Partus Sequitur Ventrem: "Making Generations" in Gayl Jones' Corregidora and Brazil's 1871 Free Womb Law

This paper situates the gendered dimensions of biopolitical subjection squarely within global histories of racial slavery through an intertextual reading of literature and the law that focuses on reproductivity as central to the colonial economies of the New World. Published in 1975, Gayl Jones’ novel Corregidora narrates the intergenerational impact of slave breeding in the Americas through one family’s matrilineal line. In an attempt to “leave evidence” of their sexual exploitation at the hands of Corregidora, a 17th century Portuguese slave master, Ursa’s foremothers insist on “making generations” of female descendants who can carry on the memory of their trauma—a task she must negotiate while recovering from a nonconcensual hysterectomy. By privileging Ursa’s memory of the past using literary forms specific to the blues tradition, I argue that the novel positions slave breeding as a historical antecedent of Ursa’s 1948 hysterectomy in the Jim Crow South. I therefore approach the novel as a historical archive, reading it as a counterpoint to Brazil’s 1871 Free Womb Law, which freed the unborn children of enslaved women without affecting the slave status of their mothers. I argue that, while disguised as a reformative measure in favor of abolition, the Free Womb Law further decorporealizes already enslaved women and reinforces the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem legalizing the matrilineal heritability of slave status. An intertextual reading of literature and the law shows how slavery is not yet past and endures, most insidiously, by way of reproductive regulation.

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