Week 2: Intimate Encounters in North America

Reading Response - Week 2: Intimate Encounters in North America CLASS Social Control all by different names, like the actual result/actions of any of these groups is really all just a guise for different forms of social control. ● “Reflecting English traditions for controlling the sexuality of the poor, Virginia’s county courts treated crimes such as bastardy as consensual sexual acts, even if the father of an illegitimate child was known to be the woman’s master.” (Brown pg. 193) ○ There were concerns because this was class mixing ■ “Servent women accounted for the majority of bastardy cases … between 1640 and 1710.” (Brown 194) ○ “Owing to their growing numbers and their potential to undermine the fragile authority of masters, white servant women became the central focus of the colony’s efforts to regulate sexuality after mid-century” Brown 194 ● “... declared that the children of enslaved women should follow the condition of their mother. This act redefined slave motherhood and vitiated the legal foundation of slave paternity, thereby making distinctions between legitimacy and illegitimacy legally irrelevant for enslaved people.” (Brown 196) ○ Most slave children were born w/ white/master fathers, therefore, by having slave paternity come from the mother’s side, the class structure of a plantation was kept as mixed race children remained slaves ● “In 1691, legislators explicitly addressed the problem presented by these relationships by refashioning older traditions for regulating servant sexuality to fit never concerns with race.” (Brown 197) ● “With their access to white women sanctioned by law and protected from the dual threat of white female sexual autonomy and black male encroachments, moreover, white men could rest easy knowing that their authority over male slaves had been confirmed legally.” (Brown 198) Furthermore, in these situations of race and male punishment in a court, Brown mentions, punishments and accountability for mixed sexual relations was only punished when it appeared “to be part of a pattern of self-assertion and trespass upon white male privilege” (Brown pg 200). “...sexuality could be used to construct and maintain boundaries between colonizer and colonized or, conversely, as the ultimate instrument of assimilation.” (Spear 75) “Influenced by demographic, economic, cultural, and imperial circumstances, authorities sought to legislate sex in attempts to further their colonial goals and to control colonial populations.” (Spear 76( “...how sexual desire is expressed and toward what object it is directed are not historical characteristics but rather shaped and mediated by human intervention.” (Spear 79) LACK OF CONCERN ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS WHEN OF BENEFIT: “In plantation colonies, on the other hand, assimilating enslaved Africans into French society through intimacy served no useful purpose; indeed, it would have been counterproductive,” (Spear 97) “Domingue Code Noir, the article governing intimate relationships between free men (whether black or white) and enslaved women only prohibited nonmarital relationships and even encouraged legitimating such liaisons through marriage by exempting the unmarried free man from punishment if he married “in forms observed by the Church, his said slave, who will be granted freedom in this way, and the slave [children] rendered free and legitimate.” (Spear 97) “... the metropole was apparently more concerned with imposing Roman Catholic mores on and, by implication, royal sovereignty over the colony’s inhabitants, slave and free, African and European, and with suppressing illicit relationships, regardless of race.” (Spear 97) THIS IS OPPOSED TO THE ONE READING THAT SAYS THIS WASN”T ABOUT RELIGION No, USING RELIGION AS A MEANS TO CONTINUE CLASS STRUCTURES “Legislative efforts to regulate racial purity on the North American mainland similarly testify to the insecurity of early American life for white settlers.” (Morgan 71) “Punishing white women for giving birth to black babies renders the apprehensions of the colony’s slave owners transparent, for even as racial categories came into focus for white settlers, interracial sexual and social contact belied the fixity of their own whiteness.” (Morgan 72) “The laws regulating interracial contact are a central index of how the very idea of race came into being for New World settlers … evolved as ideological and emotional individuation gradually replaced the commonality within which most Westerners found themselves enmeshed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” (Morgan 72) “This process of individuation was enmeshed in the intersectionality of discourses about race and gender. As an individuated “American” self came into being, key notions of mastery over property were mobilized that defined both whiteness and masculinity.” (Morgan 73) “The lure of the New World -- with wealth embedded in the landscape -- inscribed masculinity firmly in the act of colonization.” (Morgan 73) “Initially, white women performed fieldwork alongside white indentured and free men, but there was something unsettling to colonial assemblymen about white women in the field … through the tax laws that conveyed its temporary nature. The assumption that white women’s work would eventually move from field to household was the heart of lawmakers’ willingness to overlook white women’s labor as a source of official colonial revenue.” (Morgan 73-74) “In the earliest Carolina inventories, the prices assigned enslaved men and women reflect the clash between received notions of masculine value and the pragmatic realities of a reproductive labor force.” (Morgan 89) “Only the black mother embodied both productive and reproductive potential.” (Morgan 92) Morgan alludes to the work of Brown when related to the development of slave identity with race, “...as Kathleen Brown has argued, women ‘became a means for naturalizing slave status with a concept of race.” (Morgan 93) ● How can we as historians with these works unpack how religion, race, gender, and class impact different situations in different time periods? What common trends such as politics or law can help to understand the role of the state in as _____ puts it, ‘shaping the thoughts of sexuality and sexual relations”? “... what we mainly known about the history of the berdache has them located in warps of masculine power, in warfare, slavery and exploitation, not in worlds of egalitarian possibilities and of gender harmony and accord. The lives of the berdache were lives of humiliation and endless work, not of celebration and veneration.” (Gutiérrez 20) “In the Old World and in the New, there was a rather universal gender representation of conquest: victors on vanquishing their enemies asserted their virility by transforming losers into effeminates.” (Gutiérrez 27) “From men’s perspective, women’s capacity to produce, indeed to overproduce, was the problem that threatened to destory the balance that existed in the cosmos between femininity and masculinity.” (Gutiérrez 28) ● ALL TRUE IN THIS SENSE, BUT THEN HOW THE “MATHEMATICS OF MASTERY” SHAPED AND ENCOURAGED WOMEN TO HAVE CHILDREN FOR ECONOMICS ○ ECONOMICS, FOR THE SLAVE MASTERS IT MADE SENSE FOR THEM TO HAVE MORE CHILDREN, BUT FOR INDIGENOUS GROUPS MORE CHILDREN/PEOPLE WAS AN ECONOMIC BURDEN