The Consummation of Critical Desire: Sally Hemings, Sexuality, and Black Feminist Political Imagination

Abstract

The Consummation of Critical DesireSally Hemings, Sexuality, and Black Feminist Political Imagination Samantha Pinto (bio) Since 1802, Sally Hemings has almost exclusively existed in and through erotic speculation around enslaved womanhood. In particular, this essay looks at the fixation on and repetition of the consummation of Thomas Jefferson and Heming's relationship as embodying difficult desires for emancipatory politics in the study of black women's sexuality. I wish to examine the lure of consummation—both the sexual act and the fantasy of completion that is repeated in each representation of it—that haunts the study of Hemings. This essay also complicates ways of reading Black women's sexuality, sexual pleasure, and desire as wholly within the terms of "social death," Orlando Patterson's field-changing frame for thinking about the civic experience of Black life under chattel slavery that has gained refreshed life in the articulation of Afro-pessimist thought.1 Rather than make definitive claims about Black women's enslaved sexuality as either adherent or resistant to existing models of emancipatory Black subjectivity and subjection, I'd like to think about what a figure like Sally Hemings—what the subject of enslaved women's erotic lives—means when positioned as central to our understanding of Black political subjectivity, not as a field of study that has to be shoehorned into existing models of Black freedom as difficult teleologies of political completion or postscripts to inevitable political failure. Here the terms of consummation—the way it denotes both a singular event and a moment of contract or completion—might offer us a vocabulary for the imaginable limits or scope of inquiry when we talk about enslaved women's sexuality in frames that emphasize firm distinctions between resistance and [End Page 53] submission, consent and rape, pleasure and domination. I argue, along with contemporary scholars of Black erotics and enslaved women's history, that these modes, however complex the shades of gray in between, become the poles of our answers, and hence the accepted poles of the politics of Black feminist study, even when we take pains to blur their denotational lines. Consummation engages in the economy of success and failure of representation, and of consuming representation, of Black women's sexuality. I modestly ask us to think through the ways we consume narratives of enslaved women's sociality as the pinnacle of social death, and its concomitant partner-as-opposite, the height of agency. These acts of critical desire are both necessary to include and acknowledge but unnecessarily definitive of Black politics. This article suggests reading through the imaginative archive of Sally Hemings that might deem her either tragic or heroic, victim or agent, to instead build a case that positions violence, trauma, desire, pleasure, and risk as inextricably linked to, and unevenly distributed by, the vulnerable fact of human embodiment. It assumes the presence of these tense partners in sociality as the collective base of being a political subject, rather than as categories one either inhabits or doesn't. It puts Black women's sexuality at the center of our intellectual theories of politics, not as its exceptional or marginal subjects. And it imagines Sally Hemings as a figure for challenging the very basis of thinking about freedom, as we currently employ the term as the ultimate limit, and goal, for Black politics. Naming Sexual Social Death Contemporary debates about Sally Hemings hinge not on the question of did he or didn't he (have a long-term sexual relationship with a Black woman)? Nor do they rest on the question of are they or aren't they (the children of Jefferson who bear the Hemings name)? Instead, today, the question related to Hemings is about consent—did she or didn't she consent to her sexual relations with Jefferson? Think pieces in Teen Vogue and other venues make this starker: Jefferson was a rapist.2 We need to call Jefferson a rapist. Opinion editorials in the Washington Post echo this as they critique the use of the word "mistress" as a qualifier for Hemings's relationship to Jefferson, even in the most recent article about the restoration of "Sally...