Virginian Luxuries: Sex and Power in a Slave Society

Abstract

This is a book teeming with ambition. In revisiting the history of colonial Virginia from an explicitly gendered perspective, Kathleen Brown's aim is nothing less than a sweeping reinterpretation of the entire Anglo-American colonial enterprise-from its inception in the minds and actions of metropolitan policymakers through its early struggles with strange lands and alien peoples to its momentous and tragic encounter with slavery. Gender-the always political but seemingly natural arrangement of social, cultural, and physical signifiers of maleness and femaleness-shaped not only the way British officials and adventurers saw the virgin land of the New World and its savage inhabitants, but also the political institutions, social relationships, and labor systems they established in order to tame that World and subdue its peoples. From the moment English men and women stepped on foreign shores, fundamental beliefs in the naturalness of English gender roles played a crucial part in the unfolding drama of encounter and settlement, Brown writes (p. 7). In her hands, gender assumes the status of a (that is, a language of social difference that subsumes sets of social relations) during the formative years of overseas exploration and colonization, offering a naturalized justification for the seizure and exploitation of other peoples and places, until it is replaced by race as an even powerful way of conceptualizing difference and inscribing power after the transition to slavery.' Although Brown is careful to treat gender and race as overlapping and related social categories rather than as variables competing for analytical supremacy (p. 4), the larger story she tells is of the discursive subordination (if not displacement) of gender by race as the determinative metalanguage of colonial society and politics. If, on the eve of English exploration, discourses of gender were more pervasive, systematically articulated, and politically