2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel focuses on the history of enslaved women and reproduction, highlighting important new directions in the study of bodies, disability, violence, and identity. The three papers address broad questions of gender, resistance, and the ways in which enslaved women’s bodies and reproduction were scrutinized, mythologized, and politicized. Each paper examines experiences of enslaved motherhood connected to the psychological and physical trauma of enslavement linked specifically to reproductive identity and motherhood. Stefanie Kennedy’s paper, “Disability Rhetoric and the Challenge of Revolutionary Emancipation in the British Atlantic World, 1770-1807,” addresses the ways in which the images of enslaved women’s bodies and fertility were manipulated in opposition to the predominantly gendered male threat of slave rebellion in order to promote pro- and anti-slavery political agendas, amelioration efforts, and propaganda. Signe Peterson Fourmy’s paper, “A Hard Kind of Freedom”: Enslaved Women, Reproductive Resistance, and Infanticide,” examines how the degree of violence employed in acts of infanticide reveals aspects of enslaved mother’s interior lives and traumatic experiences associated with their enslavement and motherhood. Finally, Jenifer L. Barclay’s paper, “Mother’s Spots and Monstrosities: Congenital Disabilities and Racial Identity in American Medicine, Law and Folklore,” considers the use of maternal impression to explain how racial identity was assigned and reified through reading enslaved bodies for birthmarks and disabilities. Each paper will present new and original research and analysis. Jessica Millward (University of California Irvine) will comment on these papers, and Diane Mutti Burke (University of Missouri Kansas City) will chair this panel.