson • Searching for Climax 183

This moment conjures discomfort, not merely because of her forceful-

ness, but because her desire for sexual satiation finishes with her tears.

The arousing sensation she seeks brings both physical pleasure and

emotional pain. Her sexual encounter unveils her desire to be felt, seen,

and aroused. Yet she cannot fully reconcile her sexual act with her emo-

tional well-being. This filmic encounter with an enslaved black woman’s

interior life offers a point of departure for imagining the ambiguity of

creating sexual lives and performing sexual acts that might fulfill a desire

for pleasurable sensation. These sensations arguably offered fuel for

surviving slavery’s horrors, provided corporeal and embodied resistance to

dehumanization, and caused real anguish. For enslaved blacks, “senti-

ment, enjoyment, affinity, will, and desire facilitated domination, subjuga-

tion, and terror,” but enslaved and free women of color’s everyday lives did

not exist outside of space for desire, solace, and material comfort (Hart-

man 1997, 5).

Two months after 12 Years a Slave received the Best Picture Oscar, Saturday

Night Live featured a Weekend Update Skit with staff writer Leslie Jones.

Reflecting on the naming of 12 Years a Slave’s rising star Lupita Nyong’o as

People Magazine’s Most Beautiful Woman in the World, Leslie Jones joked

about the value of black female bodies within chattel slavery’s sexual

economies. Describing herself as a “Mandingo” and noting her larger size

and physical strength, Jones stated that enslaved black women with her

physical stature would have been valued over the slender and diminutive

Nyong’o.

Lamenting her devaluation as a desirable body since slavery, Jones taps

into histories of the productive and reproductive labor of enslaved black

female bodies. Jones’s conflation of desirability and utility drew on one of

the complex dynamics extant for enslaved black women: the intersection of

their desires, desirability, and perceived utility. Enslaved women’s intimate

and integral roles in slave communities interconnected with chattel slavery

sexual economies. Jones’s self-deprecating humor argued that slavery

offered racial, gender, and sexual logics that made her desirable but not

necessarily for her own erotic or sexual appeal.

The skit received considerable backlash in social media and prompted a

series of tweets from Jones about black audiences being unable to laugh at

our trauma. While her pained interiority became evident in a series of

tweets, the collective memory of black women’s exploitation and sexual

184 meridians 12:2

violations at the hands of slave owners and even fellow enslaved people

was also invoked. Her insistence on utility as many black women’s only

access to notions of beauty, sexual desirability, and, as a result, physical

intimacy foreclosed opportunities to explore enslaved women’s sexuality

outside of productive, reproductive, and sexual labor. Jones’s rendering of

slavery as a historical era in which certain black women were desirable

does, however, provide an entry point for thinking about the complexities

of enslaved black women’s sexual lives.

The skit, much like the Tubman Sex Tape, missed an opportunity to

satirize ways that enslaved women’s desirability pivoted around their

utility. It relied on black women being chosen and not choosing. The focus

on how others perceived black women sexually becomes the salient point,

and Jones offers no comedic speculation on what, how, and who enslaved

women themselves desired. By doing so, the skit simultaneously called

upon the visceral pain of black women’s violation and ignored ways that

enslaved black women could experience desire, sexual intimacy, and

romantic partnership. Although appearing to reject dissemblance, Jones’s

skit and the social media conversations that followed contributed to

ongoing anxieties about black female sexuality and to perpetual deafening

silences around the erotic lives of enslaved black women.

Just days after this skit, on May 10, 2014, Kara Walker’s A Subtlety opened in

the industrial space that was once the Domino Sugar Factory in New York.

The art installation filled the former warehouse with sculptural confections

of black bodies. Fifteen molasses-covered statues of young boys with baskets

of unrefined sugar, each five feet in height, dot the warehouse. Superimposed

against molasses-coated walls was the “Sugar Sphinx,” a white sugar-coated

sphinx, over thirty-five feet high, which comprised this massive artistic

rendering. “An homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have

refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New

World,” the exhibit sacrifices subtlety in favor of provocative nuance and

visualizing complicated historical narratives (Walker 2014). Although not a

departure from Walker’s investment in prevailing themes of race, sexuality,

slavery, power, violence, trauma, and the grotesque, her focus on the

sugar-cane fields of the New World broadened her terrain for grappling with

the realities, vestiges, and historical memories of slavery beyond the bound-

aries of historical memory in the United States. Both explicitly and implicitly

noting the importance of sugar and the exploitation of black slave labor for

Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson • Searching for Climax 185

building wealth in the Americas, the installation depicted historical truths

about the necessity of confronting the violated black bodies upon which the

wealth of New World nations accumulated.

Arguably, the most controversial and provocative part of the installation

was the white, sugar-coated sphinx. With a kerchief on her head, the Sugar

Sphinx, with full lips, wide nose, and exposed breasts, buttocks, and labia

conjures erotic, violent, quotidian, visual, corporeal, and somatic hersto-

ries of enslaved black women. With her buttocks raised in the air and

positioned as resting on her knees and elbows, the sculpture simultane-

ously evokes copulation, trauma, violability, pleasure, and historical

iconicity. The Sugar Sphinx’s left hand forms a figa symbol, a diasporic

hand gesture meaning both “fuck you” and “good luck” in Brazil (Walker

2014). In interviews, Walker noted “figa” was also crude slang for a vagina

and a symbol of fertility. Each interpretation offers a unique site of inquiry

for examining the erotic life of slavery.

Walker describes the sphinx “as this woman-like creature or guardian of

the city, the keeper of the riddle, the devourer of heroes” (Walker 2014).

Resisting the over-determination of the Sugar Sphinx as a visual commen-

tary on the controlling image or racial/gender caricature of the mammy,

Walker insists upon multiple readings of the Sugar Sphinx’s story, and

subsequently, enslaved black women’s stories. Walker does not foreclose a

reading of the Sugar Sphinx beyond the asexual mammy caricature, which is

perhaps the most common reading of a black woman with a kerchief tied

around her head surrounded by young children. Her naked body, her elevated

posterior, her hyper-visible labia, and the figa symbol made by her hand

present multiple entry points for other readings of the Sugar Sphinx, and of

enslaved black female sexuality. The Sugar Sphinx compels the viewer to

encounter the black female body as subject and object, as laborer, desired,

and commodified; as desiring, erotic, and violated; as visible but illegible; as

mysterious, unknowable but knowing; as ambivalent and as powerful. The

virility of the Sugar Sphinx is palpable, but her desires and intimate longings

remain mysterious, though not unknowable or unspeakable.

Similar to other Walker exhibits, reactions to the piece range from critical

acclaim to utter revulsion (DuBois Shaw 2004). Walker’s fascination with

slavery as a site of engagement, and more specifically, her attempts to move

beyond caricatures and archetypes of black female bodies through unapolo-

getically creating scenes of subjection, subjugation, violence, and ecstasy,

186 meridians 12:2

can cause disgust and ambivalence among spectators. With A Subtlety, the

centrality of an exposed black woman of such immensity forces viewers to

grapple with black female flesh as a product of enslavement.

Public reactions to the Sugar Sphinx also reinvigorate cultural narratives

of black womanhood and the important role digital and social media play

in historical constructions of slavery. As spectators move through the

exhibit, they are invited to take pictures and share their experiences on

popular social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Some viewers pretended to fondle the Sugar Sphinx’s breasts or labia.

Others mimed smacking and licking her buttocks. While it may be difficult

to imagine a collective understanding of this piece as a commentary on the

erotic and sexual subjectivity of enslaved black women, comical or hyper-

sexual engagements with the Sugar Sphinx gesture toward a continued

objectification of black female bodies.

The ease with which the Sugar Sphinx becomes an object of desire,

ridicule, and hyper-sexualization emphasizes the need for a new grammar

of black female bodies. The perpetual objectification of black women’s

bodies stems from histories of violence and dehumanization. However, an

inability to account for and articulate how enslaved women experienced

desire and intimacy has also resulted in stunted conversations about the

erotic life of slavery. Walker’s Subtlety offered a challenge even as it

signaled a growing interest in thoughtfully contemplating an erotic map of

slavery founded on the radical black sexual interiority of black women.

Pleasuring Black Moses

We cannot debunk or ignore the historical reality that coerced and noncon-

sensual sexual acts predominated as weapons of racial terror and sexual

subjection. We can, however, ask what happens if the “regularity of violation

transform[s] it into an arrangement or a liaison from which the captive

female can extract herself?” (Hartman 1997, 85). When Hartman ponders

this question of whether the arrangements that enslaved black women

negotiated with their owners implied “submission, resignation, complicity,

desire, or the extremity of constraint,” she concludes that the context of

domination renders desire the least likely possibility for what enslaved black

women could experience. Without question, the hierarchical and property-

based relationship between enslaved black women and slave masters/owners

Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson • Searching for Climax 187

complicates any facile understanding of consensual and desirable sexual

relationships. This imperious relationship, nevertheless, does not preclude

sex acts from being liberatory tools for enslaved and free women of color.

The relationship between patriarchal and racial subjugation does not

eradicate erotic capital as a vehicle through which enslaved black women

could and did imagine attaining freedom. On a more quotidian level,

finding moments of sexual pleasure with oneself, a partner, or partners

meant rejecting the dehumanizing status designation of property. As with

expressive adornment, dance and play, music and song, to feel, to be felt,

to have erotic sensations was to steal bodies back from masters (White and

White 1998; Camp 2004). To search for this in chattel slavery by interrogat-

ing these possibilities in the archive and in film and new media does not

lessen the traumatic, terrorizing, and horrific nature of slavery. Such

inquiries allow for the interior lives and erotic subjectivities of enslaved

blacks to matter. The Tubman Sex Tape trivialized the sexual violations

enslaved black women endured, but inadvertently opened the door for a

more public conversation about sexual transactions as an emancipatory

strategy. It broke silences around ways enslaved blacks negotiated their

sexual subjectivities and erotic desires. As far as we know, Tubman did not

exchange sex for freedom, but more than likely, she did have erotic desires

and sought physical pleasure.

Contemporarily, the ways we think about Harriet Tubman make her

larger than life. She is Black Moses, the Conductor, and the General who

organized the battle at Combahee. She is the woman with the shotgun at

your back, in case you think about going back (Badu 2007). She is “Ameri-

ca’s most malleable icon” (Sernett 2007). To suit our purposes, she needs to

be larger than life—not unlike Walker’s Sugar Sphinx.

As a result, we do not consider her documented marriages as moments for

erotic speculation. We do not reflect on the experience of being married as a

slave to a free man of color and the demands exacted upon her as a lover,

wife, and laborer. These roles intersect in painful and poignant ways, as

Leslie Jones invoked in her skit. Her role as wife proved powerful enough for

her to return south for John and to attempt to support his journey north. It is

easier to consider her bound by duty or loyalty, religiosity or love. It is more

difficult to imagine she returned out of lust or loneliness. We must ponder: is

desire enough to propel a body across slave lines?

188 meridians 12:2

We do not imagine the emotional violence she endured as she left people

behind, although we know she returned for loved ones, time after time. We

do not imagine what it might mean to pull the shotgun out and know,

perhaps, she would need to shoot someone she had just spent a consider-

able amount of energy guiding through the woods by the light of the North

Star. We do not imagine the pushback she encountered as a former slave

and a woman leading men into battle, convincing them to follow her, that

she knew best what to do and what the plan should be. We do not imagine

her as someone confused by the stars, sitting in the dark wondering which

direction was the right way to go. We cannot fathom the painful knot of

her muscles on her journeys, tension called into being because she did not

dare relax, jumped at every sound, was a woman under siege.

We do not imagine the adrenaline rush she may have felt, the pleasure she

might have taken in dodging slave catchers, patrols, police. We do not

imagine nights where she may have touched herself to extend the feeling,

slipping her fingers inside her clothes and between her thighs to hang on to

the sparkling rush, maybe feeling a bit desperate, maybe feeling a bit free,

maybe not caring who saw, maybe self-conscious and curled around her own

body in the dark shadows of the trees. Maybe she cried afterwards. Maybe

she smiled. We dare not ask. We do not imagine the men who, feeling that

same rush, may have reached out to her for some relief, for mutual, tactile

acknowledgment of their presence, their escape, their arrival and existence

in the world. We do not imagine the women who did the same.

We do not consider her second marriage to Nelson Davis, a younger

man, her Tea Cake, a marriage that remains a grossly understudied site for

thinking through Tubman’s erotic subjectivity. Although this second

marriage supports a framing of Tubman as invested in sustaining a

heteropatriarchal family structure, one could also consider the sexual

agency she exercised when deciding to partner with a significantly younger

man. We do not ponder what it means that they met during the Civil War

but would wait to be married until after the battle dust cleared, when she

had time, when she returned to New York, when John was dead.

Despite her first husband’s rejection, one could reflect on feelings of

longing and desire for romantic satiation that Tubman may have endured

during her separation from John, before meeting Davis. We indulge a bit in

the details of her first wedding as a freedwoman, the church where it was

held, the announcements registered, the dignitaries present (Clinton

Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson • Searching for Climax 189

2004). We do not take the same pleasure in envisioning her wedding night.

We do not envision her wedding night at all—or twenty years of nights

thereafter. We lack imagination. The archive demands imagination.

Instead, she is Black Moses. Undefiled by carnal desire, she is a black

revolutionary body impervious to human needs and wants. She is a trope to be

used and deployed, refashioned from being into memory and elevated to icon.

Conclusion

The Tubman Sex Tape dislocated Black Moses from her iconic status and

consequently sparked outrage rooted in both the perpetuation of historical

lies and a shared desire for an unmarred and unsexed heroine. At best the

failed execution of the digital short opened the door for more thoughtful

considerations of the legacy of Harriet Tubman and of the role sex played

in the lives and emancipatory efforts of enslaved black women. Although

depicting only a brief acknowledgment of the pervasive sexual violence

enslaved and free women of color endured, the Tubman Sex Tape intro-

duces the possibility that sexual transactions, erotic sensations, and

intimate relationships complicated by complex webs of desire and power

factored into resistance, survival, and liberatory strategies. The ability to

feel through sensory stimulation such as erotic touch is a tool of survival

and an affective act of asserting one’s humanity.

An erotic mapping of Tubman and enslaved black women more broadly

must plumb the archive for the lived reality of sex during slavery. It must

push against presentist concerns about systemic racial inequality and

white supremacy that have circumscribed historical explorations of the

intimate and interior lives of enslaved blacks and free people of color.

Black female sexuality during the period of slavery cannot remain unex-

plored, especially as stereotypes about black women’s sexual lives persist

then and now. Whereas pursuit, compromise, and harassment fit within

extant historical narratives about pervasive intimate violence during US

chattel slavery, sexual freedom remains largely untouched as a critical

space for understanding the lived experiences of enslaved people.

What did ecstasy look like for newly emancipated blacks? Can we

imagine ecstatic moments for slaves, if only brief and painfully ephemeral?

Do sexual transactions as vehicles for emancipation unfavorably distort

the noble remembering of slave rebellion and resistance? These questions

190 meridians 12:2

call for an erotic and sexual mapping of slavery that centers on the feelings

and experiences of enslaved blacks and free people of color. Tubman offers

a point of departure for this exploration because of the breadth of knowl-

edge about her life. She is an ideal historical figure with whom to begin

excavating a history of black women’s sexual lives in the United States.

(Re)mapping Tubman means recovering a history of enslavement, sex,

and kinship far beyond heteropatriarchal family structures. It means

encountering black women as consorts, engaged in a range of sexual acts,

including transactional sex, and finding pleasure in ways still difficult to

imagine. Future research methodologies can center black women’s sexual

lives by unpacking the labor enslaved and free women engaged in across a

spectrum of intimate behavior. Furthermore, if scholars approach the

history of enslavement as though sex acts occurred in fields and forests,

slave quarters and urban alleys, across status, race, and gender, radical

histories of black community can be created.

Tubman framed as an erotic subject speaks to the impossibility of static

intimacies and sexualities. Cultural narratives, even when problematic,

offensive, or disturbing, can serve as ripe sites for imagining and mining

enslaved black erotic subjects. If we approach the history of enslavement as

though orgasms, wetness, and writhing, pulsating, aroused bodies

existed, our understanding of enslaved and free women of color’s lives will

begin to defy slaveowners’ conceptions of black sexuality. Instead of

depicting enslaved and free women of color as once again becoming the

property of someone else, scholars must challenge themselves to write

fully actualized, erotic, historical subjects.

NoTeS1. All Def Digital, http://www.youtube.com/user/AllDefDigital (accessed August

15, 2014).2. For key examples see Danielle, 2013; Starr 2013.3. Although testimony varies, historians agree Tubman completed at least ten trips

south and freed some seventy slaves as an “abductor” leading slaves north to freedom. In January 1863, Tubman also served as an informant, strategist, and commander with “several men under her” with the Second South Carolina Volunteers when they raided Combahee River plantations during the Civil War. The Combahee River raid alone freed over 750 slaves. Tubman’s other abolition-ist activities included touring and retelling her story to a wide range of

Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson • Searching for Climax 191

audiences, generating publicity for the abolitionist movement (Clinton 2004, 167; Larson 2004, 99–101; see also Humez 2006; Horton 2013).

4. Angela Davis writes, “In confronting the black woman as adversary in a sexual contest, the master would be subjecting her to the most elemental form of terrorism distinctively suited for the female: rape” (Davis 1972, 96). Thirty-two years later, Jennifer L. Morgan reflected on the same: “Slaveowners ‘coupled’ men and women, named them husband and wife, and foresaw their own future in the bellies of enslaved workers” (Morgan 2004, 105). In Morgan, we see analysis of intimate violence under bondage moving beyond slave owners as rapists to incorporate acts engendering reproductive violence more broadly, not merely because enslaved women, as subjects, were accessible but because the logic of slavery demanded it. For more on slave breeding in the antebellum South and a useful methodology for uncovering sexual violence in the archive, see Jennings 1990. On slaves as sexual artifacts and products exchanged via the internal slave trade of the antebellum era, see Baptist 2001.

5. In African American vernacular English and more specifically among those of the hip-hop generation, this position is referred to as “doggstyle.”

6. Unsurprisingly, formal documentation of sexual relationships, exchanges, and dynamics under US chattel slavery is limited, but documentation is there. For a sampling, see Jennings 1990; Clinton and Gillespie 1997; Baptist 2001; Spear 2009. Along with the work of the aforementioned scholars, see work presented at the conference “Sexuality and Slavery: Exposing the History of Enslaved People in the Americas,” convened by Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris on November 11–12, 2011. Work from this conference promises to shed greater light on the relationship between sex acts and sexual economies of slavery (Berry and Harris, forthcoming 2015/16). For a significant Caribbean study, see Burnard 2004. Christina Sharpe creatively reimagines the relationship among sex, kinship, and slavery as the “monstrous intimacies” that emerge from the legacy of Atlantic slavery (Sharpe 2009).

7. Her biographers, however, do highlight some negative feelings Tubman harbored for her first husband John because of his unwillingness to follow her and his remarrying. (Clinton 2004, 82-3) Sarah Hopkins Bradford based her biography on interviews with Tubman and testimony from antislavery activists like William Seward, Frederick Douglass, and Wendell Phillips. The biography was also a fundraiser for Tubman. Destitute at the time, Tubman had been unable to secure a pension for her work for the Union Army during the Civil War (Clinton 2004, 201–02). Bradford’s biography became the primary text scholars use to understand Tubman’s life (Bradford 1869). It, like all slave narratives, offered a particular picture of her life. For a review of black literary activity during this time period, see Lee 2013.

8. The report is accessible here: http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/webid-meynihan.htm (accessed August 15, 2014).

192 meridians 12:2

9. The Moynihan Report was part of a longer tradition of writers and policy-mak-ers looking to slavery for insight on the twentieth-century black condition. See Frazier 1939; Myrdal 1944. For an overview see Gutman 1975; Stevenson 1995.

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