African Concubinage in Qajar Iran: Sexualized Violence, Vulnerability, and Resistance

Sexualized violence fails to merit enough attention in historical sources, particularly with regards to enslaved African women who were trafficked in the Persian Gulf in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Female slavery was defined by the lack of consent in virtually all aspects of life, with the threat of sexual violence looming in the most intimate, proximate spaces. The social institution of female concubinage, which by the late nineteenth century by many accounts was on the rise, calls into question the stability of the concepts of “home,” “family,” “women” and “society,” concepts haunted by the presence of the unfree.

In this paper I consider how theories relating to vulnerability and resistance, gender violence and commodification, help us explain sexual violence under slavery and the occlusion and distortion of bondswomen’s experiences in Iranian historiography. As Liat Kozma has argued, Black women possessed “added vulnerabilities that freed white slaves, and even black male slaves, did not have to deal with.”^[1] In reconstructing a history of East African women’s labor, I challenge many contemporary studies on slavery that disavow race, gender, class, and regional origin. I suggest that by centering African women in history as a unique social class, who form the majority of trafficked peoples in Iran in the nineteenth century, we can uncover what Judith Butler refers to as “vulnerability and resistance” in black women’s stories.

^[1] Liat Kozma “Black Kinless and Hungry” (Race and Slavery in the Middle East)

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