Un-Silencing Sexual Violence

Abstract

In this chapter, texts illustrate how white women attain and act out power via sexual violence against Black women. As this chapter argues, instances of sexual violence between women reveal racialized class, gender, and sexual norms that circulate in the plantation imaginary. A miniseries adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots (2016), Valerie Martin’s novel Property (2003), and Ann Allen Shockley’s short story “The Mistress and the Slave Girl” in The Black and White of It (1987) demonstrate how thoroughly corruptible positions of power are when they come from the racialized sexual economies of slavery. Then, Shockley’s story “Women in a Southern Time” (1987) reveals how the enduring legacies of slavery likewise affect women’s same-sex desires in a post-emancipation, twentieth-century setting. To contextualize such representations, the chapter traces a genealogy of how texts depict sexual abuse between women, ranging from suggestions of that violence to descriptions of violent acts. The silences of these texts speak loudly here, for reading between the lines—decoding what is said and inferring what is not—urges the reader to address difficult questions about desire, gender, intimacy, and violence.