Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean by Ashley M. Williard

Abstract

Reviewed by: Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean by Ashley M. Williard Frederick C. Staidum Jr. Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean. By Ashley M. Williard. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 312 pages. Cloth, ebook, pdf. Contemporary scholarship often uses intersectionality as a catchall term reducing complex relationships among race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and more into an oversimplified, additive formula (for example, Black + man + deaf = identity) where the essentialized properties of each social position remain discrete. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who originated the term, however, formulated intersectionality to expose and name the processes by which diverse modes of marginalization and privilege compound and co-constitute each other, creating new and unique configurations of oppression and opportunity—and, by extension, new subjectivities.1 For Atlantic history, this concept indicates that one cannot explicate the histories of colonization, slavery, and race without also chronicling gender and sexuality because modern conceptualizations of race were founded on interpretations of so-called grotesque and abhorrent African and Indigenous reproductive anatomies, sexual behaviors, and family formations. These categories, moreover, were mutually constitutive and interacted in ways that created new forms and contexts of vulnerability and privilege.2 Ashley M. Williard’s Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean is an important intervention in this conversation as it interrogates the intersections of gender, race, and (dis)ability in the Atlantic world, especially between the early modern French metropole and its Antillean colonies (particularly the understudied Lesser Antilles). Williard focuses on constructions of social positionalities—specifically masculinity and femininity—from 1635 to 1715, the period when the Compagnie des Îles de l’Amérique and later the French state first introduced and then cultivated slavery in the Antilles. Engendering Islands astutely demonstrates how polymorphous constructions of gender, sex, race, and [End Page 192] ability were woven throughout early modern “juridical, religious, and medical discourses” (1) and practices, which in turn upheld and were upheld by seventeenth-century French colonization and slavery. And she argues that the gendered discursive mechanisms of colonization produced new forms of human alterity, including novel racial and ableist categories. Williard builds on important work on the early modern racialization of gender and sexuality by incorporating concepts and practices of ability, disability, and hyper-ability.3 As she shows, colonization and enslavement generated ontologies of (dis)ability through various modes, ranging from public maiming to adjudicating economic value, and from conceiving nonwhite bodies as malformed Europeans to endowing those same bodies with fantasies of pathological sexuality and even supernatural abilities. She thus joins emerging scholarship focused on the meaning and experiences of disability in early modern colonial societies of the Atlantic world, bringing together two trends in disability studies that rarely overlap.4 First, scholarship focusing on early modern Europe has illuminated how ideas of human deformity influenced Renaissance-era and seventeenth-century developments in language, performance, medicine, science, social organization, crime and punishment, and—above all—gender and sexuality.5 Second, scholars have given increasing attention to the impairing violence of slavery in the Americas, explicating the centrality of race to the shaping of marginalizing categories such as “lame,” “dumb,” “backwards,” and “dependent,” which defined through contrast what it meant to be a human, citizen, and modern subject.6 [End Page 193] Though these two areas of inquiry have developed in parallel, Williard cogently sutures this divide while also extending both approaches and linking their narratives. Moreover, she does not assume a linear, one-way evolution of gender, sexuality, race, and (dis)ability. In her account, French gender constructs were not exported as stable forms from the metropole to the colonies, and race was not singularly devised in the colonies and then conveyed to France as a fixed concept. Rather, these categories were entangled in a cyclical exchange of invention, resignification, and repurposing that remade ideas of human difference on both sides of the Atlantic. Williard examines an array of early modern actors, including Indi- genous Kalinago people, members of Catholic religious orders, enslaved Africans, French pirates, indentured servants, colonial administrators, merchants, and planters. In each of the book’s four chapters...