In A Desired Past, Leila Rupp presents additional fragmentary evidence of same-sex intimacies between enslaved women during the nineteenth century. Regardless of their sexual content, Tinsley frames these relationships as queer, as they radically disrupted a violent social order that denied the sentience of African peoples. Tinsley argues that enslaved women and men, aboard ships and on plantations, formed erotic same-sex bonds, some likely sexual, some not.
The word translates as “my girl,” but has its roots in shipmate, as in “she who survived the Middle Passage with me.” 2 Colonial records point to similar ship mate intimacies in multiple Caribbean sites, between African women-and men-who were kidnapped and transported to the “New World” together. Tinsley, for example, traces the etymology of the Suriname word mati, which Creole women use to describe their female lovers. Nonetheless, as Omise’eke Tinsley argues, histories of enslaved peoples must be open to different evidentiary possibilities. To date, scholars have presented scant primary evidence of volitional same-sex intim acies between African Americans held captive during slavery. Following the war’s end in 1865, Congress ratified the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, which signaled slavery’s legal end. Ultimately, political disagreements over the economics of slavery, states’ rights, and the federal government’s authority to prohibit slavery in western territories prompted the Civil War in 1861. In 1808, US Congress banned the international slave trade, but allowed the domestic trade to grow, which tripled the slave population by 1860, when four million African Americans lived in captivity.
Fortified rather than undermined by the Declaration of Independence, slavery expanded rapidly in the early nineteenth century, after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 enabled large-scale production of a highly profitable export crop. Slavery’s roots in the Americas, of course, stretch back to a much earlier period, when Spanish explorers first brought kidnapped Africans to Santo Domingo in 1501 and English colonists transported enslaved Africans to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. Queer history’s neglect of slavery is startling, given the institution’s centrality to economic and political life in the nineteenth century. In doing so, I consider how the field would productively shift if queer histories of slavery were centered. In this chapter, I review the field of nineteenth-century queer history by discussing its central exclusion (slavery) in relation to its dominant themes (industrialization and western expansion). Queer historical studies of slavery are not only academically viable but also politically necessary to foreground the specificities of black queer histories and center slavery’s constitutive role in modern sexualities.
Recent scholarship by Omise’eke Tinsley, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, and Vincent Woodard demonstrates that this omission is unjustified. By emphasizing the transformative effects of industrial ization and westward expansion, however, the field of queer history has generally overlooked the sexual dynamics of slavery, an institution whose persistence, abolition, and aftermath was central to nineteenth-century life. This scholarship has shone a spotlight on industrial northern cities and the western frontier, detailing conditions that facilitated both the proliferation and restriction of nonnormative genders and sexualities. Over the past few decades, scholars have produced a wealth of research on nineteenth-century queer history.